What the disappointed Trump voter tells us.
A look (with salt) at the NYT focus group.
Voters say President Trump is distracted from what they want and obsessed with what makes their lives worse. When his focus lands on what he promised, it goes so far it bruises their idea of America.
That is the message that runs through the New York Times focus group with 12 voters who regret voting for Trump. (Caveats about focus groups can be found here.1)
It can be a mistake to extrapolate from focus groups (Wait, didn’t you just make that point at length in the footnote? Yes, but it’s worth making again). In addition to the mistakes I outlined, it’s possible to over-read the views of a sliver of a coalition as larger than they are.
Here’s why it’s worth risking a longer look at this focus group. First, all exploration of themes about 2026 are useful because the president is actively trying to make a bad outcome seem like the result of fraud. He’s done this throughout his career, as I wrote about here. From before he was a candidate, to the Iowa caucuses in 2016 and to the results of the Virginia redistricting vote. Trump’s unfounded malevolent lie about the 2020 election led to the first attack on the capitol since 1814. So following along as the 2026 election takes place arms citizens against claims that crazy things are happening. (More on this in a future piece.)
Second, focus groups show what the polling can’t. We know the president is very unpopular (author quotes self here), but a focus group can give us what the disappointment sounds like.
So let’s take the claims of the lede. Here they are with one poll number for each. The supporting polls are in the footnotes.
President Trump is distracted from what voters want:2
Morning Consult, current as of last week: 79 percent of voters say bringing down prices should be a top priority and 73 percent say making health care more affordable should be — but only 23 percent say imposing tariffs should be a top priority, while 41 percent say it currently is, an 18-point overshoot.
He is obsessed with what makes their lives worse: Iran:3
CNBC’s late-April survey on feeling less safe: a 48 percent plurality say they feel less safe because of the war, with 58 percent of independents in that camp. Wars aren’t supposed to make people feel less safe.
He is obsessed with what makes their lives worse: Tariffs:4
ABC/Washington Post/Ipsos: 64 percent disapprove of Trump’s handling of tariffs to 34 percent who approve, and 65 percent disapprove of his handling of inflation.
Where his focus does land on what he promised, he goes too far:5
PBS/NPR/Marist: 65 percent say ICE has gone too far.
Their idea of America is at stake:6
NPR/Ipsos in January: Americans overwhelmingly believe the U.S. should be the world’s moral leader, but only two in five believe it actually is, a serious erosion from 2017.
Now here are quotes from the actual article lining up with those thoughts:
Distracted from what voters want:
Daniel: “with the current administration, it’s something new every week. DOGE, Venezuela, immigration, Iran. This week, the president’s feuding with the pope.”
Michelle: “if Trump would have approached the country and the problems that the nation has been having as passionately as he had his personal vendettas against Biden and those before and after him, he would have been an amazing president.”
Argenis on the loss of focus since first term: “He was so focused on Americans and making the country great, but now it doesn’t seem that way at all. He’s more focused on Israeli affairs and what’s going on there.” And: “he’s very emotional with his decisions. There’s a lot of uncertainty as a result.”
Chris: “I think Trump is focused on the stock market, Wall Street. He’s focused on the rich.”
Daniel: “he’s more focused on profit than what happens.”
Voters want help with prices:
Chris: “Life is becoming more and more unaffordable. The prices of things like gasoline and food overall haven’t come down. I thought it all would just be a lot more affordable.”
John: “Cost of living, oil, gas — housing. I mean, you touch on any aspect of it, it’s bad.”
Argenis: “I was hoping to be able to afford a house, and it’s going up and up and up and up and up.”
Jose: “I’m cutting my travel time because of the prices of gas. The cost of living is terrible.”
Obsessed with what makes their lives worse — Iran
Daniel: “this whole conflict with Iran is just uncalled for.”
Jose: “He said we’re not going to be in any wars. We have had wars.” And later: “We shouldn’t be in Iran. They don’t have a nuclear weapon. Show us something with proof.”
Chris: “And here we are in a war. And the deficit is continuing to expand. We’re headed in the wrong direction.”
Obsessed with what makes their lives worse — tariffs and cost of living
Natan: “If you understand economic policy, tariffs are not the way to go because the cost is passed to consumers.”
Nancy: “Tariffs are really impacting me, especially at work, because I work for a company that has offices abroad. The tariffs are just creating chaos at work between all of our customers.”
Where his focus lands on what he promised, he goes too far
Alla: “When he was saying he would try to fix immigration, I was behind it. But then the way he did it, it’s just not the way I agree with.” Followed by: “How ICE was treating people. This is not the way to do it.”
Natan: “He did secure the border and slow down immigration. He did it his way, and a lot of it is bad. He could have done it in a much, much, much better way.” And on the spillover effect: “While he has tried to cut back on illegal immigration, it has hurt a lot of legal immigrants. He’s created problems in getting access to legal citizenship.”
Jose: “He started separating kids and doing that mean stuff to parents, to moms, and all that. That wasn’t necessary. I understand immigration enforcement, but he was trying to be mean.”
Franceska on her boyfriend stopped by ICE: “He was pulled over by ICE, immigration, and they checked his ID and all that, I feel just because of how he looked.” And the direct judgment: “I do feel the way he is handling immigration now is a little bit of abuse of power.”
Michelle on the selectivity: “it seems to be just one ethnicity type that’s being targeted in regards to immigration. He’s not trying to clean up both sides of the country’s borders.”
Their idea of America is wounded:
Jose, on immigration: “We’re discriminating against anybody that looks different than us or believes in whatever religion or sexual preference. That’s not what we’re about.“
Pamela, after the Zelensky meeting: “I’m not embarrassed by anyone that is like, oh, yeah, we told you this would happen. I’m embarrassed for our whole country that this is what we’re dealing with daily now.”
