On the menu: Tire-d of class warfare; Dems ready for ugly primary season; Dems shrug at a Harris statewide run; Stefanik for governor?; Moose on the loose

It’s no surprise to anyone that President Trump’s approval ratings have been sinking since his trade war kicked off. Just Google “Trump approval ratings” and you will be awash in coverage of the steep decline for Trump as voters soured on Trump’s handling of the economy, once his strongest suit.

Yes, but …

The typical story of a new presidency is that a honeymoon phase lasts through, say, August of the first year before gravity sets in. That was the case for former President Biden and for Trump in his first term.

But Trump is in a different spot than his modern predecessors. As a return visitor to the Oval Office, there’s a lot less fluidity in the public opinion about the commander in chief. It is notable that Trump is increasingly unpopular, but maybe not surprising given that he was already the best-known figure in American public life in decades when he took the oath of office the second time.

When Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton married for the second time, the honeymoon was shorter too. And so it goes for America’s on-again-off-again romance with Donald Trump.

Trump started at a higher register than he did in 2017, with an average approval in high-quality national polls of nearly 48 percent at the end of January, and an average disapproval of about 44 percent for a net score of 3.4 points to the good side. That was about 3 points better than it had been eight years ago.

Today, Trump is underwater by 8 points, with about 44 percent approving and about 52 percent disapproving. That 11-point swing is remarkable by the standard of the typical January-August decline, but if we think of Trump not as a new president but a second-termer, it’s perhaps not so surprising that gravity would assert itself within the first 100 days.

Nor do we have to wonder what is primarily driving the decline. Trump’s overall number matches pretty closely his number on his handling of the economy, as in the latest CNBC poll that finds 44 percent overall approval and 43 percent approval for his handling of the economy. When you tank in what was once your strongest area, the top number is very likely to be dragged down.

So, it’s a pretty straightforward story. The second-term president who had developed a strong brand on economic performance undertakes a program of economic pain he promises will deliver long-term gain. If the neighborhood pizza place your family had been visiting every week started putting kale in the crust, you’d expect to see some customer dissatisfaction.

What we wondered, though, was what was happening with the voters that Republicans nabbed from Democrats in the big swing from 2020 to 2024.

Republicans have cheered and Democrats have mourned the big changes among younger male voters, particularly non-white men. If you were looking for one dominant idea in conventional wisdom about the 2024 election, it’s the bro vote. Arguably the most effective ad of the 2024 campaign was the Trump campaign’s blast against Kamala Harris for supporting transgender initiatives — an ad that dominated airwaves around sports broadcasts in the fall.

The bro vote has had Democrats looking for their own Joe Rogan and Republicans extolling the masculine virtues of everything from government spending cuts to taxes on imported goods.

So how’s it going now?

We don’t have a ton of high-quality data on subgroups so early in the term, but what we do have suggests that Trump is leaking support with the bros, but that the declines among men overall are approaching levels of serious concern for Republicans.

According to the pollsters at Echelon Insights, Trump’s support among younger voters, those ages 18 to........

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