Even before becoming President, Donald Trump was already one of the most unpopular person to ever run for President under the banner of one of the major parties. By that same token, Republicans were also already reaching historic levels of public disdain. Since the beginning of the Trump Administration last year, neither Trump nor the Republicans have done much to endear themselves to the American people. On the contrary, since inauguration an unrelenting stream of awful policies, scandals, and downright vindictive behavior has flowed from Congress and the White House.

So one year into the Administration, I wanted to know exactly how Trump was faring in the court of public opinion. Where is Trump facing his most intense opposition? How well is Trump’s supposedly unflappable support among working class voters actually holding up? How’s Trump doing with the protest voters that helped put him in office, directly and and indirectly? Where is Trump holding onto his support? How Trump is doing with voters across all groups?

To answer these questions, I tracked how Trump’s approval ratings have changed among various demographic groups. First I compiled polling data from a series of Morning Consult polls conducted bi-monthly in the period between Trump’s inauguration and last weekend. These polls provided a demographic breakdown of Trump’s support based on age, ethnicity, gender, income, partisan lead, past voting behavior, policy priorities, and various factors. From that, I calculated both Trump’s net approval rating, as well as a weighted approval rating taking into account the intensity of approval/disapproval. To offset the high variability between polls, I also smoothed out the data to extrapolate a general trend for each group over time.

Doing this will hopefully give us some indication how we can expect the 2018 midterms to go, and understand where Trump is most vulnerable. A full breakdown of the polling data is available here.

Where Did Trump See His Strongest Opposition

Trump has experienced intense protests since even before his inauguration. While literal protests in the street have subsided somewhat, dissatisfaction has only mounted. So where is Trump facing his strongest opposition?

The most notable corner of the electorate where Trump has seen his strongest opposition has been voters who prioritize Women’s Issues. These voters have consistently given Trump a net approval rating below -40% throughout his first year. And while women’s issues doesn’t equate to the voting priorities of all women, the gender gap in voter attitudes is very real, with Women typically giving Trump a net approval rating 15%-20% lower than men. This partially helps explain part of why feminism has been such a prominent part of #theResistance. They were Trump’s strongest critics at the earliest date, and thus got in at the ground floor on messaging and organizing.

In terms of issues where Trump has lost the most support, Trump has done worst on healthcare, where he’s seen a 24% drop in net approval among voters prioritizing the issue. This makes sense, during the 2016 election Trump could appeal to Republicans with promises to repeal the Affordable Care Act while reassuring everyone else he wouldn’t degrade the quality of health care. However as the year rolled on the harsh realities of what repealing the ACA actually meant began to set in.

Trump has also seen a 22% drop in his net approval among voters prioritizing the economy. This is pretty surprising, consider that while Trump’s handling of the economy has been pretty bad, the economy itself has actually been going strong, at least so far. However, Trump’s approval numbers are not reflecting this.

Looking across ethnic groups, African Americans have naturally given the Trump Administration low mark’s Trump’s approval ratings among African Americans dropped off quickly in the early days of the Administration, hitting a low after Charlottesville, before bouncing back somewhat. In recent months his his net approval ratings among African Americans has tended to be in the range of -50% to -60%. This is to be expected African Americans have pretty consistently been the most reliably Democratic constituencies in the country, and with Trump’s own history of racism it would be highly unusual if the situation were otherwise.

Somewhat more interesting is the markedly low approval ratings Trump among people in the category of “other” ethnic groups, including voters who identify as South Asian, East Asian, Middle Easterners, and so forth. These voters have seen a decline in Trump’s net approval of 26%, a more dramatic drop in support for Trump than any other ethnic group. This is striking turnaround for a group that, not too long ago, was splitting its vote nearly evenly between Democrats and Republicans.

All these groups are helping to drive the opposition to Trump, and have been indispensable in the Democrat’s special election wins so far.

The Working Class And The Midwest

Trump’s electoral victory in the 2016 came largely thanks to his relatively strong showing among working class voters, particularly in the Midwest. And if you believe the more or less continuous stream of journalistic dispatches from Trump country, you probably believe that Trump’s support among working class middle Americans has been tenacious.

But by most indications, the truth is actually very much the opposite. By any measure Trump has been hemorrhaging support among working class voters. In fact, he’s been losing support among working class voters much faster than middle and upper class voters. If you go by income, Trump’s support has dropped precipitously among low income voters, and they consistently rate Trump worst out of any income group.

If measure working class status by educational status Trump’s absolute level of support looks better, which isn’t surprising considering that measuring working class status this way tends to skew the definition heavily towards older and rural populations.

But still his support among those with less than a college education has fallen off faster than it has among the highly educated.

