The sleeping giant just woke up as angry nonvoters are about to rock midterms

This week, the president has hit the floor in his support. A new Reuters poll found that Donald Trump's approval is 35 percent. A new Q poll found that it's 33 percent. Nate Silver said it's lower than Joe Biden's was after the Disaster Debate. While there's hope his numbers will keep falling, they probably won't. A third of America is descended from the original confederates. Trump is burning up their lives and fortunes, but they're stand by their man.

I could be wrong, but whether his numbers keep falling may be beside the point. The real question is whether Trump's supporters show up in defense of his administration in the coming congressional elections. Tuesday's primaries suggest an answer in the affirmative, as they knocked off Republicans Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Thomas Massie of Kentucky.

However, their defeats might say more about them than about Trump. Cassidy voted to removed him after the J6 insurrection. Massie has been a vocal Trump critic. Both men were marked by maga. Anyway, the point of the movement was to be anti-Republican. They show up to punish Trump's adversaries, not necessarily to support Republicans. Polls suggest that maganites are hardcore partisans, but what made maga a movement is that many are not.

Trump took supporters on a decade-long moral vacation. He freed them from the ordinary constraints of decency. He vowed to punish their "enemies," especially uppity women. And he promised they would all get rich. In turn, they believed Trump would spare them from the consequences of their own desires.¹ In the end, he didn't. Their cost of living is soaring higher. The pain of tariffs and war is increasingly intolerable. And now they feel betrayed.

Some of them even feel like Joe Biden was better. A recent poll found that six in 10 Americans think the economy was better under the former Democratic president. They are right.

That said, the likelihood of a Trump voter picking a Democrat in November is very low, but the likelihood is very high of Trump voters returning to their natural state as nonvoters. Trump didn't woo swing voters. He amassed winning coalitions by adding people who did not vote prior to his entry onto the political scene. What they desired was Trump and everything he represented to them. That desire has backfired and now they lost hope.

"They’re s------- themselves because nobody is going to vote," a Trump voter told NOTUS. "You will have your boomer Republicans who watch [Sean] Hannity and all that stuff go out and vote. But people like me, normal people, dealing with the cost of living, we’re not voting."

The demoralization that's pushing maga back into nonvoter-hood is compounded by Donald Trump's other big problem – the activation of Americans who might otherwise be oriented toward the Democratic Party but who stayed home during the last presidential election. The couch can no longer hold them down, as gas prices are surging, food costs are soaring and health insurance is impossible. The magnitude is such that Mike Duggan ended his bid as an independent candidate for Michigan governor, because "our internal polling showed the intense anger over gas prices and Iran was boosting Democrats in every office nationally."

Maga is demoralized. Democrat-leaning nonvoters are energized.

There's room for independent candidates.

I don't know if we can trust nonvoters who say they're going to vote. (CNN's Harry Enten said they are "p----- off" and "absolutely" will, while noting that only 48 percent of them said they were "almost certain to vote.") The fact remains, however, that anger is highly motivating. Beyond other considerations, anger has probably determined the outcomes of all but one presidential election since Barack Obama's victory. That year's panic brought a ton of nonvoters to his side. (A Democrat has not won Indiana since.) Moody's says odds of a recession are reaching 50 percent. It's only mid-May. Voters are mad. Nonvoters are madder.

The Democrats talk a lot about how to win over Trump voters, but not about how to harness the compounding rage of nonvoters, and then turn them into Democrats. The presumption seems to be that Trump voters will stick around, but hardcore partisans, who make up his floor of support, will never vote Democratic. Trump was the reason many maganites surfaced in the first place. He's the reason they will likely go back underground. That leaves some swing voters to fight over, which is fine, but there are 90 million people in this country who did not vote in the last election. A bunch of them now say they will vote this year.

The Democrats act like there's only so many voters to go around, so they have to be careful about the kind of message they send. It can't be too "anti-Trump," whatever that means, and it can't be too "progressive," whatever that means. Apparently, there has to be a sweet spot between pro-democracy and pro-"working class," which may be the lesson of 2024, but 2026 is made profoundly different by the fact that Trump is burning up the economy. Inflation is expected to reach 4 percent next month. Chris Murphy said the key to winning over Trump voters is to "unrig the economy and unrig the democracy," but forget about Trump voters. Say it to the millions of new voters who are about to demonstrate how p----- off they are.

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