Michelle, when asked about Epstein accountability: “Other countries have been willing to dismiss bloodlines and are doing a better job at holding people accountable, and we’re still cloaking and protecting people of power because they’re people of power.”
The picture isn’t uniform. Trump’s base remains with him on tariffs. Border security is still his strongest issue, and a majority of voters still favor deporting people in the country illegally — what they reject is how the deporting is being done. Most Republicans still see America the way they always have. The disappointment in this focus group is the disappointment of a coalition’s edges, not its center. But in a midterm, that’s where a party gets buried.
So that’s a table-setter. I will return to this focus group as a way to think about themes in the election in the coming days.
Next: The most important finding.
I’ve run a lot of focus groups. They have well-documented limits. Participants lie pleasantly — they tell the moderator what a responsible citizen should say, not what moves them in the booth. A loud or charismatic participant can move the room. Ninety minutes of forced deliberation creates a high-information environment that bears no resemblance to how most voters actually encounter politics, which is sideways, while scrolling. Twelve people cannot represent a battleground state, and the format rewards safe, middle-of-the-road reactions, or what people think others might want to hear.
A moderator can steer a room into territory it would not have wandered into on its own — which is what feels like happened with Epstein in the Times one. No participant brought it up organically. Better to let participants raise the issues themselves, then start feeding them. What they bring without prompting is data; what they say after you’ve named the topic might be performance.
The reason to pay attention to focus groups though, is the surprise. After the Access Hollywood tape, I asked a sample group which candidate they would trust to help them change a tire. Clinton or Trump? A woman somewhat younger than middle-aged said Trump. Her reasoning: based on what she’d heard about the tape, he clearly liked women. What the rest of the country was processing as bragging about sexual assault had been converted, in real time, into a character reference for competence. No survey question would have caught that. It is the kind of thing focus groups exist to reveal — not what voters think, but what they are doing with the information they have.
Also: It’s worth talking about focus groups for epistemic development: though focus groups and polls are blunt and sometimes flabby or inaccurate, each engagement with them sharpens our thinking about how useful they are. We become better consumers of the next ones and of punditry in general. Now when someone wings out a focus group finding, you’re more skeptical.
CNN’s January poll: just 36 percent said Trump had the right priorities, down from 45 percent at the start of his term, and only a third said he cares about people like them — the worst rating of his political career.
The Brookings analysis of January 2026 polling is starker: almost six in 10 Americans saying the president is focusing on the wrong things, while 73 percent say he is not spending enough time working to lower prices.
ABC/Washington Post/Ipsos: two in three Americans say Trump is out of touch with the concerns of most people.
Reuters/Ipsos poll: showed 27 percent approval and 43 percent disapproval, with 56 percent saying Trump is too willing to use military force.
By March, Quinnipiac had it at 53 percent opposing the U.S. military action against Iran, with 40 percent supporting.
Fox News roundup lined up six other major polls — NPR/PBS/Marist, CBS, NBC, Washington Post, CNN — all showing minority support. NPR/PBS/Marist: 44 / 55 CBS News: 44 / 56 NBC News: 41 / 54 Washington Post: 39 / 52 CNN: 41 / 59 Reuters/Ipsos: 27 / 43
Fox News, on the same question: 63 percent of registered voters disapproved of his handling of tariffs.
Pew: Fifty-one percent of Americans surveyed say the effects of tariffs will be mostly negative for the country and for their families.
Quinnipiac’s April number on his trade handling: 39 percent approve, 55 percent disapprove.
Washington Post/ABC/Ipsos: 58 percent say Trump has gone too far deporting undocumented immigrants, an 8-point rise since last fall.
Ipsos in February: 62 percent of Americans say ICE efforts go too far, including 65 percent of independents and 30 percent of Republicans.
AP-NORC: about six in ten think Trump has gone too far deploying federal immigration agents in major U.S. cities.
Quinnipiac in February: 60 percent say the administration has been too harsh in its treatment of undocumented immigrants, against 7 percent who say too lenient.
Marist, same month: 57 percent think Trump’s decisions have weakened the United States’ role on the world stage, including 65 percent of independents.
CNN’s April poll: 63 percent say Trump’s foreign policy decisions have hurt the United States’ standing in the world, up six points since January.
I dislike, extremely, men in power who essentially ruin young women's lives. That includes Clinton, Clarence Thomas and Trump. And others of course. But these three have been present and in power despite their egregious juvenile behavior during my adulthood.
Many Thanks John, for giving us sme inside baseball on focus groups, polling, etc. The further Trump fall, the more relieved I get. To me, it would be fascinating to undertake a large, wide-ranging survey of Trump's hard-core base. They may still believe everything they did about him in the beginning, or maybe not. I find that when the Trump diehards I'm acquainted with are presented with conflicting information, they often refer back to generalized, almost rehearsed talking points, as if the retorts have been drilled into their subconscious. Such as, say, if I bring up migrants being arrested at a courthouse after an asylum hearing went in their favor, they'll say, "But they still broke the law when they came here illegally" or "They're still illegal," or whatever. Maybe not the best example. I did read, awhile back, about some HSA/ ICE memos surfacing during a federal court case, in which Homeland Security flatly stated that ICE Agents should not pick up people anywhere near immigration court proceedings.. Really?? The case is ongoing, I'll try and track it down. It
it was brought by some immigrant groups with the help of the ALCU, in NYC I believe. I know it's somewhat off-topic, but I was dumbfounded by that admission. Of course Karoline Leavitt or HSA or whomever responded on X, stating that of course ICE would continue to stalk immigration courts, that it's perfectly legal to snatch migrants after a "removal" order, but that's often not the case, when these folks dutifully show up for their ongoing asylum process. Sorry for the long comment, this has just been on my mind lately.