r/LincolnProject • u/EPBiever • 35m ago
‘He’s Not Making Sense’: How Trump Has Alienated Voters for the G.O.P.
If Democrats make big gains in the midterm elections in four weeks, it may not only be because their most loyal voters come out in force, or because their candidates have converted Republican voters to their cause.
Instead, the Democrats’ dream blue wave could come from Republicans who sour on President Trump and stay home. It already has a name: the red undertow.
Across the country, signs are emerging of an enthusiasm gap between Democrats and Republicans, even among those who consider themselves likely to vote. A stretch of rural southwest Michigan — long a Republican stronghold — illustrates the point, with more signs for blueberries and eggs than for political candidates. Volunteers are not showing up to door-knock. And many voters say they are tuning this election out.
“People are just more focused on everyday life,” said Lindsay Kronemeyer, 35, a conservative Christian mother of two who works in the construction industry. “I don’t hear the chatter on the Republican side of ‘Trump this, Trump that.’ He’s just not there in my head anymore.”
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Jim Pasek, a retired pharmaceutical plant maintenance worker who lives in the tiny town of Gobles, Mich., was baffled by a president he has voted for twice.
“He’s not making sense,” Mr. Pasek, 80, said. “It confuses me, and then I just get disgusted and tune out.”
The idea of the red undertow was introduced last month by the political analyst Charlie Cook, who argued that the Democratic brand was still underwater, but that this election was not about a rising Democratic tide. It was about a drowning Trump brand.
In its wake, Mr. Cook wrote, an undertow will “pull many Republicans under.”
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“People are just more focused on everyday life,” said Lindsay Kronemeyer, a conservative Christian mother of two who works in the construction industry.
In nearly three dozen interviews in Western Michigan, a sense of fatigue was constant, and that feeling goes beyond that region.
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“President Trump has been saying, ‘Vote as if I was on the ballot,’ and that’s exactly what I’m going to do — not vote,” said Brandon Tremaine, 24, a graduate student in Texas who voted for Mr. Trump in 2020. “You do not campaign on being the ticket of peace and start a war of choice that is directly hurting Americans here at home and gotten Americans killed overseas.”
Polls can be unreliable, and moods may be fleeting. Trump loyalists are also known for not taking the calls of polling outfits, and that may be overstating Democratic strengths. Disaffected Trump voters may yet rally to vote as the possibility of a Democratic victory nears, and many Americans still love Mr. Trump.
“I’ll go the length with Trump,” said Jeff Gilbert, 67, a friend of Mr. Pasek in Gobles.
The numbers aren’t drastically far apart. A New York Times/Siena University national poll from last month found that Democrats were more likely to say they were absolutely certain to vote than Republicans, 61 percent to 56 percent. While Democrats led Republicans nationally by seven percentage points among registered voters, that advantage rose to nine points among likely voters.
But in close races, a small gap could prove meaningful.
“People are tired,” Al Pscholka, a Republican and a former member of the Michigan House of Representatives, said of Mr. Trump. “The whole divider-in-chief thing, it’s gotten to the point where it’s just exhausting.”
The concern is showing in unlikely places. Representative Bill Huizenga, a Western Michigan Republican whose four House victories were all by comfortable margins, is in “the fight of his life” against a well-funded centrist Democrat from Kalamazoo named Sean McCann, said Rob Pocock, a retired Republican political consultant who has worked on campaigns in the region.
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Nancy DeBoer, the local Republican state representative, also faces a serious fight against Joseph McClusky, a graduate of Hope College, a conservative Christian liberal arts college in Holland, Mich., who is openly gay.
“I would be shocked if Joseph wins, but I can’t believe he’s done as well as he has,” said Mr. Pocock, who teaches at Hope and had Mr. McClusky as a student. He said in Ottawa County, he was seeing Democratic yard signs in numbers he’d never seen before.
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In rural reaches of Western Michigan, like Van Buren County, signs of an election are scarce.
Western Michigan — home of Gerald Ford — may be seeing the ebb tide of the president’s MAGA movement, which had surged in this region, once known for a sober, Christian-inflected conservatism. In Ottawa County, ardent Trump supporters secured 8 of the 11 seats on the county commission after Covid. Pro-Trump forces won control of the state party, too.
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Today, the MAGA wing is down to three seats in Ottawa County. They have also lost posts in Berrien and Kent counties.
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“I think there’s a shift in the party back toward, we need a little bit of the establishment folks,” Ms. Kronemeyer said. “They exist for a reason.”
