Welcome to Thursday’s Washington Secrets. Let’s not speak of the World Cup ever again, except to cheer on the Spanish team against those dirty Argentinian cheats on Sunday. Today, we have some exclusive polling data for you. How many Donald Trump voters now wish they had voted for Kamala Harris in 2024? Plus, what was Joe Biden doing with his ice cream?
Almost one in five people who voted for Donald Trump now have buyer’s remorse.
That’s the finding of a new poll shared exclusively with Secrets.
Some 7% of Trump’s supporters in the 2024 election now say the nation would be “much better off” if Kamala Harris had won. Another 10% said the U.S. would be simply “better off,” according to the poll of 1,000 voters conducted by J.L. Partners.
The numbers illustrate the challenges facing Republican candidates in November’s midterm elections, when they must contend with lingering inflation and the war in Iran.
And they are the latest sign that Trump’s extraordinary 2024 coalition is thinning out after delivering him a thumping election win.
Today, that still leaves 65% of Trump voters saying the country would be worse off if the Democratic candidate had won.
Caroline Mulvaney, research manager at J.L. Partners, said she was not surprised by the results.
“When our team was conducting research ahead of the 2024 election, we spoke to a lot of undecided voters who ended up voting for Trump because he promised a strong economy,” she said. “They felt he was the candidate who would be most capable of improving their everyday lives, with tangible proof points like cost of living and taxes.”
“Instead, they’ve had the opposite experience, first with higher prices from tariffs and now with higher prices from the war in Iran.”
They aren’t the ones who picked Trump because they loved his personality or the rest of his platform. They picked him on kitchen-table issues and now feel financially worse off.
Republicans should pay heed to the numbers. J.L. Partners distinguished itself in 2024 as one of the few polling firms that predicted Trump would win the national popular vote, and it nailed the Electoral College result. Its final prediction model forecast was that Trump would win 312 electoral votes to Harris’s 226, which is how it turned out.
At the same time, Mulvaney said Democrats, and perhaps Harris herself as she mulls another presidential run, would be wrong to think they have won over this 17% of voters.
“I think it would be a mistake to assume that these voters are saying they are pro-Harris,” she said.
“I don’t think you’ll find any of them canvassing for a Democratic candidate anytime soon,” Mulvaney added. “But a Harris presidency might not have had tariffs or war, and therefore might not have had the same rise in cost of living that voters are currently experiencing.”
Harris continues to keep herself in the mix for 2028. The latest fundraising numbers suggest she would enter the race as an immediate frontrunner if she decided to stand. Her Fight for the People PAC raised $1.3 million and had $836,000 on hand in its filing for the past three months.
The statistics are the latest warning light for Republicans.
Two weeks ago, Secrets revealed similar findings from More In Common. Its survey showed how what it calls the “Reluctant Right” — younger, less committed voters — were drifting away from the Trump coalition.
Two opinion polls published last week give Democrats a three-point lead in the national generic poll.
The latest Economist/YouGov survey found that 35% of Americans strongly or somewhat approve of Trump’s job performance, while 61% disapprove. That puts his net rating at -25, a shade above his record low during both terms.
Quote of the day I: Sexy Joe and the soft serve
There are a lot of takeaways from Vice President JD Vance’s interview with Joe Rogan. But Secrets’ favorite part is when he muses on the former President Joe Biden’s and the dumb stuff they would get him to do in front of the cameras.
“The way that he ate ice cream … but it’s like they would get him eating ice cream in the most ridiculous, suggestive way imaginable,” he said with a grin.
Quote of the day II
You don’t need Secrets to tell you that all is not well among Republicans on the Hill. The latest installment comes from a closed-door meeting between Vance and GOP House members, which was designed to persuade lawmakers that the budget reconciliation process was a must-pass moment in securing elements of the SAVE America Act.
But fiscal hawks were upset that a budget framework published Wednesday for a bill funding the military conflict with Iran, farm aid, and election administration offered no spending cuts. They said they had agreed on a “skinny” Reconciliation 2.0 earlier in the year based on a promise that more anti-fraud measures and spending cuts would follow.
“We’ve been lied to,” said Rep. Eric Burlison (R-MO) before the meeting with Vance.
Lunchtime reading
Ro Khanna’s rude awakening: “The Democratic congressman has been pandering to the anti-Israel left for months. In a podcast interview this week, he realized what his new bedfellows actually believe.”
Trump, the accidental green president: Is irony the most powerful force in politics?
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