Not all Trump voters "voted for this"

Trump’s policy agenda is very unpopular, including with many of his supporters. To win the next election, Democrats need to welcome regretful Trump voters back onto their side

Dear members,

Last week, The New York Times ran a great story about residents of a small Missouri town coming to grips with the consequences of Donald Trump’s mass deportation policy. The story focuses on the community’s reaction to the arrest and imminent deportation of Carol Hui, a 20-year resident of Kennett, MO, who worked at the local diner and is the mother of three children.

One of Carol’s friends, Vanessa Cowart — a Trump voter — is quoted in the story as saying, “I voted for Donald Trump, and so did practically everyone here. But no one voted to deport moms.”

The article is full of quotes from people around the small town (10,000 people — 3x bigger than where I grew up!) saying they do not support what is happening to Carol. That includes people who worked with her, people from her church, and farmers from the county surrounding the town. It seems many of Kennett’s Trump voters do not support deporting people like Carol.

And according to polls, most Americans do not support deporting people like Carol either. Deporting undocumented immigrants who are parents of U.S. citizens is underwater by 36 percentage points, for example, and by a net-18-point margin adults oppose deporting immigrants who have not committed crimes other than unlawful entry/overstaying their visa/etc. The only super popular component of Trump’s immigration policy is deporting undocumented immigrants who have committed other violent crimes.

And as YouGov has shown recently, the vast majority of Trump’s agenda more broadly is also unpopular with the average voter:

Trump is particularly unpopular on health care, executive powers, and foreign policy.

The average Trump policy polled by YouGov is 17 points underwater with the public. That is twice as negative as the president’s overall job approval rating. As an empirical matter, most Americans — including millions of Trump voters — seem unsupportive on the whole of Trump’s policy agenda, despite a plurality of them voting for him.

The other way to say that — and the way Carol’s friends put it — is that millions of Americans voted for Trump, but they didn’t vote for this.

. . .

Yet the quote from Cowart has caused quite a stir online, mostly among progressives. On Blue Sky, the average reaction to the quote above is something like “yes, you did” or “counterpoint: you’re complicit in fascism.” Some of these posts are getting tens of thousands of likes:

But there is a big difference between voting for Trump because you wanted Carol (and people like her) to be deported, or because of something else. That’s especially true when partisanship and negative polarization are so high: Perhaps you didn’t even vote for Trump; you just voted against Harris.

In my opinion, chastising these Trump voters for their choice both misunderstands voter psychology and is very unproductive. In this piece, I’m going to explain why I think that.

Democrats need to wrestle with why Trump actually won, and what policies the average American actually supports, so they can build a large and sustainable coalition to win in 2026 and beyond.

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Voting for Trump is not the same thing as voting for his agenda