A slew of polls marked the first 100 days of the second Trump presidency. All the major ones showed increasing disapproval of Donald Trump‘s handling of his job during his second term. In fact, the numbers are the lowest since national polling on the question began in the early 1950s.
On most of the major issues, including those that were most salient in Trump’s 2024 election victory, polling shows growing dissatisfaction with the president’s performance. Here we will examine independent voters and if they could go back in time, would they change their vote for Trump because of dashed expectations. That is a much higher standard than simply disapproving of Trump’s performance on individual issues. It forces the voter to admit to being wrong in casting their ballot for Trump just a short time ago.
To probe the potential buyer’s remorse of this group we turned to the recently released Emerson College Polling national survey and took a deeper dive into the opinions of independent voters.
Like the NBC News, CNN/SSRS and CBS/YouGOV polls—all of which had Trump’s approval rating in the 41 percent to 45 percent range and disapproval ratings in the 55 percent to 59 percent range—the Emerson College poll found that among independents, Trump was underwater on issues ranging from tariff policy to the economy to deportations to handling of the Russian/Ukraine war and the Israel/Hamas wars.
Overall, the Emerson College poll results were somewhat more charitable to the Trump presidency than most others. Thirty-six percent of independent voters in the survey approved of his performance and 44 percent disapproved.
Strikingly, independent men were divided equally between approval and disapproval of Trump’s second first 100 days. He’s 15 percent underwater with independent women, however, with 62 percent of them declaring these last few months to be a failure.
Looking at family finances, Trump is underwater with both independent men and women, but more women feel negatively: only 10 percent of women believe they are better off, compared with 55 percent who believe the opposite.
When independent voters are asked, “Knowing what you now know, if you could go back in time to the 2024 election, would you vote for Kamala Harris, vote for Donald Trump, vote for someone else, or not vote?” only 9 percent would change their ballot—but all of those who would voted for Donald Trump in 2024. That doesn’t mean these people prefer Harris, though. About three quarters of them indicated that they would vote for a candidate other than Harris or not vote at all.
When the same question is put to the full sample of respondents, not just independents, if the vote were to happen again today, Trump would still win, with a 47.5 percent to 46.7 percent margin over Harris.
So, when all the national polls show deep dissatisfaction on almost every major issue—felt even more deeply by independent voters—why is there so little buyer’s remorse? The numbers suggest that disappointment in the Trump presidency has not gotten high enough to drive voters into the “I regret my vote” column.
Why?
Many voters, no matter how disenchanted they are with Trump’s performance, may have a very tough time admitting that they made a mistake in casting their vote. Many may also feel that while Trump has not lived up to expectations, Harris, given her weak performance as a candidate, would still have been a worse choice on decisive pocketbook issues.
That’s despite the fact that 89 percent of Americans believe it is either somewhat or very likely that prices of items they buy—not just prices generally—will go up as a result of Trump’s tariff policies, according to a recent Gallup poll. You can’t get 89 percent of Americans to agree that funding cancer research is a good idea, so this is a remarkably high consensus view. That’s nine out of 10 people surveyed who believe Trump’s policies will hurt them personally. If there is not significant buyer’s remorse among independent voters, yet, what will it take? Will their views change if prices really begin to climb, or will it never set in?
There seems to be very clear polling evidence that the overwhelming majority of Americans believe there is a wrong Trump answer to a lot of right questions. Still, measuring dissatisfaction based on retrospective support for Harris may not be the way to best assess independent voter regret. Democrats aren’t the clear beneficiaries of what modest inklings of buyer’s remorse there are.
Democrats have a lot of work to do with independents. While the Emerson poll asks respondents to look back in time, an Economist/YouGov survey asked the forward looking question, “If the elections for U.S. Congress were held today, which party would you vote for?” Independents backed Democrats 26 percent over Republicans 20 percent, but what should be alarming for Democrats is that 49 percent were evenly divided between “not sure” or “I would not vote.”
The emergence of a stronger Democratic presidential prospect than Kamala Harris may change whether a bigger slice of the independent pie regrets their votes. As of now, however, it does not appear we have seen enough of a swing among independents to say that if the same election was held again today, the result would be any different. Despite the high level of dissatisfaction with a broad range of Donald Trump’s policies, unfortunately, independents are not yet prepared to abandon their support for him.
Tom Rogers is executive chairman of Claigrid, Inc. (the cloud AI grid company), an editor-at-large for Newsweek, the founder of CNBC and a CNBC contributor. He also established MSNBC, is the former CEO of TiVo, a member of Keep Our Republic (an organization dedicated to preserving the nation’s democracy). He is also a member of the American Bar Association Task Force on Democracy.
Susan Del Percio is a Republican strategist and crisis communications consultant with over 30 years of experience in the political, government, nonprofit, and private sector arenas. She is also a political analyst for MSNBC/NBC News.
The views expressed in this article are the writers’ own.
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