Ex-GOP congressman flags 'five-alarm fire' showing Trump's base is dumping him

As President Donald Trump’s support continues to crater one year into his second term, new polling shows that Trump’s support among one key voter bloc has absolutely collapsed, prompting MS NOW’s Joe Scarborough to warn Republicans Friday that they’re facing a “five-alarm fire.”

That key voter bloc in non-college-educated voters, a group that voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2024 and helped propel him to the White House a second time. New polling flagged by CNN, however, shows that Trump is now “underwater by nine points” with non-college voters, a staggering 23-point fall from last year.

“When you start seeing non-college voter support for Donald Trump and Republicans cratering, that's the five-alarm fire,” Scarborough, who previously represented Florida in Congress as a Republican from 1995 to 2001, said on MS NOW’s “Morning Joe” on Friday.

Over the past several years, Democrats have lost support among non-college voters, with former President Joe Biden sinking by 10% with the key voter bloc from 2020 to 2024, whereas Trump made gains with the group by 2% during that same time period. That trend appears to have all but reversed, however, in recent months, with Trump’s policies apparently not sitting well with non-college voters.

“I connect this to the [Jeffrey] Epstein class, [and I] also connect this to calling affordability a 'hoax',” Scarborough said.

“Many, many of these voters are the same voters that can't afford their rent, can't afford their health care, can't afford to send their kids to college, can't afford the things that they thought they were going to be able to afford to pursue the American dream!”

Jennifer Palmieri, a former White House communications director in the Obama administration, concurred that Trump’s catering of support among non-college voters was largely self-inflicted, but argued that “something larger” was also happening with lower-income voters.

“Non-college voters have been moving to Republicans for a while now, and if they see that there is underneath their belief that Donald Trump and Republicans were on their side, and that the evidence is very much to the contrary… this does not go unnoticed among working-class voters,” Palmieri said, appearing alongside Scarborough on “Morning Joe” Friday.

“I think that it's not just bad news for the Trump administration, it suggests something larger is collapsing in how they're looking at the two parties.”