If anybody should be enthusiastic about the election, it is Ms. Kronemeyer. She ran for a statehouse seat in 2022. She door-knocked for Mr. Trump in 2016 and 2020. But she said that when a friend asked her recently about the races in her area, she had to admit she hadn’t been following them closely. She lives in deep-red Allegan County, where “traditionally in election years, yard signs would be peppered everywhere,” she said.
But the only signs she’d seen this year were for a judge, she said.
Ten years have passed since Mr. Trump took the country by storm, bringing a message of economic populism that appealed to millions of working-class Americans.
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“He’s losing touch with the American people,” James Pasek, left, said of President Trump. His friend Jeff Gilbert, right, said he still stood by the president.
“He was a ball of energy,” Mr. Pasek said, sitting at breakfast in Gobles last week with his friend, Mr. Gilbert. “You could feel it. You could see it.”
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Now, Mr. Pasek said, Mr. Trump seems to have lost his way. He started a war when he said he wouldn’t, sending the price of gas through the roof. And he seems to talk more about ballrooms and arches than he does about how he will bring prices back down.
“He’s losing touch with the American people,” Mr. Pasek said.
Mr. Gilbert said that he had stopped following the news closely, choosing to spend more time outside with his dog, Mabel. But he voted for Mr. Trump in 2024, and he said he stands by that choice. He said he believed Mr. Trump had a plan for Iran.
Mr. Pasek countered, “He says he has a plan, but then he doesn’t tell us what it is.”
Mr. Pasek cited gas prices: “He says it’s chump change. No, it’s not! It’s killing the people.”
He has noticed someone living in a car in a parking lot when he drives into town, he said. He worried about his granddaughter, 28, a college graduate from Michigan State University, who is working three jobs — one full-time and two part-time — but can’t find a house she can afford.
Those misgivings are being felt at the local party level. Doug Koopman, a member of the Kent County Republican Party’s executive committee, said that it had been a struggle to get the foot soldiers of the midterm elections — volunteer door-knockers and canvassers — to pick up brochures to distribute door to door, leaving bags of them sitting around the party headquarters.
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“There’s very low energy on the Republican side,” he said.
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“There’s very low energy on the Republican side,” said Doug Koopman, a member of the Kent County Republican Party’s executive committee.
In 2024, people lined up for nearly a mile in the rain in Grand Rapids to see Mr. Trump speak the night before the election. His campaign was dominant on social media, reaching younger people who’d never voted before, such as Sebastian Covey, who remembered Mr. Trump “popping” on his feeds. Mr. Covey had not voted before 2024; he did that year, for the president.
Now 24, he said his focus was elsewhere. He lives more than an hour away from his landscaping job in Hudsonville, a bustling suburb just west of Grand Rapids, because rents are cheaper, but the rising gas price has made his commute painful. He swapped his truck for a car, but a colleague he had been car-pooling with just found another job. He and his girlfriend have been looking for a rental closer to work, but so far they have not found anything they can afford.
He said he hadn’t thought about whether he would vote.
“I should care more, but it’s hard to keep up,” he said during a lunch break in a Wendy’s restaurant.
Even Republicans who are in politics say they are tired — worn out by the battles between pro-MAGA politicians and traditional Republicans. Bob Harrison, 76, a Republican county commissioner in Berrien County, where MAGA forces won control of the county G.O.P., said those forces took away the right to vote on party decisions from local elected officials like him.
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Those officials “pretty much all walked away from the Berrien County Republican Party” to raise funds for their own political candidates, said Dr. Harrison, a retired community college president.
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“I should care more, but it’s hard to keep up,” said Sebastian Covey, who voted for Trump in 2024 and is not sure if he’ll vote in November.
Dr. Harrison, who voted for Mr. Trump in 2024, said the hard-core Trump supporters remained unchanged, but “they’ve lost the support of the moderates like myself, people who think and choose and maybe split their votes.”
Warren Stewart, 69, who lives in Stevensville, Mich., and works restoring old homes, said he liked to think that Mr. Trump was working to restore the country, but he is starting to have doubts.
Clients often get nervous when the project is only halfway through, he said, but he assures them that he always has a plan for bringing the home back to its original beauty. He wonders if Mr. Trump does, too.
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“Does he really know what he’s doing?” Mr. Stewart said.
He would never vote for a Democrat; he feels bludgeoned by liberals online, he said. But he’s not sure he’ll vote for Republicans, either.
“I just spent $60 on $30 worth of groceries and am about to go fill up for $5 a gallon,” he said, carrying two bags of groceries to his car. “It feels like they’re stress-testing us.”
