Outside the Morgan County fair in McConnelsville, in a rural swath of
Ohio that fervently backed U.S. President Donald Trump in last year’s election,
ticket seller
John Wilson quietly counts off a handful of disappointments with
the man he helped elect.
The 70-year-old retired banker said he is unhappy with
infighting and turnover in the White House. He does not like Trump’s penchant
for travelling to his personal golf resorts.
He wishes the president would do
more to fix the healthcare system, and he worries that Trump might back down
from his promise to force illegal immigrants out of the country.
“Every president makes mistakes,” Wilson said. “But if you add one on top
of one, on top of another one, on top of another, there’s just a limit.” Trump,
who inspired millions of supporters last year in places like Morgan County, has
been losing his grip on rural America.
According to the Ipsos daily tracking
poll, the Republican president’s popularity is eroding in small towns and rural
communities where 15 percent of the country’s population lives. The poll of more
than 15,000 adults in “non-metro” areas shows that they are now as likely to
disapprove of Trump as they are to approve of him.
In September, 47 percent of
people in non-metro areas approved of Trump while 47 percent disapproved. That
is down from Trump’s first four weeks in office, when 55 percent said they
approved of the president while 39 percent disapproved.
The poll found that
Trump has lost support in rural areas among men, whites and people who never
went to college. He lost support with rural Republicans and rural voters who
supported him on Election Day.
And while Trump still gets relatively high marks
in the poll for his handling of the economy and national security, rural
Americans are increasingly unhappy with Trump’s record on immigration, a
central part of his presidential campaign.
Forty-seven percent of rural
Americans said in September they approved of the president’s handling of
immigration, down from 56 percent during his first month in office. Poll
respondents who were interviewed by Reuters gave different reasons for their
dissatisfaction with the president on immigration.
A few said they are tired of
waiting for Trump to make good on his promise to build a wall along America’s
southern border, while others said they were uncomfortable with his
administration’s efforts to restrict travel into the United States.
“There
should be some sort of compromise between a free flow of people over the border
and something that’s more controlled,” said Drew Carlson, 19, of Warrensburg,
Missouri, who took the poll. But Trump’s “constant fixation on deportation is a
little bit unsettling to me.” The Trump administration would not comment about
the Reuters/Ipsos poll.
(For a graphic depicting poll results, To be sure,
Trump is still much more popular in rural America than he is elsewhere. Since
he took office, “I like him less, but I support him more,” said Robert Cody,
87, a retired chemical engineer from Bartlesville, Oklahoma who took the poll.
Cody said that Trump may rankle some people with the way he talks and tweets,
but it is a small price to pay for a president who will fight to strip away
government regulations and strengthen the border.
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