President Donald Trump's approval rating fell sharply this week as some of the folks who voted for him in droves have begun to back away from the leader who has been plagued by controversy during his brief but rocky tenure in the White House, according to a new poll this week. The survey from Fox News found just 40 percent of voters approved of Trump's job performance, a 5 percentage point slide from where it stood in the same poll last month. Disapproval also rose 5 percentage points to 53 percent.
"Some of the drop in approval comes from Republicans," noted Fox News in its write-up of the survey. In their poll, Trump's support among GOP voters had hovered between 84 percent and 87 percent during his tenure in the White House, but in the new survey that fell to 81 percent. Fifty-three percent of white voters without a college degree approved of the job Trump has done, a decrease of 9 percentage points in just one month.
White voters overall were split on Trump, with 48 percent approving of his job performance and 48 percent disapproving, according to the Fox News poll. In the election, 66 percent of whites without college degree and 57 percent of whites overall voted for Trump, according to CNN's exit polls.
A few potential issues white working class voters might have with the Trump presidency: 44 percent don't support the Republican health care bill backed by the former reality TV star and 50 percent thought he wouldn't actually get a wall built along the southern border of the U.S., one of his key promises during the campaign.
According to the Fox News poll, voters overall were skeptical of Trump's firing of former FBI Director James Comey. By a margin of 60 percent to 29 percent, voters believed the president got rid of Comey for self-serving reasons—namely the FBI's investigation into his administration's potential ties with Russia—versus firing him for harming the bureau.
The Fox News poll interviewed 1,011 registered voters through telephone calls from May 21 through May 23. It had a margin of error of 3 percentage points for the full sample.
The latest poll isn't the first to find white working class voters and Republicans have begun to jump off the Trump train just four months into its planned four-year trip. A Reuters/Ipsos poll last week found disapproval of Trump among Republicans jumped 7 percentage points to 23 percent. A Quinnipiac University survey this month found support among whites without a college degree had dropped 10 percentage points in just one month to 47 percent.