A similar story has unfolded geographically. While at the beginning of his Presidency Trump’s approval ratings in the Midwest were similar to levels found in the Republican stronghold of the South, that support fell apart pretty quickly. The early months of the Trump administration saw a fairly precipitous drop in Trump’s support in the region, and currently, Trump tends to poll almost as badly in the Midwest as he does in the solidly Democratic Northeast.

And for the most part it doesn’t look like racial solidarity and “white identity politics” has done much to save Trump. He’s losing support among white voters about as quickly as he’s lost support among any other ethnic group.

None of this should be particularly surprising. Trump’s support among working class and Midwestern voters was always fairly brittle. He did have enthusiastic support from some corners, like rural white working class voters in the American midland. But taken as a whole, he didn’t do much better with either the working class or the Midwest than Romney had four years earlier. His relatively strong performance in both categories is far more attributable to a collapse in the Democratic vote in both groups. So it makes sense that his position would be tenuous.

The “Protest” Vote

Despite widespread doubts about his candidacy, in 2016 Trump ended up benefiting from what might be called a protest the protest vote. That is to say voters who were disappointed with the political status quo, working on the basis of “throw the bums out”, “screw ’em all”, or “I just want to shake things up”. This would include the much of the vaunted Obama-Trump voters who voted Democratic in 2012, voters who went third party, or those who simply abstained from the election.

The relative importance of any of these groups is debatable. The media, for its part, tends to focus on Obama-Trump voters over 3rd party voters and abstentions. My own sense is that Obama-Trump voters were relevant, but their importance is somewhat overstated. According to a post-election survey by the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), Trump netted something like 4 million voters that he had poached from Obama. That’s not irrelevant, but factoring the aging out of Romney voters and the Democratic advantage in first time voters, the actual impact of these voters on the margins may not have been all that great. Also, as a point of fact, Trump didn’t net that many voters period, it was instead Clinton who lost short in many key demographics. This points to abstentions and 3rd party voting being the bigger factor.

However, whatever the relative importance of Obama-Trump voters, third party voters, and abstentions may have been when taken individually, taken together they were undoubtedly crucial in 2016. So how’s Trump doing with the protest vote?

The short answer is “poorly”. For the long answer, let’s look at each group individually.

Third party voters are the easiest address, since they’re measured directly. Third party voters have always given Trump net negative approval ratings, starting from a net approval rating of -15% on his inauguration day. His approval ratings with 3rd party voters have only gotten worse from there. Moreover his approval ratings among third party voters has been dropping twice as fast as it has been with both Clinton voters and Trump voters. Whereas these groups have respectively seen Trump’s approval rating swing down by about 15%, among third party voters that support has dropped by over 30% to about -48% today.

Obama-Trump voters are a little more difficult to address, since the pollsters don’t identify directly. However the data we do have still allows us to make reasonable guesses.

First we can look at the difference between Trump’s approval rating with Clinton voters and Obama voters. Obama voters have been less negative on Trump overall, and we can assume that the difference is reflects Obama-Trump voters and 3rd party voters. The fact that Trump’s approval ratings have dropped among Obama voters faster than Clinton voters indicates that he’s losing support among Obama-Trump fairly quickly. Conversely, the fact that Trump’s approval ratings have declined among Romney voters more slowly suggests that his support among traditional Republican is much more steady, meaning that where he’s losing support it’s largely among non-traditional supporters, i.e. the Obama-Trump voters and others. Again, Trump is apparently losing support among Obama voters who switched parties pretty quickly.

How quickly? We can try to figure that out by using what we know. We know Trump’s approval ratings among Trump voters, Clinton Voters, Obama voters, Romney voters, as well as third party, and how approval ratings in each of those groups have shifted since January. Thanks to the earlier cited CCES we also know roughly how 2012 voters voted in 2016. Using these two pieces of information we can interpolate how much Trump’s approval ratings have shifted in each of these subgroups. Doing this produces an estimate that Trump’s approval ratings have swung about -25% among Obama-Trump voters, against of -19% among Obama-Clinton voters and -15% among Romney-Trump voters.

Is this correct? There are too many unknowns to say for certain, but the numbers need to look something like this in order to balance out. This would also be consistent with surveys which have looked at the approval ratings of Obama-Trump voters, which tended to find that their support was lower than more partisan Republican voters. So I do feel pretty confident in saying that whatever support Trump gained from defecting Democrats in 2016 has largely collapsed.

All this is to say that it looks like the voter disaffection that ended benefited Trump in 2016 is starting to work against him. This observation should be taken with a grain of salt, of course. Just because Trump is losing support among some voters, that doesn’t mean they’re lining up to support his opponents. But a good many of them probably will, and others will simply not vote for Trump.

