Only 27 percent of respondents say they support all or most of Trump’s policies, down from 35 percent when he took the oath of office. Nearly all of that decline is attributable to *Republicans.*
— The Bulwark (@thebulwark.com) February 6, 2026 at 11:00 PM
It’s no suprise that the Bulwark people would very much prefer that ‘normal, decent Republicans’ be separated from ‘those mouth-breathing weirdos who followed in Trump’s wake’, but it’s still amusing:
AS WE SURVEY THE WRECKAGE of Trump’s second term, it is often said that half the country voted for this, or worse, half the country is fine with this. Though it is undeniable that something is deeply awry with a nation that can give a popular vote majority to a moral degenerate who did not hide his authoritarian plans, we shouldn’t act as though public opinion hasn’t shifted since the 2024 election. The question for now is: Is MAGA a majority?…
The first step is recognizing how big the problem really is. MAGA is a bit of a moving target, but a recent Economist/YouGov poll found that only 27 percent of all voters described themselves as “MAGA supporters” and a perhaps surprisingly low 54 percent of Trump voters so identified. In other words, a minority of the voting public and only a little over half of the GOP is Trump’s loyal base.
A new survey from More in Common, an international pro-democracy organization (I sit on its global board), offers a more granular look at Trump 2024 voters and provides further evidence that MAGA is definitely not half the country. Between April 2025 and January 2026, they canvassed more than 18,000 Americans, including nearly 11,000 who voted for Trump. In looking over their findings, the group categorized the Trump voters into four clusters: MAGA Hardliners, Anti-woke Conservatives, Mainline Republicans, and the Reluctant Right. Their conclusion? Trump voters were a coalition, not a cult.
The MAGA Hardliners
These are the people we usually picture sporting red hats. They are highly religious (or at least they think of themselves as God-fearing), are 91 percent white, mostly Gen X (32 percent) or Baby Boomers (42 percent), and less educated than other Trump voters—only 24 percent hold a college degree or higher compared with 29 percent of total Trump voters. They have little trust in institutions, believe that a sinister cabal runs media, business, and politics, and are not averse to their leader ignoring the Supreme Court or other constitutional checks in order to “get things done.”
A lamentable majority (62 percent) of the Hardliners say Trump should “punish his opponents for the damage they’ve done” and 60 percent support their man attempting to serve a third term. (In case you’re wondering, yes, they do know the Constitution imposes a two term limit, because it was included in the question.) Nearly three quarters think we should “use our military to round up everyone who came to the US illegally, put them in mass detention camps, and deport them.” Seventy-four percent say voting for Trump is part of “living out my faith,” and 94 percent (75 percent strongly) believe that God intervened to save Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania so that he could make America great again.
This crowd cannot be trusted with power. They are conspiratorial, cultish, dismissive of constitutional limits, and punitive toward their perceived political enemies. There isn’t much good to say about them except this: They represent only 29 percent of Trump 2024 voters….
War for Ukraine Day 1,446: The Plot Thins
smike
I oblige.
SpaceUnit
In 2024 a majority of voters selected trump.
Go ahead and leave your comment, but we’re living in a looney bin.
satby
I thought this was interesting when I shared it before, because it confirms what I see in real life. Lots of the felon’s voters are not MAGA hardliners and even other Republican voters think they’re a bit weird. But there’s too many of the not hardliners, like “mainline Republicans”, that passively just vote the way they always have. Their reasons for supporting Republicans haven’t been true since the 1980s (fiscal conservatism) so I discount that as the real reason. We know the real reason, but just like in the 60s, the brutality of the racist policies they’ve supported showing up on the news every night may peel enough of them away this year.
NobodySpecial
@SpaceUnit: Not only did a majority select him, a significant minority who voted against him in 2020 decided suddenly it was a-ok to not stand in his way.
Baud
Wake me up when he’s down to zero.
SpaceUnit
We’ll all be living under highway underpasses while the majority vote for trump and MAGA.
satby
Can’t stand this much cheer so early in the morning, so I’m going back to bed. 😴
piratedan
for my Virginia peers/peeps…
what are the chances that this is in Ms. Lucas district?
bsky.app/profile/lvr1258.bsky.social/post/3meijsmrkes25
oldster
“There isn’t much good to say about them….”
It’s almost like they are a basket of deplorables.
rikyrah
Ah…..27%
😂😂😂😂
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone😊😊😊
Ten Bears
Happy every one is catching on. I’ve only yelled it at the clouds for ten years
The way they keep claiming the votes were rigged, maybe they were …
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Ten Bears: Oh, I’m confident that there was voter fraud in all of the last three presidential elections. I’m also fairly confident that the fraudulent votes were heavily in the Republicans’ favor.
Lacuna Synecdoche
Mona Charen @ Bulwark via Anne Laurie @ Top:
That’s still close to one out of 6 voters.
Geminid
@piratedan: Front Royal is at the northern end of the Shenandoah Valley, so this ICE activity could be unrelated to Senator Lucas’s Norfolk-area district.
Speaking of Norfolk, I wonder when the Pentagon is going let the aircraft carrier Gerald Ford go home. It left the Norfolk Navy base last June. The Navy tries to limit deployments to six months in order to limit wear and tear on sailors and equipment. They extended the Ford’s cruise for the Venezuela operation, but what’s the excuse now?
different-church-lady
and the rest are morons.
montanareddog
MAGA Hardliners (trans.: deranged cultists)
Anti-woke Conservatives (trans.: racists, homophobes, transphobes and misogynists)
Mainline Republicans (trans.: IGMFY, why can’t the poor just die already?)
and the Reluctant Right. (trans.: I like the Democrat’s policies but the party is just ick)
piratedan
@Geminid: so likely this is Vindman’s Congressional district then…
Gvg
@rikyrah: 29% of 54% of…the percent of the population that voted. Better than I hoped.
