A new poll commissioned by NBC News finds that 71% of Republican voters now identify with President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement—a massive jump from the 40% who identified as MAGA a little over a year ago.
Trump is, unsurprisingly, crowing about the poll. “A just out NBC Poll says that MAGA is gaining tremendous support. I am not, at all, surprised!!!” he wrote in a Truth Social post.
Of course, Trump is exaggerating the poll’s results, suggesting in his Truth Social post that the entire country is becoming MAGA—and not primarily Republicans, as NBC’s poll found.
“All of that shift is coming from Republicans,” Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster who helped conduct NBC’s poll, told the outlet.
Ultimately, the fact that Trump’s MAGA movement is steadily taking over more of the Republican Party could be a major problem for the GOP in upcoming elections. While Republican voters may support Trump, voters more broadly—including independents—do not.
A new poll by YouGov for the University of Massachusetts at Amherst found just 31% of independents support Trump. A Quinnipiac University poll from last week had similar findings, with just 36% of independents approving of the way Trump is handling his job as president, compared with 58% who disapprove. What’s more, 51% of those independents in Quinnipiac’s survey “strongly disapprove” of Trump.
Of course, in swing districts, Republicans need to win over independents and possibly even some Democratic voters to get elected. Since the party has been taken over by MAGA, Republican candidates now have to embrace Trump and his movement to win primaries. And that could hurt them in a general election.
In fact, this dilemma has been a problem for Republicans in the past.
For example, in the 2024 election, MAGA Republican Joe Kent—an election-denying white nationalist now in Trump’s administration—lost a House race in Washington State in 2024 to Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, even though Trump carried the district.
Kent was the GOP nominee after he ousted a normie Republican, Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, who had voted to impeach Trump for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
And in 2022, MAGA hurt Republicans in the midterms, with Trump’s hand-picked candidates losing races Republicans should have won in a typical midterm year when a Democrat was in the White House.
Trump’s picks sank Republicans’ chances at holding the Senate that year, with nominees Mehmet Oz, Blake Masters, and Herschel Walker losing winnable Senate races in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia, respectively.
What’s more, the MAGA candidates whom Trump endorsed in competitive House seats lost as well. That includes Trump superfan J.R. Majewski, who lost in Ohio’s Republican-leaning 9th District, as well as former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who lost in Alaska’s at-large House seat.
Now, in 2025, even fairly normal Republicans are defending and embracing Trump, which will make it hard for them to shy away from him and the MAGA movement in the midterms. Indeed, since Trump was sworn in in January, Republicans have lost winnable state-legislative special elections and severely underperformed in a pair of House races in Trump country—a sign the backlash to Trump is already here.
Polling shows that non-MAGA Republican Susan Collins, a senator in Maine, is caught between a rock and a hard place. Collins is running for reelection in a state Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris won in 2024. But her penchant for caving to Trump on certain issues, while standing up to him on things like tariffs, has made her unpopular with both Democrats and Republicans.
From a Public Policy Polling survey in March:
The feeling from both sides that Collins is letting them down leads to a rare poll finding in these polarized times where voters across the aisle agree about something. Asked whether they consider Collins to be a strong or weak leader majorities of both Harris (19/66) and Trump (28/51) voters call her weak. Overall just 24% characterize her as strong with 59% calling her weak.
These findings are putting Collins in a position where she could be vulnerable next year both in a Republican primary and the general election. 69% of Trump voters think Collins is ‘too liberal,’ presumably leaving her vulnerable to a challenge from someone to her right. But 69% of Harris voters think she’s ’too conservative,’ suggesting she may also struggle to win the sort of crossover support from Democratic leaning voters that’s fueled her success in the past.
As Collins would say, all signs say Republicans should be very “concerned” about elections over the next two years.
