Bulwark founder Sarah Longwell, who regularly conducts surveys and focus groups with Trump supporters, said her latest findings show many of Donald Trump’s 2024 voters giving him a low-C grade for his first year.

The survey indicates that some Trump voters are willing to criticize his performance sharply, while still stopping short of saying they made the wrong choice. That distinction is politically important because dissatisfaction inside a party’s own coalition does not automatically translate into defection; it can also show up as lower enthusiasm, reluctance to defend a candidate, or frustration with specific policies. Critics cited in the discussion said a low-average assessment may not be enough to motivate Republicans to turn out and help the party avoid what they described as a predicted November downturn.

Longwell joined Amy Walter, editor-in-chief of the Cook Political Report, to discuss Trump-voting respondents in the Bulwark’s latest survey. The exchange centered on how voters who backed Trump describe his performance in their own words, a format that can capture intensity and reasoning even when it does not, by itself, establish how widely those views are held across the full electorate.

“The thing that made me give him a C-minus is the promises that he made that from day one, he would lower prices and instead it's the opposite,” one Trump voter said. “Six rolls of paper towels used to be like $6.99. Now they're like $19. So, I just feel that some things he didn't keep his promise and some things he just did wrong.”

The same voter said her daughter works for a government agency where “one day 300 people got fired that morning. Their laptops got taken away and they were just let go.”

“He is holding grudges against people, real or imagined, about people that worked for him before or people that he thought stole the election. I feel like he just can't get over this. And no proof that they really did anything wrong,” the voter said, referring to Trump’s “ridiculous lawsuits that cost us money.”

She also criticized Trump’s demeanor and raised concerns about the next election.

“I feel like he's falling asleep half the time,” she said, while also criticizing what she described as Trump’s attempt to rig the election. “I'm very concerned about the next election, what he's trying to do. I feel like if he was so confident in himself, why are you worried about it? I think he realizes there's a lot of dissatisfaction right now with him.”

Despite those criticisms, she still gave Trump a “C-minus.”

Another Trump voter assigned the president a “C,” citing what she described as damage to the nation’s public safety net.

“There's people that are able-bodied that should be working, that shouldn't be on Medicaid. I get that. But what's going to happen is people that need it are going to have to be filling out paperwork twice a year. A lot of them won't do it,” the woman said. “I just knew that from my own being in the industry. We're being told as insurance brokers that we could very well see a lot of hospitals close, lose funding because of this, so I feel like the Republican current administration does not care about poor people. I feel like it's just about being wealthy.”

A third voter also offered harsh criticism of Trump’s performance, but likewise did not give him an “F.”

“Unless things really turn around, I'm like ... This is embarrassing. I don't really have like a lot of high standards for — you know, I don't want to talk show host. I don't want someone that's plastic and with all these platitudes, but this is just, it's enough,” she said. “… That's why I gave him a C-minus. There's not even a good economy to show for it. At least when people have money, I think when the economy is decent, everything else falls into place.”

Longwell said she was surprised that, given the intensity of the criticism from Trump’s own voters, more respondents were not assigning him “F” grades. Walter said Trump voters are unlikely to give failing marks in the current polarized environment.

“Well, I think about this a lot, too, in the sense of just looking back at partisanship is just so much more intense now than it was back in 2006,” Walter said, arguing that Trump will not reach George W. Bush-level disapproval because Republicans will not say that to pollsters.

“I think it's really right that polarization and also living in a world where people don't like to admit that they were wrong,” Longwell said. “Nobody wants to say they changed their mind.”