Donald Trump is now underwater even in Greater Appalachia, the last region where his support had still looked durable. G. Elliott Morris’s updated model, built from a May 18-19 Strength in Numbers/Verasight poll, puts Trump at 42.8% approval there — enough to make his final stronghold no longer a place of net strength.
The new estimates matter now because they do more than mark a single bad poll. Morris used surveys of 12,000 individuals and precinct-level demographic data to build inferential estimates of Trump’s approval across 2,400 Public Use Microdata Areas, covering roughly 100,000 adults. The result is a sharper regional map of how far Trump’s standing has slipped since January, and the shift is broad: his federation-wide support has fallen from minus 18 percent to minus 23 percent since then.
That weakness shows up in places that once formed the backbone of his coalition. Trump is at 38.1% approval in the Deep South and 38.5% in the Far West, with under 35% approval in the Midlands and 22.3% approval in Hawaii. He won the Far West and Deep South by double digits in the 2024 presidential election, which makes the current numbers harder to dismiss as simple regional noise.
There is still a catch in the map Morris built. Trump was already underwater across most of the Deep South and throughout the Lower Rio Grande Valley in El Norte in the earlier January estimates, so the new poll does not show a sudden collapse everywhere at once. It shows something more telling: the edges of his strongest terrain were already fraying, and the May 18-19 update now puts the last holdout, Greater Appalachia, below water too.
The open question is no longer whether Trump has lost ground in the regions that powered his 2024 victory. It is how much more of that map can erode before the numbers stop looking like regional variation and start reading as a broader national decline.
For readers comparing the latest regional movement in Trump approval, the updated estimates sit alongside a broader look at GOP weakness in Trump Approval Rating By State Softens as GOP Support Slips on Economy.
