The coalition that carried Donald Trump back to the White House in 2024 — young voters, Latinos and independents — is quietly coming apart, and a new NBC News poll lays the damage bare. The numbers are not a rounding error or a single bad week. They describe an erosion at the very seams that Republicans stitched together less than two years ago, and they should alarm anyone betting on a comfortable 2026.
The defections that should scare Republicans
Start with the young. Among voters aged 18 to 29, the poll found just 21% approve of the president's job performance while 77% disapprove — a near-total collapse with a group that Trump had improbably made competitive in 2024. Latino voters, whose rightward drift was the defining surprise of the last election, now disapprove by 64% to 34%. Independents, the swing of every modern majority, break against him by roughly two to one.
Put together, Trump's overall approval has sunk to 42% among registered voters, the lowest mark of his second term in NBC's surveys. The poll, conducted May 29 through June 7 among 2,400 registered voters with a margin of error of about two percentage points, is not an outlier so much as a confirmation of a trend that other surveys have been tracing for months.
Why coalitions like this don't snap back on their own
Here is the uncomfortable truth for the GOP: the voters now peeling away were always the most conditional members of the coalition. Young and Latino voters did not turn to Trump out of deep ideological conversion; many came for a single promise, lower prices, after years of inflation. When that promise frays — when grocery bills stay high and the cost of a first apartment keeps climbing — the loyalty frays with it. Gratitude is not the same as allegiance, and a transactional vote is a vote that can be lost as quickly as it was won.
You can see the strain in places like Arizona, where Phoenix's Latino neighborhoods swung hard right in 2024 on the strength of economic frustration. The same frustration that delivered those votes is now turning back on the party in power, because the party in power owns the economy. That is the iron logic of incumbency, and no amount of messaging discipline repeals it.
The young present a different but related problem. They are not bound by the partisan habits that anchor older voters, which is precisely what made them gettable in the first place — and precisely what makes them so easy to lose. A 24-year-old who took a flyer on Trump because rent was impossible feels no tribal obligation to stay if rent is still impossible. The very volatility that handed Republicans a generational opening now cuts the other way, and there is no loyalty program that converts a protest vote into a permanent one.
A warning, not a prophecy
None of this guarantees a Democratic wave. Midterm electorates are older and whiter than presidential ones, the party out of power has its own deep credibility problems, and seventeen months is an eternity in politics. The generic congressional ballot shows Democrats with an edge, but edges have evaporated before.
Still, the direction is unmistakable, and direction is what campaigns are built to fight. The Republican coalition of 2024 was a genuine achievement — a real expansion of the party's reach into communities it had written off for a generation. The tragedy, if the trend holds, is that it may also prove to be the most fragile majority in recent memory, undone not by the opposition but by the simple failure to deliver the one thing it was elected to fix.