WILLOWICK, Ohio — Just outside the bar where the TV warned of rising gas prices, Dottie Cirino, 64, predicted that President Donald Trump would figure it out.
“He’ll get ’em back down,” said Cirino, part of the White working-class who for a decade formed the core of Trump’s base.
Annette Dombrowksi, a 64-year-old janitor at the same factory as Cirino, also voted for Trump. But she was starting to worry.
“You could be paying these prices for a while,” she said quietly.
White voters without college degrees like Dombrowski, who have powered Trump’s victories since 2016, are growing frustrated with his second term. In a striking shift, the group that voted to reelect Trump by a huge margin is now net-negative on how Trump is handling his job in several polls. They join other Americans across demographic lines souring on the president’s second term, especially his handling of the economy.
The swing is stark: 54 percent of White voters without a college degree disapproved of Trump’s performance in a CBS News poll this month, up from 32 percent in February 2025 and 45 percent in February of this year. It’s a sobering sign for Republicans heading into the midterms and working to turn out the voters who carried Trump to victory in 2024.
Dombrowski said she believed Trump when he promised during his last campaign to lower prices. She watched excitedly alongside her boyfriend last year as Trump signed one executive order after another. But now her bills for gas, groceries and other necessities have gone up.
“I don’t even want to vote for anybody in the next election,” said Dombrowski, once a reliable voter in the midterms. “I don’t care, because they’re all crap.”
Outside the bar at American Legion Post 678, where union members gathered for drinks, Dombrowski and Cirino swapped strategies for stretching their budget at the grocery store. Cirino bought in bulk and shopped at Sam’s Club. Dombrowski made crockpot meals to last a couple days.
Now gas prices were adding to their burdens — though Cirino noted they were low before the U.S. went to war. She was tired of Trump critics on Facebook “just tearing him down.”
Dombrowski tried to avoid politics online. “It just causes fights,” she told Cirino.
But she had chimed in recently on someone’s Facebook post about grocery prices, noting that they kept going up even though Trump promised to bring them down.
White voters without college degrees have been a cornerstone of Trump’s support since his 2016 upset victory. He vowed to bring jobs back from overseas and reject “globalization” he said had hurt Americans, declaring in his victory speech that November that “the forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.” And he promised to crack down on immigration, calling for a wall at the southern border and a ban on Muslims entering the country.
His Democratic opponent, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, won handily with voters of color and, in exit polls, lagged a few percentage points behind Trump with White college graduates. Trump won two-thirds of White voters without degrees.
Trump posted similar winning margins of more than 30 points with the demographic in 2020 and 2024 and started his second term with their broad approval. Those numbers started sliding early last year, however.
White Americans without college degrees still approved of Trump’s handling of immigration in the CBS News-YouGov poll this May, but the margin had shrunk. They disapproved of Trump’s handling of the economy by 22 percentage points — and they were negative overall.
White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement that Trump “has always been clear about temporary disruptions” resulting from the U.S. war with Iran and touted Trump’s efforts to lower prescription drug prices, bring manufacturing investments to the U.S. and overhaul immigration.
“President Trump delivered historic working-class prosperity in his first term — along with the first drop in wealth inequality in decades — and once these disruptions are behind us, he’s set to repeat the success in his second term,” Desai said.
The drop-off in White working-class support could be consequential for the GOP in midterm battleground states like Ohio, where Trump won by 11 points in 2024. Republicans now face expensive, competitive races to keep a Senate seat and the governor’s mansion.
Austin Keyser, a leader with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers who lives in Ohio, said other union officials tell him about meetings where members say they regret voting for Trump, frustrated by high prices or setbacks to projects they are working on.
Peggy Liff, 57, a welder and three-time Trump voter, remembered having “money in the bank” during Trump’s first term. “Prices were down,” she said. “Gas was low.”
No longer.
“He’s concentrating on other things, like overseas, Iran,” she said of Trump. “He says he’s doing it for us, but I don’t see where that’s happening.”
Tariffs were a key part of Trump’s pitch to working-class voters — a tool the president said would bring jobs and factories “roaring back” to the United States. But even some Trump allies balked at the sweeping tariffs Trump announced last year, worrying that escalating trade wars and haphazard changes would hurt the economy. Inflation rose in the wake of the tariffs, and some companies changed their U.S. investment plans.
Honda, for instance, announced in March that it was canceling development of three electric car models it intended to produce in Ohio — saying U.S. tariffs and changing policies toward electric vehicles under the Trump administration, among other forces, had undercut their business.
At the same time, consumer sentiment has hit record lows as the U.S. war with Iran pushes up gas prices — which experts say could remain elevated for months even if the two countries reach a deal.
Dombrowski, the janitor, barely follows politics. She grew up poor with factory worker parents who taught her that Republicans were for rich people — not families like theirs who struggled and saved money by making their own clothes.
But she put her faith in Trump when he ran for president in 2016, opting for an outsider over Clinton and her decades in politics.
Now she trusts no one, believing politicians “want your money and give you fake promises.”
The musical instrument company where she works, Conn Selmer, is shifting jobs overseas — even though the owner, Trump donor John Paulson, has echoed the president’s calls to keep manufacturing in the United States.
Now their factory in northern Ohio is closing, despite employees’ pleas — and Dombrowski, at 64, needs a new job.
Scott Clement contributed to this report.
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