Guess who I think should be in jail, in fact I would bet a fair % of those have records, especially for domestic abuse, and don’t overlook that women can be abusers too. In a nice mood I could say they need treatment and probably come from abusive families. Right now, I am too worried about myself and other defenseless people surviving to think nice.
there go two miscreants
And yet, Obama was elected TWICE and Biden defeated the orange idiot in 2020. Apparently, “God” only pays attention part-time, or is not “all-powerful, all-knowing, etc, etc” as they also claim to believe.
Geminid
@piratedan: I think Front Royal is in VA-06, which is represented by Republican Ben Cline.
montanareddog
@there go two miscreants:
And their omnipotent “God” cannot even solve the trolley problem and could only divert the bullets into the bodies of 3 Butler rally attendees, one of them fatally.
hueyplong
@there go two miscreants: Pretty sure that’s the point at which they piously ask, “Who are we to question God’s plan?”
planetjanet
@piratedan:
Not even close.
planetjanet
@piratedan:
That is Ben Cline’s district.
piratedan
@planetjanet: mea culpa, still learning the VA ropes, hope that this will Mr. Cline’s chances and that the good people of the area will do what they can to protect their neighbors.
Denali5
“The trolley problem”?
chemiclord
And yet 99.9% of GOP voters will happily vote GOP in the next election, and would/will eagerly vote for Trump in 2028 if they could/can.
The only thing they dislike about Trump is that he says the quiet parts loudly. That’s it.
And of that sliver who are genuinely upset, they come right back the instant a different Republican starts saying those same exact things with the volume they prefer.
NeenerNeener
@Denali5:
The
trolley problem is a famous ethical thought experiment questioning whether it is morally permissible to sacrifice one person to save five others, typically by pulling a lever to divert a runaway trolley. It explores the conflict between utilitarianism (maximizing good outcomes) and deontology (duty-based rules against harming individuals). It is heavily used in psychology and AI ethics to understand human moral reasoning.
Key Aspects of the Trolley Problem:
The Scenario: A runaway trolley is headed for five people. You can pull a lever to switch it to another track where only one person is, but that person will die.
The Moral Conflict: Most people agree with pulling the lever in the classic scenario (sacrificing one to save five), but disagree with pushing a bystander onto the tracks to stop the same trolley (the “Fat Man” variant), despite the outcome being the same
.
Geminid
@piratedan: Ben Cline is an interesting figure to me. He succeeded Bob Goodlatte in 2018. Goodlatte had risen to the chairmanship of the House Judiciary committee. He wad an immigration attorney before he entered Congress, and he took up the practice of law again when he left.
I assume Goodlatte represents the corporate side in his legal practice. This bears on Cline’s role as Congressman, because there are some large and well-known employers of undocumented migrants. I can think of half a dozen in Rockingham County, just over the Blue Ridge from me.
So far as I know, these plants have not been touched by ICE. I suspect they have “protection” of one form or another, and the team of Cline and Goodlatte are involved. This is one more reason to tune in the Harrisonburg news station, WSVA 550AM. Large ICE raids would be a big story there. Plus, they interview Ben Cline for a few minutes each week.
JML
@chemiclord: that’s probably not true: there are plenty of GOP voters who would stay home rather than vote for a 3rd term for the Orange Idiot. Are they persuadable to vote for a Democrat? That’s where the number starts getting smaller, but looking at what happened in some of the recent elections in Texas and Louisiana, there’s been definite crossover.
It’s easy for us to smack around the people now saying “I didn’t vote for this!” for being ignorant tools and not taking the Orange Idiot at face value for what his campaign was pumping out. Because this is what they voted for. But they also voted for someone who said the Biden administration was clueless, said they would fix things for the economy, and would make things “better” immediately.
Sure, we know the Orange Idiot was lying about actually helping people and his economic program was always going to be a disaster with the tariff nonsense, but much as I liked the Biden administration and thought they did a good job cleaning up the mess, the day to day for a lot of people hadn’t come back yet to what they expected or thought they had been promised, so there were plenty of people (especially in our short-attention span society) that went for change over more of the same.
(I also firmly believe that racism and sexism played a huge role in the final result of the 2024 election, of course.)
Lot of voters want instant gratification. They’ll buy the snake oil, they’ll swallow the lies.
RevRick
@JML: I think it’s not just the short term memory of the populace that enabled Trump’s reelection. It is also because people are extremely pain averse. The spike in inflation was a real shock to people’s finances, and it all happened under Biden’s watch. Most of the deaths due to COVID happened under his watch. The social isolation dragged on under his watch. The spike in violent crime dragged on under his watch.
It’s the same thing as occurred under Obama. The Great Recession was all the fault of the Bush administration, but because it dragged on for so long and the recovery was so slow, the blame adhered to him and the Democrats, and our party has suffered the consequences to this day.
The decisive margin in the 2024 election were those screaming, “Make the pain go away!” And they blamed the Biden administration and Democrats for failing to do so.
Paul in KY
@there go two miscreants: Maybe the devil intervened?
Ed in OK
The Crazification Factor cannot fail, it can only be failed.
JustRuss
@Lacuna Synecdoche: Mona Charen. Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. She used to be a regular on our local paper’s basket of deplorables editorial page, along with George Effing Will. Congrats Mona, you did your part to make this happen.