Public Notice is proudly celebrating 5 years of independent journalism. Support our work by becoming a paid subscriber ⬇️
In the stunning rebuke voters delivered to Donald Trump and his party in the midterm elections, some of the biggest losers were the most MAGA-friendly candidates who ran Trumpian campaigns, from Ken Paxton to Vivek Ramaswamy to Mike Collins to Darline Graham.
It was a timely reminder as the Trump era begins its final chapter: For all the profound effects the MAGA movement has had on American politics and culture, it was never particularly popular.
Shocking, absurd, dramatic, destructive, overwhelming? MAGA has been all those things. It has had a deep and possibly lasting effect on our culture, making it coarser and uglier. But it has never had anything approaching majority support from Americans.
The midterms weren’t a surprise or an aberration; they were an expression of how the electorate has always felt about Trump and his movement, albeit a particularly emphatic one.
The MAGA myth
Start with Trump himself.
Despite what he would have us believe, the truth is that he is uniquely unpopular, with the lowest average approval rating of any president since approval rating has been measured.
But how can you argue with his success? The man did get elected twice.
That’s true. But it’s also true that Trump’s electoral record is pretty poor — in fact, arguably the worst of any president who served two terms.
Here’s how it went: A popular vote loss with a fluke electoral college win (2016); a midterm blowout loss that cost his party the House (2018); an emphatic reelection loss (2020); a general election win by one of the closest margins in history (2024); then finally, the worst midterm loss in half a century, costing his party both houses of Congress (2026). That adds up to a record of 1-5 or 2-3, depending on how you want to score it.
But that 2024 win — by a mere 1.5 percentage points, after the sitting president dropped out and the vice president scrambled to cobble together a campaign in a matter of weeks, in a year in which ruling parties around the world were punished for presiding over the 2022 post-covid inflation — was turned into a narrative about Trump creating something stunning and possibly enduring.
It’s an obvious exaggeration when Trump and his spokespeople insist on an almost daily basis that his 2024 win was a sweeping landslide unparalleled in American history. But through sheer repetition, they may have succeeded in convincing many that it was at least a big victory. The elite news media, furthermore, was happy to describe it as an emphatic, era-defining expression of the true sentiments of the American volk.
A key part of that story was that Trump had increased his numbers among some important demographics, including young voters, Latinos, and even Black voters. As Perry Bacon has noted, after 2024, journalists (especially white journalists) could barely contain their excitement at the idea that Trump had created a new multiracial coalition that reshaped the political landscape.
But just two years later, the landscape doesn’t look so reshaped after all. In this year’s elections, Democrats won 70 percent of voters under 30, 91 percent of Black voters, 70 percent of Latino voters, and 71 percent of Asian-American voters. So much for that realignment.
The reason so many voters were willing to swing back to Democrats after they had voted for Trump in 2024 — and perhaps in 2016 and/or 2020 as well — is that they were never MAGA in the first place.
This is one of the key points to understand about the MAGA myth: The fact that someone voted for Trump a time or two doesn’t mean they were on board with the entire project, that they embraced everything Trump would ever do, or that they have loyalty to him as an individual.
There are different ways one could define what a MAGA voter is; for instance, one study from 2024 defined MAGA Republicans as those who voted for Trump in 2020 and refused to accept the result of that election. That’s not a bad measure, but another way pollsters have approached the question is to simply ask people if they identify with MAGA.
Whichever definition one uses, over time the number of MAGA Republicans has fluctuated fairly significantly depending on what Trump is doing and whether an election is approaching. But generally speaking, the figure has been somewhere between a third and two-thirds of Republicans.
Which means, of course, that at any given time, between a third and two-thirds of Republicans have said they aren’t MAGA. One can make finer distinctions; this recent UMass poll found that about a third of Republicans said they very much identify with MAGA and another third said they somewhat do. A less than full-throated endorsement could mean different things; for some, it probably means they don’t like Trump all that much (even if they’ll still vote for him over a Democrat), or that they don’t like the vulgar style he has brought to our politics, or that they think MAGA cultists are weird.
Keep in mind that the entire population of both Republicans and Republican-leaning independents amounts to around 40-45 percent of the adult population. Multiply that by the one-third to two-thirds of Republicans who say they’re MAGA, and that means that the whole MAGA population is a distinct minority of the public.
According to YouGov polls, for instance, the proportion of the citizenry self-identifying as MAGA peaked at 21 percent earlier this year.
And you can bet that as more prominent Republicans ease away from him, the Trump merch stores close, and the movement seems less fun and more like the redoubt of losers and dead-enders, those numbers will fall even farther.
