Tom Dawe of Kent, Ohio voted for Donald Trump last year for a familiar reason: He didn’t feel he could vote for Hillary Clinton. But now that he has seen Trump in action, Dawe, 61, feels he made a mistake.

Trump has endorsed a Senate healthcare plan that, if enacted, would cut back Medicaid benefits for Dawe’s wife, Catherine. And Dawe, the retired manager of print operations for a container company, feels that instead of strengthening America’s standing around the world, Trump’s leadership style has weakened it. “If I knew what I know now, I wouldn’t have voted for him, because I think he’s a quack,” Dawe says. “His talk about how everybody was going to prosper—I fell for it.”

Donald Trump’s approval rating has remained low but steady at around 40% during his embattled presidency. But new research by Yahoo Finance has identified a key subset of Trump voters who are turned off by his actions as president, including some who would change their votes if they could. In a Yahoo Finance online survey conducted in late June, 12.6% of Trump voters said they were dissatisfied with his performance as president, and 11.1% said they wouldn’t vote for him again. That’s a much larger portion than Trump’s margin of victory in key states that put him over the top last November, including Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan and Wisconsin—which Trump won by less than 2% of the vote. The poll results suggest Trump has lost the voters who provided his margin of victory in 2016—and would be needed again were he to run for reelection in 2020.

Trump voter Tom Dawe of Kent, Ohio: “If I knew what I know now, I wouldn’t have voted for him, because I think he’s a quack.” More

The Yahoo Finance survey included 25,271 people who said they voted for Trump for president. About 83% of them said they were satisfied with Trump’s performance so far, and 73% said they felt they’d be helped by policies Trump has backed as president. So Trump’s so-called base remains more or less intact. But a meaningful minority of Trump voters said they’d be hurt by his healthcare policy, along with a rollback of environmental regulations, changes to trade agreements, tax cuts perceived to help the wealthy more than the middle class, and other Trump priorities. (See the full survey results.)

Source: Yahoo Finance online survey conducted via Survey Monkey. More

Trump voters have confounded pundits who consider them oblivious to Trump policies that would leave some of his own supporters worse off. But in follow-up interviews with Trump regretters, we found thoughtful voters very aware of the likely impact Trump’s policies would have on them. Some are disappointed that Trump didn’t moderate his combative views and behavior once elected. Others feel he has abandoned campaign promises while obsessing over negative news coverage. And some simply feel they made a mistake. Here are a few vignettes on topics that came up most frequently in interviews with Trump regretters.

Competence. Trump impressed many voters with his success as a businessman, which they hoped would translate into success as a political leader. For many, it hasn’t. “I expected competence,” says Fred Wedel, 74, a retired petroleum engineer who lives outside Sacramento. “The only thing I’ve seen is gross incompetence. It started his first week in office, when he put out the immigration edict. I’m not a lawyer, but I read it and I knew it’s unconstitutional. I realized, he may know how to run his Trump business but he has no clue how to run a government.”

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