Which voter groups (age, region, education) show the largest change in attitudes toward Trump since January 2025?
Executive summary
Since January 2025 the sharpest downward shifts in attitudes toward President Trump have come from younger voters—especially Gen Z and young men—plus independents and segments of the working- and middle-class, while white non-Hispanic and college-educated voters have shown smaller net movement; multiple national polls and analyses document these trends [1] [2] [3] [4].
1. Young voters (age): Gen Z and young men swung away fastest
The clearest and most consistently reported change is among the youngest cohort: multiple polls show net approval among Gen Z collapsing from a brief post-inauguration high to deep negatives by late 2025, driven largely by economic worries and skepticism about policy fixes [1] [5]; media analysis highlights young men—a bloc credited with helping deliver Trump in 2024—as notably souring on the president over the course of the year, citing the economy and perceived broken promises [6] [2]. Newsweek and Harvard’s youth poll both document double-digit swings in net approval and low single-digit approval figures for Trump among 18–29-year-olds by late 2025, indicating this is the demographic with the largest magnitude of change since January 2025 [1] [5].
2. Independents and non-aligned voters: steady erosion of support
Independent voters, who are pivotal in swing outcomes, have exhibited meaningful declines in Trump’s standing: Reuters/Ipsos and other trackers show his approval holding strongly with Republicans but weakening among independents, and Chatham House and national trackers report a sustained slide in his approval tied to economic perceptions—an erosion that disproportionately affects swing voters [7] [8]. This shift is important because small moves among independents translate into outsized electoral consequences, as several analyses link independent disapproval to falling scores on economy handling and leadership strength [9] [3].
3. Region: suburban and urban college-educated pockets resisted gains, working-class suburbs wavered
Regional patterns are mixed: Pew’s post-2024 breakdown shows urban residents and voters with four-year college degrees continued to favor the Democratic ticket, implying limited pro-Trump movement in dense urban cores and among the college-educated [10]. By contrast, late-2025 polling and analysis flag declining support among working- and middle-class voters—many concentrated in suburbs and non-coastal regions—who were crucial to Trump’s 2024 coalition but who now cite economic concerns and unmet expectations as drivers of their cooling attitude [3] [2]. The net effect is that Trump’s strongest erosion is outside the high-density urban Democratic enclaves, where he had less upside to begin with, and instead among the working-class bases that initially delivered him gains [3] [10].
4. Education: college-educated voters moved less; non-college and lower-income voters showed larger swings
Across education lines the largest attitudinal shifts are among non-college and less affluent voters: CHIP50’s slice analyses and late-2025 survey reporting find larger drops in approval among non-white and less affluent groups compared with white non-Hispanic voters, and Newsweek and Navigator identify declines among working- and middle-class Trump voters who now express regret—again largely tied to economic performance and broken promises [4] [3] [2]. Conversely, voters with at least a four‑year degree continued to skew Democratic in 2024 and showed smaller relative movement against Trump through late 2025, suggesting education-correlated stability in partisan attitudes [10].
5. Caveats, competing interpretations, and the limits of available data
The available reporting converges on youth, independents, and working-class voters as the groups with the largest negative swings, but methodological caveats matter: some datasets are proprietary or sample-limited (online panels, oversamples of certain minorities), and different trackers measure “approval” versus “vote intention” or “regret,” which are related but distinct metrics [2] [4]. Alternative readings exist—Pew emphasizes turnout dynamics and coalition shifts in 2024 that initially favored Trump even as some groups later cooled [10] [11]—and the public’s view of the economy versus foreign-policy moves complicates a single-cause explanation [9] [8]. Where sources do not provide a precise numeric, subgroup-by-subgroup change from January 2025, this analysis refrains from inventing finer-grained estimates and instead reports the consistent patterns found across the provided polls and briefings [1] [3] [7].