I Didn’t Vote for Trump Republicans…Open Thread for 2/25/2026

Buyers Remorse as Donald keeps digging himself Deeper into a hole…..

His blaming the Democrats is NOT going over even for ‘his’ party members it might seem?

Not big numbers…

But enough to cause problems for JD Vance?

 

There is a curious polling phenomenon where a nontrivial share of respondents falsely claim to have voted for the winner of the last election. Whether they’re lying, misremembering, or rewriting history, “winner’s recall” is common enough that many reputable pollsters have observed it in past elections.

In our national polling of registered voters, though, we’re finding something different: a nontrivial chunk of people who are mad at Trump seem to suddenly have amnesia and no longer admit to having voted for him in 2024.

Voters abandoning the winning candidate is a pretty big reversal of a well-established phenomenon. But we now have enough data to suggest that it’s both real and the direct result of Trump’s unpopularity.

Let’s back up for a second. How do we even know who people voted for in the first place?

The day after the 2024 election, our polling partner Verasight collected data from every respondent in its panel about whom they voted for. For each new recruit who joined its pool post-2024, it asked for 2024 vote choice as part of the signup process.

In other words, a respondent’s 2024 vote is recorded as part of their profile at a time when it was fresh in their memory. As Nate Cohn of The New York Times explained, this kind of logging of past vote is more reliable (and significantly less noisy) than asking someone who they voted for months (or even years) down the line.1

But every survey, we also separately ask respondents whom they voted for so that we can see how people’s responses and memories drift and diverge from reality over time.

Here’s what we’re finding: six percent of Trump voters — as determined by the recorded vote data we have, which we’ll treat as the ground truth — don’t even admit to voting for him in the last election….

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So we know that if a Trump voter disapproves of Trump, they’re more likely to (incorrectly) say they never voted for him in the first place….

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You can imagine that at the start of his second term, when his political strength was arguably at its peak, this effect would have inflated Trump’s recalled vote share quite a bit. Now, the effect is the opposite; with the president’s approval rating sitting at a whopping -15 points in our most recent poll, there is no appetite among the electorate to align with Trump….

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image…ABC News….