One in eight people who voted for Trump having second thoughts – poll

NEW YORK (Reuters) –About one in eight people who voted for President Donald Trump said they are not sure they would do so again after witnessing Trump’s tumultuous first six months in office, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll of 2016 voters.

While most of the people who voted for Trump on November 8 said they would back him again, the erosion of support within his winning coalition of older, disaffected, mostly white voters poses a potential challenge for the president. Trump, who won the White House with the slimmest of margins, needs every last supporter behind him to push his agenda through a divided Congress and potentially win a second term in 2020.

The poll surveyed voters who had told Reuters/Ipsos on Election Day how they had cast their ballots. While other surveys have measured varying levels of disillusionment among Trump supporters, the Reuters/Ipsos poll shows how many would go as far as changing the way they voted. The survey was carried out first in May and then again in July.

In the July survey, 12% of respondents said they would not vote for Trump “if the 2016 presidential election were held today;” 7% said they “don’t know” what they would do; and the remaining 5% would either support one of the other 2016 presidential candidates or not vote.

Eighty eight percent said they would vote for Trump again, a slight improvement over the May figure of 82%. Taken together, the polls suggest that Trump’s standing with his base has improved slightly over the past few months despite his Republican Party’s repeated failures to overhaul the healthcare system and multiple congressional and federal investigations into his campaign’s ties to Russia.

To be sure, most presidents lose support among core supporters the longer they are in the White House. According to the Gallup polling service, former president Barack Obama saw his popularity dip among Democrats and minority voters, though it did not come until later in his first term. But Obama, who won the Electoral College with greater margins than Trump, was not as reliant on retaining his core supporters.