Betrayed: Trump's support plummets with rural and military voters

Investor’s Business Daily/TIPP’s latest poll shows Trump dropping to 34 percent approval and 56 percent disapproval, leading IBD to note, “Approval ratings for a president haven’t been this low since President Bush’s last months in office.” Their polling reflects other recent data from organizations like Gallup, as Trump seems dead set on sending his party toward a midterm backlash if progressive momentum against the Republican agenda continues all the way to the ballot box in 2018.

But things become even more dire in the details of the IBD/TIPP poll, where Trump’s support among his devoted base has begun to suffer. His support among white men is now underwater, dropping from 58 percent to 49 percent. The trend is even more devastating with rural voters, where Trump has gone from 56 percent to 41 percent. IBD summarized the collapse, “Across the board, the poll has bad news for Trump.”

The poll also shows double-digit losses for Trump with his support well below 50 percent for strong leadership (35 percent), health care (25 percent) , and the economy (37 percent).

Another poll showing erosion for Trump with his base comes from Gallup. While there is an uptick in support in Appalachian communities, in communities surrounding the many military installations around America, the numbers are devastating.

In the 2016 election, he won 56 percent of the vote in those communities. In February, his approval with those voters was down to 50.1 percent. Now it has dropped to 41.4 percent, showing that the very people who embraced the idea of Trump as commander-in-chief are beginning to reject him.

The Wall Street Journal notes that he may be losing these voters due to the “continual run of news headlines about FBI and congressional investigations into contacts between Trump campaign associates and Russian operatives,” in addition to the fact that these will be the first communities to suffer the effects of Trump’s loosened rules of engagement for the military via injury and death of service members.

Polling does not create the outcome of an election, but Trump’s mishandling of his position is creating a ripe environment for voters to resist his agenda and elect leadership willing to perform the much-needed oversight of this failing administration. All the pieces are coming into place — and that is bad news for Trump and the Republican Party.