The red hats are being stowed away as some of the president’s once-vocal supporters are now reluctant to publicly acknowledge they voted for him, according to new polling.
Pollsters Verasight and The Argument conducted surveys of Donald Trump voters between August 2025 and February 2026 among 12,180 respondents. These same voters were polled immediately after the 2024 election about who they voted for. The two polls show that about 6 percent now deny ever having voted for Trump despite reporting they did so in 2024.
Among those voters, 2.7 percent falsely claim they voted for Democrat Kamala Harris, while 3.3 percent say they voted for neither Trump nor Harris.
The data also reveals another striking trend: Trump voters who now disapprove of him are much more likely to deny having voted for him in 2024. About 15 percent of Trump’s 2024 voters reported disapproving of his job performance.
Among those disapproving Trump voters, 12.5 percent claimed they voted for Harris, while 11.8 percent said they didn’t vote for either candidate. By contrast, among Trump voters who approve of him, just 0.9 percent said they voted for Harris, and 1.3 percent claimed they voted for neither.
In response, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told The Daily Beast: “The ultimate poll was November 5th 2024 when nearly 80 million Americans overwhelmingly elected President Trump to deliver on his popular and commonsense agenda. The President has already made historic progress not only in America but around the world. It is not surprising that President Trump remains the most dominant figure in American politics.”
The narrative rewrite from some Trump voters comes as polls have shown in recent weeks that Americans are growing increasingly unhappy with Trump’s performance in office.
Polls have put Trump’s popularity at a historic low, with the latest Washington Post–ABC News poll putting Trump’s disapproval rating at its highest point since the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol (60 percent).
Meanwhile, Trump’s net approval is deep in negative territory on several key issues. That includes the economy and immigration—both of which were key issues for voters in the 2024 election.
YouGov/Economist polling shows that since the beginning of his second term, Trump’s net approval on immigration has dropped from +11 points to -11 points, while his rating on the economy has dropped from +12 points to -23.
Anecdotally, a number of individual Trump voters—some of whom cast ballots for the 79-year-old president in the last three elections—have also come forward to express to reget for supporting the MAGA leader.
Recent surveys have also shown that Trump is losing support among key voter groups that propelled him into the White House in 2024, such as young men, Hispanics, and non-college-educated Americans.
And the latest Marist poll, conducted between Jan 27-30, found that 55 percent of residents nationally say the direction in which Trump is moving the country is change for the worse, up from 51 percent in April 2025.
Trump isn’t the only president whose supporters have misremembered or denied their votes when his popularity declines.
Pollsters have long observed that people don’t always accurately report how they voted when they are dissatisfied with the candidate’s performance, a pattern called “recall bias.”
In 2024, when President Biden faced low approval ratings, New York Times pollster Nate Cohn noted that Trump sometimes fared better in these post-election recall surveys than he did in the actual 2020 vote.
And the recent data shows that this effect extends beyond Trump voters. Among nonvoters or third-party voters who now approve of Trump, 43 percent claim they voted for him, while just 5 percent of those who disapprove say they did.
Similarly, among 2024 Harris voters, those who approve of her mostly report accurately, with 73 percent saying they voted for Harris, while disapproving Harris voters are even more precise, with 98 percent accurately reporting their vote.
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