The left's obsession with whether Americans "like" Donald Trump completely misses the point. Elections aren't popularity contests — they're about who can get the job done.
Trump has never pretended to be a feel-good figure. He knows voters don't have to like him — they just have to trust him to fight for them.
That's exactly the point he hammered home two months before the 2024 election during a rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. As the Independent Journal Review reported on September 5, 2024, Trump told voters:
Your biggest business, and you get a big majority of your income from fracking, and you have somebody (Kamala Harris) that's not gonna allow fracking … You can't take the chance. You have no choice. You've gotta vote for me. You've gotta vote for me. Even if you don't like me! (You) can sit there and say, "I can't stand that guy, but there's no way I'm gonna vote for her."
That's the real American political calculation: Which leader will protect my family, my job, and my country?
When I publicly predicted Trump's 2016 victory two months before the election, it wasn't because he was loved — it was because voters decided they needed him more than they needed to feel good about him.
Today, Democrats still don't get it. They gleefully track every dip in Trump's favorability, like Nate Silver's showing a drop from 51.6% to 44.4%. But falling "likability" numbers don't mean voters are switching sides.
In fact, CNN's Harry Enten crushed that liberal fantasy on April 16. As The Daily Beast (hardly a Trump-friendly outlet) reported:
"According to Enten, just two percent of Republican voters say they would change their vote if a hypothetical rematch between Trump and Kamala Harris were to happen tomorrow, with just one percent saying they would rather not vote at all.
'I mean, this is the big question, right? I hear all these stories, all these articles, all the Trump voters, saying they regret what they did back in 2024,' Enten remarked. 'I'm here to tell you, very few of them regret what they did back in 2024.'"
Only 1% of All Voters Regret Voting for Trump
Do the math: If 2% of Trump voters have regrets, and Trump got roughly half the vote, that's just 1% of the entire electorate.
Meanwhile, the reporting on Harris voters was revealing. CNN and The Daily Beast said Harris' base had "near-identical loyalty." Not identical. Nearly identical.
Why hedge? Probably because if fewer Harris voters were flipping, they'd scream it from the rooftops. More likely, a slightly larger chunk of Harris voters — maybe 3% — would now vote for Trump.
I even emailed YouGov to ask if Harris defections were higher than Trump's. No response. You can draw your own conclusions.
The Real Youth Revolt
The narrative that Trump is losing young voters doesn't hold up either. Yes, some polls show Trump's personal favorability among voters under 30 has dipped. But when it comes to actual votes, the story is the opposite.
A Harvard Youth Poll released in April found Republicans now lead Democrats by 10 points among voters under 30 — a political earthquake after decades of Democrats dominating that group.
Young Americans are tired of open borders, inflation, and chaos. They may not love Trump's tweets, but they're voting Republican in numbers we haven't seen in half a century.
Midterm Challenges Are Real
None of this means Republicans can get complacent. Historically, the party holding the White House loses an average of 26 House seats in midterms. With a razor-thin margin today, Republicans must fight for every district.
Sure, Democrats can cruise in their second straight Wisconsin Supreme Court election where they can argue that a conservative win would result in a 4-3 decision to reinstate an 1849 abortion ban even in case of rape and incest — but that will not be the issue in any congressional midterm.
The 70-30 issues in those races will be keeping men out of women's sports, supporting Voter ID and securing the border to stop fentanyl and Venezuelan gangs from killing people.
The old adage from my candidate schools was that people don't vote for a candidate, they vote against your opponent or for themselves. If your opponent supports allowing men in your daughters' locker rooms and gangs of illegal immigrants into your communities — they are going to vote for the other candidates even if they believe they are horrible people.
After Biden's 2020 win, he opened the border and his administration promoted the extreme transgender agenda, and his favorability cratered by 14 points in his first year (Gallup), twice the drop Trump has seen post-2024. Biden's political survival depended on being likable — and when that illusion shattered, so did his support.
Liberals want you to believe that if Trump's favorability numbers fall, it's over for conservatives. Wrong.
Favorability numbers didn't stop Trump in 2016. They didn't stop him in 2024. And the jury is out on if they stop conservatives in 2026.
If anything, the left's endless lawfare has backfired. Americans can smell a rigged system — and trying to bankrupt or jail the leading candidate only makes voters more determined to support him. Trump is no longer just a candidate; he's a symbol of fighting back against an out-of-control elite.
And when it's time to vote, that's what matters — along with how the economy is doing a year from now — not who sends the nicest tweets.
John Pudner is the President and Founder of freedomandfamilyaction.com, a nonprofit that drives conservative voter turnout through a church-doors-and-postcards strategy. Pudner developed this approach while leading faith-based outreach for the Bush 2000 campaign and refined it as head of www.wisconsinffc.com, a program credited by some with helping deliver Wisconsin's decisive Electoral College votes for Trump in 2024. Previously, Pudner ran Take Back Our Republic Action, the first organization to expose ActBlue's funneling of hundreds of millions of dollars in unverified donations to liberal causes — a report that was later retweeted by President Trump. Read more John Pudner Reports — Here.
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