Where Trump Is Holding Onto His Support

So far we’ve been largely been dismissive of the idea that Trump’s base of support has somehow remained impervious to any doubts about Trump. Virtually all groups have registered substantial declines in Trump’s approval ratings. Still, there are areas where Trump’s support has declined more slowly.

First, rural areas. While voter enthusiasm for Trump is greatly over stated he really did really bring out a substantial number of rural voters in 2016. and by most indications these voters haven’t been turned off by Trump to quite the same extent as the rest of the country.

Second, the South. Trump’s approval ratings in the South started well above the national average, and they’ve remained there by a substantial margin. Moreover, they’ve been slower to decline, with Trump’s net approval rating only declining at about half the rate of other parts of the country.

Both of these areas are, of course, typically Republican strongholds. Moreover, they’re both areas where Trump can be said to have legitimately had enthusiastic support. Whereas Trump’s relatively strong performance in the Midwest and the working class was almost entirely due to a collapse in the Democrat’s vote, Trump actually did gain a lot of votes in rural districts and across the upper South. So it shouldn’t be too surprising that Trump’s support has remained relative strong in those places. Presidents tend to retain more support from their partisan base, and many of the worst actions from the Trump Administration are, in fact, just Trump playing to his base with policies they basically wanted.

On the other hand, there are also parts of the Republican base where Trump has alienated quite a lot of people, but it looks like he’s done all the damage he’s going to. Namely, Trump did seriously turn off a lot of more affluent and highly educated Republicans in 2016, but it’s not clear he turned off that many more in 2017. Whatever Trump’s crass behavior and disdain for norms and institutions has done to turn off well-heeled suburbanites, it’s worth remembering that those voters are about as close to a traditional Republican constituency as you can get, and at some point he was bound to hit partisan bedrock. To some extent the slow decline in Trump’s support among high income and/or highly educated voters reflects that. Both groups started his administration unusually negative, however, since then support among both groups has declined slower than average.

Overall

So far we’ve talked about how Trump has done among particular group, but we should take a moment to ask how Trump is doing across all demographics.

Trump has lost support among virtually all group of voter whether you’re talking by gender, ethnicity, region, income, voting history, or top policy issue. This has been faster in some groups than others, but almost all groups have seen a drop in net approval somewhere in the range of 10%-30%.

The extent to which Trump has lost support, which was already historically low to begin with, is a little surprising. Trump has certainly done a lot of things to turn people off, but many of these should be invisible to most people. Many will take time to be fully felt, such as the efforts to sabotage the ACA. Others impact narrow groups of people severely but don’t effect most people directly, such as Trump’s deportation drive and efforts to undermine social programs. Many of the most damaging actions have been administrative moves that passed under the radar. Even the scandals the Administration finds itself in are sufficiently distant and ambiguous to most voters that he could weather them. Meanwhile Trump inherited a good economy, and there’s nothing like an unpopular foreign war or other obvious disaster going on to sap his popularity.

All this is to say, it’s not a given that Trump should be as unpopular as he is. So why is he? What I think it comes down to is the fact that the general public understanding of how the Trump administration operates has already largely been set, and it’s broadly negative. By this point, most people would take it as a given that the Trump’s actions are typically going to entail some level of corruption, impulsiveness, shoddiness, vindictiveness to the poor, dishonesty, discrimination, xenophobia and/or exacerbating wealth inequality.

Hence, people haven’t been directly affected by Trump’s Tax Bill yet, and they probably couldn’t fully say what it entails, but they know it’s probably going to benefit primarily the rich and wreck the budget. They might not see deportations or all the human rights abuses they entail, but they know they’re happening. And so on and so forth.

These expectations are constantly being reinforced by a steady stream of incidents, reports, and controversies that confirm them that they are in fact accurate. A more discipline administration might be able to mitigate this with effective messaging, but the administration is so bad about botching their own initiatives and drowning them out with other missteps that they largely don’t have a counter narrative.

This is all fairly typical. People often like to think of politics in terms of how certain things resonate with target demographics, but more often than not attitudes tend to shift together across groups, with only slight variations between them. That is to say, when politicians do well, they usually do well everywhere. And in Trump’s case this has happened both rapidly and pretty consistently in a downward direction.

My suspicion is that this Trump’s approval ratings haven’t hit rock bottom yet. Trump’s support may yet completely collapse if/when the economy falls apart or Robert Mueller’s investigation starts bringing in really big arrests or something to that effect. On the other hand, even if the Administration were to get its act together on messaging, it would likely be too late for them to change public perceptions too much. This isn’t a given, of course. Partisanship notwithstanding, people want to feel good about their President, so it may easier to gain back support than lose it. So it’s important for those opposing the Trump administration to keep the pressure up.