Donald Trump and maga Republicans made campaign promises but GOP policies failed to help middle class voters

As usual when Donald Trump occupies the White House, in 2025, he condensed a decade's worth of political upheaval into a single year.

Opinion published in the Charlotte Observer, news in North Carolina, by Ronald Brownstein for Bloomberg opinion.

Brownstein: "2025 turned Trump's biggest strength against him."

Identifying the most important of those developments is like picking through the wreckage to find a few family heirlooms after a tornado has torn through the neighborhood. But, in the swarm of conflicts, controversies, personnel changes, policy reversals, legal battles, feuds and shifting alliances, several dynamics emerged this year that are most likely to shape the electoral landscape in 2026, 2028 and beyond.

Of those key developments, the most significant was the collapse of faith in Trump's ability to manage the economy. In virtually every survey during Trump's first term, more people approved than disapproved of his handling of the economy. Moreover, his approval rating on the economy almost always exceeded his overall job performance rating, which meant that confidence in his economic agenda was a floor bolstering his support no matter which other controversies engulfed him. 

Now, guess what❓ That equation is reversed. Recent surveys routinely show that fewer people approve of Trump's management of the economy than at any point during his first four years; most national surveys this month have shown that 40% or fewer Americans give him positive marks on the economy, and even fewer give him good grades on the cost of living - the problem that tops every survey as Americans' biggest concern. It's a complete inversion from his first term: The economy is now dragging down overall assessments of his performance.

To some extent, Trump is simply suffering from proximity: presidents' approval ratings always sag when voters are unhappy with the economy, as they are today. (Like other presidents, he's found that efforts to blame his predecessor for current conditions fall flat after a few months.) But Trump's problems extend beyond that. 

Opinion polls consistently find that most Americans believe he has not focused enough on their 💲cost of living. Even more damaging, more voters say his agenda has hurt than helped their finances, often by a crushing margin of two or three to one. Voters particularly dislike his tariffs❗

The bottom line: Trump's greatest asset during his first term - confidence in his economic mastery - has become his biggest albatross in his second. "Unless there's a fix to inflation … I think the economy is going to continue to drag him down," says Democratic pollster Jay Campbell, part of the bipartisan polling team that surveys attitudes about the economy and politics for CNBC. The crumbling of confidence in Trump's economic performance largely explains 2025's second key electoral dynamic: the reversal of the president's beachheads among the new voter groups central to his reelection. In 2024, Trump notably improved his previous performance among several big constituencies-Latino young men and non-White voters without a college degree. Republican strategists dreamed of realignment.

But, Trump's standing with those groups rapidly deteriorated. Recent surveys that extensively examined attitudes among Latinos and young people, both with much larger samples than typical public polls, found his approval rating with each group has plummeted below 30%.❗ Frustration over the economy explains much, but not all, of that decline. In the Pew Research Center's massive recent Latino survey, for instance, more than 7 in 10 said the administration is doing too much to deport immigrants; nearly 8 in 10 said his overall agenda was hurting the Latino community. (Even a third of his 2024 Latino voters said his policies were harming the community.) Former Republican Representative Carlos Curbelo, who represented a heavily Latino South Florida district, told me that Trump "had a lot of rope" with Latinos, but has squandered that opportunity with his militarized deportation offensive. "They have gone way too far," Curbelo added. "It's going to be hard for Republicans to recover some of this support." Which brings us to the third important development of 2025: In the normal hydraulic fashion of American politics, Trump's fall allowed Democrats to run well in this year's major elections. But the Democratic Party's overall public image also remains weak- but, not when voters are asked to put a generic candidate to run against any given Republican.

That may not matter much next year, because midterm elections are predominantly a referendum on the incumbent president's performance. But "in 2028, the question of who we nominate matters enormously," says Simon Bazelon, an adviser at Welcome, a new centrist Democratic group. Even if Democrats win "a referendum on Trump's unpopularity in 2026," he adds, it would be a mistake to conclude "voters are happy with us again, when in fact they may still be angry at us." The heated argument between progressives and centrists over the party's direction will play out next year in Senate primaries in Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa and Texas among other places. But, of course, the real battle will come in the 2028, presidential primary. And, indeed, that race may turn less on ideology than on disposition - who Democratic voters believe is the candidate most committed to fight, and most likely to beat, Trump's Make America Great Again -- maga cult ❗- movement. 

