Nate Cohn

You might remember there was talk of a conservative vibe shift in the culture a year ago.

Yeah, Trump made enormous gains in 2024 among young, non-white, less educated, lower income voters.

Voters who traditionally had voted for Democrats and who Democrats had often taken for granted.

That's right.

We've just finished a national poll one year into Donald Trump's term, and it does not look like the polls did a year ago or like the polls did in the run-up to his victory in 2024.

His approval rating is at 40%.

That's down considerably from the 48% favorability rating he had heading into the election, let alone the majority support that he had when he entered office.

And importantly, those big demographic shifts that we saw in the 2024 election, they have mostly reversed.

Young, non-white, lower income, less engaged voters, they have gone from being his relative strong points to, again, looking much weaker for him.

In fact, in almost every respect, it looks like a poll that you could have done during Trump's first term.

Now, as you pointed out, this does sort of answer this longstanding question about what happened in the 2024 election.

Was this a permanent shift or was this just a reaction to Joe Biden?

On its face, it looks a little bit more like a reaction to Joe Biden, or at the very least, it's certainly not a permanent shift.

I do think, though, that that doesn't mean that what happened during the 2024 campaign wasn't real.

What it may mean is that Donald Trump squandered an opportunity that he did enter with real support from groups that haven't traditionally voted for Republicans, but he has not succeeded in consolidating that support in office.

In fact, he's reminded voters of the very reasons why they didn't support him initially in 2016 or in 2020.

We know a lot about why in one respect, which is that on almost every question we ask about, voters disapprove of his handling of the issues.

So they disapprove of his handling of the economy.

They disapprove of his handling of immigration.

They disapprove of his handling of the federal government spending.