Frank Luntz is shocked that Donald Trump’s voters are not behaving as expected.
You’ve probably seen the propaganda that massive numbers of Trump voters are experiencing buyer’s remorse. It is one of the many failed memes being pushed by Trump opponents. X is filled with fake stories of liberals describing how their Trump-voting friends (as if they have any left) are crying about how Donald Trump is ruining America.
No doubt, there are regretful Trump voters–when 77 million people do anything, some fraction will regret it. But there is no large-scale phenomenon of Trump voters defecting to the Democrats. It is a fantasy, not a fact.
This surprises Frank Luntz, and you can understand why: it IS true that Trump voters are unusually loyal and willing to extend the benefit of the doubt to Trump in a way that seems a bit unusual.
He’s not wrong & the reason you’ve never seen it before is because both parties have put up candidates that have never listened & been a champion for them in the way Trump has; so they’re willing to give this approach space because they believe it’s the best thing for the country https://t.co/eBhfElQWSn
— ZitoSalena (@ZitoSalena) May 1, 2025
At one level, you can see Luntz’s point. The stock market is down a bit from its highs in the first months of Trump’s administration, although the idea that Trump has crushed the stock market through his somewhat chaotic negotiating style is more than a little absurd. In fact, the stock market is marginally higher–by an insignificant margin–than on election day. If a market at this level is in crisis, then what was portrayed as remarkably good under Biden is suddenly crushingly bad under Trump.
In other words, the notion that Trump has crashed the market in mere months is absurd. It is a media-generated myth. A flat market is not ideal, but anybody who didn’t play the market after Trump got elected is just fine.
Still, the sense of chaos–largely but not entirely created by media members having their hair on fire– is real and makes a lot of people nervous. So much negative coverage, even when not especially backed by reality, has a psychological effect, yet Trump voters are largely unmoved or even happy to bear a bit of suffering in the short term.
Why? Salena Zito hits the nail on the head: Trump voters are much more anxious about the country’s headlong rush into fiscal insolvency under status quo policies. They believe that Trump’s moves now will result in longer-term prosperity, so they want Trump to stay the course.
The Biden economic policy was to increase debt massively, draw down oil reserves, and create a sugar high economy headed to a crash even worse than the 2008 financial crisis. You can fake prosperity by spending what you don’t have, but the end result is bankruptcy, and responsible people accept living within one’s means as a superior strategy to build real wealth.
Washington people don’t get that, obviously. The whole point of swamp policies is to keep the masses happy while grabbing what they can right now, even if that means disaster down the line. It is inconceivable to them that others don’t think like they do.
Even “forward-looking” policies like NetZero are more about grabbing the “green energy” brass ring. Get those subsidies now, face Spain’s future later.
Rightly or wrongly, Trump voters believe that Trump’s strategy is likely to be good for the country and are willing to let it play out. This used to be considered a good thing–delayed gratification in the service of the long-term good of the country.
Washington swamp dwellers think that makes you a sucker.
Nobody can reliably predict whether Trump’s strategy will work–there are a lot of moving parts and some of the success depends on his bullying his opponents into cooperating–but it is a strategy nonetheless, and Trump is the first president in decades–to even try to fix what is broken.
Trump voters will stick with him, even if that makes no sense to people whose only goal is to get rich quick.