At home and abroad, Trump is governing as if he feels himself completely unbound. But while other Republican officials, with the rarest exceptions, have bowed to his excesses, he's provoked a clear recoil among voters beyond his core coalition. In that way, 2025, reaffirmed the most important political trend over roughly the past 60 years. The rapid erosion of Trump's 2024, breakthroughs underscored that we continue to live through the longest period in American history when neither party has been able to establish a durable advantage over the other.

In fact, the last five times a U.S. president has gone into a midterm election with unified control of the federal government (the White House, House and Senate), the voters have revoked it - the longest such streak in American history. Nothing that happened in 2025, suggests Trump can stop that wheel from turning again in 2026.

It's About People- President Obama's Compassion Versus Governor Romney's Disdain

Mud slinging is routine in politics but this year's presidential candidates are catching ordinary people in the "no man's land" middle of their verbal volleying.

Republican Romney was caught exposing how businesses makes money by describing how he likes being able to fire people who provide services to him.  It's that "People" thing...they're the problem. Too many people on the payroll erodes profits.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/post/romney-sees-need-to-be-able-to-fire-service-providers/2012/01/09/gIQAF18alP_blog.html

Yesterday, at White House news conference on the economy, President Obama made a comparison response to a reporter's question when he happened to say the private sector economy is doing okay - compared to the public sector. Of course, Republicans cut off the second half of the message to create their own sound bite.

From the Blog Newser: Read Less Know More - "But don't be surprised if another line generates the most chatter, one in which he declared the "private sector is doing fine" in the US. BuzzFeed, calls it a 'gift to Republicans,' and indeed the National Review Online quickly tweeted a video of the comment." http://www.newser.com/story/147725/obama-private-sector-is-doing-fine.html

At least President Obama's private sector response reflected compassion for the working middle class, while Governor Romney's comment about firing people exposed his disdain about the cost of employees.

Moreover, disdain continued in Mr. Romney's knee jerk response to President Obama's sound bite remark, by acknowledging how Republicans want to cut jobs for police, firefighters and teachers.

Mr. Romney made comments on Friday afternoon in Iowa that suggested the country doesn’t need more firefighters, police or teachers.  Yet, many news reports omit  where Mr. Romney says Americans don't want to hire more police, firefighters or teachers.  


Dear Mr. Romney, police, firefighters and teachers are Americans!  Your clearly elitist response obviously demonstrates, again, disdain for ordinary people who happen to consume money on payrolls. 


Romney obviously never asked the US citizens who carry the honor of being police, firefighters and teachers if they consider their jobs to be a value to their fellow Americans.


Mr. Romney and his overaggressive advisors didn't prepare a sharpened response to the President's private sector comment.  Rather, Romney immediately made a disdainful remark about America's middle class in his zealous response.

While middle class Americans are forced to pay attention to the Presidential 2012 mud slinging, because, after all, we're already deluged with untethered and expensive political ads, these verbal assaults by candidates are reflective of how each feels about ordinary people.  

Mr. Romney's concept of "people" are that they're expensive and dispensable, while Mr. Obama demonstrated compassion for the workers.

While each political campaign desperately searches for that "gotcha" moment, perhaps the real magic bullet is how the candidates perceive the value of people.  Are we number expenses on a businesses bottom line or do we bring value to society?

It's clear to me, Republicans marginalize people in their concept of how to improve our nation's economy.

In contrast, Democrats consider people to be the engine that drives the economy.

President Clinton created this segue quote - "It's about the People, stupid!"

But in the political 'no man's land", both candidates have clearly put people in the middle of their strategy.  I'd like to know how Mr. Romney defines "people" and whether or not he supports their contributions as bringing value to our economy?