Why the myth was compelling
The core of the MAGA myth has always been that it represented nearly all Republicans, and therefore any Republican victory was a validation of the movement and its power. That idea had two essential components, one about the base and one about the elite.
The MAGA base is garish and grotesque in a way that made it a subject of endless fascination from the beginning; never before has so much attention been lavished on a politician’s supporters. You may have noticed that the news media were not determined to publish hundreds of stories about the habits, beliefs, and sartorial choices of Biden voters.
This was true not only of the media but of liberals themselves, who have been both horrified and intrigued by the MAGA faithful’s bizarre beliefs, their costumes and merch, and their horrifying social media accounts and podcasts.
Every New York Times “In This Diner In Trump Country, Trump Supporters Support Trump” story and every mocking Daily Show segment, justified though they may be, only served to convince all of us that this movement is important and influential — and that to be a Trump voter is to be both deranged and loyal to a fault.
But that is a delusion of those who pay a lot of attention to politics. Political junkies (and if you’re reading this, that means you) often have trouble putting themself in the mind-space of the millions of people who just don’t care about it all that much. Those of us who do care often imagine that the average person sees the same news we do, makes the same connections we do, and understands political differences and the relationships between issues in the same way we do.
That assumption is wrong, and always has been.
That erroneous assumption leads to the conclusion that anyone who ever voted for Trump must have been a MAGA voter, at least in part. Engaged people had trouble understanding how anyone who isn’t MAGA could have voted for Trump, because doing so meant tolerating everything that makes Trump Trump. But many disengaged voters just weren’t tuned into his daily offenses against morality and common sense — or they found them to be trivial and not disqualifying when it came to an election in which they were upset about more mundane things like inflation.
The top-down component of the MAGA myth is driven by the remarkable unity of the Republican elite, including the conservative media, the activist/think tank world, and most importantly, elected officials.
Some lined up behind Trump because they actually believed in him, others because they were afraid that if they didn’t he would punish them, which he did again and again to pound the lesson home (just ask the likes of Bill Cassidy, Thomas Massie, or John Cornyn). Either way, Trump’s successful maintenance of elite unity communicated to all that the GOP is MAGA, even if Trump support is far closer to universal among Republicans in Congress than among the Republican voters.
Combine the florid MAGA base and the near-unanimity of the Republican elite, and it has seldom seemed worth exploring the fact that such a large proportion of the Republican electorate — sometimes an outright majority — has not been MAGA at all. That’s not even to mention the millions of people who voted for Trump at some point but weren’t even Republicans.
According to the Pew Research validated voter studies, Trump got 43 percent of the independent vote in 2016, the same 43 percent in 2020, and 48 percent in 2024. These voters found a reason to vote for Trump — perhaps a belief that he would be good for the economy, or (especially in 2016 and 2024) a simple desire for change — but the idea that they were loyal MAGA cultists was always absurd.
There’s one final fact to consider: In every election in which Trump was in power — the 2018 midterm, the 2020 presidential race, and the 2026 midterm — he has been smacked down decisively. When he and his movement have been not a vehicle for change but the ones wielding authority — and his second term has been the purest expression of MAGA beliefs and priorities — the public has recoiled in disgust, as they did last Tuesday.
Many Republicans are now wondering whether the MAGA movement can survive Trump’s departure, and who can step up to lead its collection of red-hat-wearing conspiracy theorists, election deniers, and insurrectionists. Perhaps instead, they ought to ask who in the GOP can appeal to non-MAGA Republicans, and anyone else. Because that may be what they need to have any chance at avoiding another crushing defeat in 2028.
That’s it for today
We’ll be back with more tomorrow. If you appreciate today’s PN, please do your part to keep us free by signing up for a paid subscription.
Thanks for reading.
That was a very sensible and realistic bit of analysis. Nevertheless having over 30% of the Republican base embace a dangerous cult about MAGA is no small deal. A person that can get the loyalty of that many Republican voters is only a small step away from winning Republican endorsement in any primary. That gives those foolish, indeed dangerous extremists a serious amount of power in the running of the country. The only cheering thing about it is that in many ways it is a cult. Cults tend not to survive the death (literal or metaphorical) of their founder.
Great analysis. It certainly seems like the Republican elite have increasingly gone off the "deep end" and that was obvious in 2016 when there were a lot of horrible Republicans (including Trump) running for President and the more reasonable Republicans were dropping out of the race. My husband, an independent, had made that observation. He has voted for both parties over the years while I've been a lifelong Democrat who rarely votes Republican for anything. But from 2016 forward, he has voted Democrat since the Republicans have gone far right. Republican elites have espoused the same type of rhetoric that Marge Schott, the former Cincinnati Reds owner, had espoused. And she was forced to sell the team as a result.