How many Trump voters regret their votes?

If you’re on social media these days, you might have noticed a growing volume of posts about Trump supporters who, to paraphrase, effed around and found out.

Anecdotes abound about those voters - particularly people affected by President Donald Trump’s cuts to federal programs and firings of government workers - apparently expressing surprise at his actions and even regret for their votes. The Trump critics highlighting them aren’t exactly sympathetic.

And it’s not just on social media. A Wall Street Journal report last week pointed to some similar examples of Trump voter regret. An anti-Trump conservative activist says it’s an increasingly real phenomenon in her focus groups. An Arizona focus group reported on by Axios earlier this month, conversely, found swing voters who voted for Trump gave him a unanimous thumbs-up.

But these are all anecdotes - including some on social media that haven’t been verified.

So what’s the real story here? And how widespread might this Trump voter regret actually be?

The short answer is that polls suggest it’s not a major phenomenon - even though some discontent is brewing and Trump’s overall numbers have declined.

Two recent polls have gotten at this question rather directly and found that a pretty unremarkable number of Trump supporters are expressing measures of regret.

A Washington Post-Ipsos poll conducted Feb. 13 through 18 found that just 5 percent of voters who said they cast ballots for Trump oppose what he has done since taking office, including just 1 percent who “strongly” oppose it.

That’s still 1 in 20 Trump voters who say they don’t like what they voted for. But the margin of error means it could be even more negligible.

And more to the point: That 5 percent is a pretty unremarkable number when you consider that nearly as many people who voted for Kamala Harris - 4 percent - said they support what Trump has done. Both are pretty normal levels of partisan crossover.

The other poll to dig into this question recently came from CNN. It was conducted at much the same time - Feb. 13 through 17 - and the findings were similar.

It asked both whether people felt that Trump’s actions were “unexpected” and whether they felt that was a good or bad thing. Just 5 percent of self-described Trump voters said Trump’s actions were unexpected and that was a bad thing.

That’s a loose approximation of the kind of voter regret we’re talking about, and it was far from prevalent. And again, we see similar levels of crossover in reverse, with about as many Harris voters saying Trump’s actions were good as Trump voters saying his actions were bad.

All told, these and other polls suggest disapproval of Trump among Trump voters is in the mid-single digits.

Which brings us to the buts.

While these data are more quantitative than focus groups and are certainly more reliable than social media anecdotes, they do carry limitations.

The big limitation is the margins of error. Because we’re talking about small percentages of a subgroup of voters (i.e. Trump supporters), we don’t know whether the real numbers are closer to 10 percent or closer to zero. The fact that pretty much all the polling puts the number around the mid-single digits suggests that’s probably pretty accurate, but we just don’t know.

The other big limitation is that these polls rely on people self-reporting whom they voted for in 2024. People aren’t always great at doing that, either because they forget or because they misreport it.

In this case, at least, the vote is relatively recent, and it’s unlikely that people forgot. But it can’t be ruled out that people aren’t accurately sharing this information. It would seem plausible that some people who voted for Trump but have decided they don’t like what he’s doing would not want to cop to that vote.

All of that being said, this is a dynamic situation full of unorthodox and drastic Trump actions. And there are clear signs that what Trump is doing could alienate significant portions of his voter base.

To wit:

The Post-Ipsos poll found around one-quarter of self-described Trump voters disapprove of his policies on ending birthright citizenship, his decision to roll back temporary legal status for refugees, and his proposed tariffs on Canada and Mexico. A majority of Republicans (52 percent) said those tariffs would increase prices. And 63 percent oppose his pardons of violent Jan. 6 defendants.

Government cuts spearheaded by Elon Musk appear to be a looming problem. In both the Post-Ipsos and CNN polls, 11 percent of Trump voters said they dislike Musk’s involvement in the administration. An Economist-YouGov poll shows just 29 percent of Trump voters want Musk to have “a lot” of influence in the administration (which he clearly does). And the Post poll shows just 65 percent say they approve of Musk shutting down federal government programs. (Many say they’re undecided, apparently reserving judgment.)

13 percent of Trump voters say Trump has gone “beyond his level of authority” as president, according to the Post poll.

Around 1 in 10 in the CNN and YouGov polls say Trump has gone “too far” with his presidential powers and in cutting government programs.

And 13 percent of Trump voters in the CNN poll say they would prefer to see less of Trump.

Trump has indeed taken lots of drastic actions that invite his voters to dislike what they’re seeing.

Whether those actions are ultimately dealbreakers remains to be seen. But thus far, they don’t appear to have invited large-scale regret.