GOP voters have been gaslit and hoodwinked. Yet they still believe Trump.

Republicans believe the complete opposite of easily observable facts, according to new research.

By Jeff Nesbit

The most comprehensive post-mortem on the 2024 presidential elections—by Blue Rose Research, a leading Democratic polling firm that collected 26 million responses from voters of all ages, demographics and party affiliation in 2024—has been making the rounds of podcasts, newsletters and political media recently.

Donald Trump won among young white men, and also narrowly won support from 18-year-old non-white men. AP’s vote cast analysis showed that Trump won 47% of the 18–29-year-old vote—an 11-point jump from 2020. There was also an unprecedented 23-point gender gap among voters under 30, with young men in this group significantly more likely to support Trump than young women. David Shor, a founder of Blue Rose, said this dramatic conservative shift among Gen Z voters was what shocked him most from the data.

This last point is especially important. Unfortunately for Democrats, there are more under-educated voters than college-educated voters in America. Voters without a bachelor’s degree outnumber those with one in the electorate by 57% to 43%. Which helps explain why Trump is trying to abolish the Department of Education and has set out to destroy elite colleges by eviscerating federal research that supports hundreds of institutions of higher education.

But what is most shocking (and hiding in plain sight in the Blue Rose research findings) is this simple, awful, incomprehensible fact: Republican voters who sent Donald Trump back to power might be the most hoodwinked, gaslit, deceived and lied to group of voters in U.S. history.

Many of the biggest issues that voters say are critically important to them—and where they also trust Trump’s GOP more than the Democrats—are, in fact, the very types of issues that the Democratic Party fights to protect and expand. On the issues that are most important to them, GOP voters are quite simply living in an alternate reality with little or no basis in fact.

Take Social Security. Voters say Social Security is one of the most important issues to them. It’s right up there with the cost of living, inflation and the economy as issues that voters say they really, really care about. Tens of millions of Trump voters receive Social Security checks. They do not want anyone to do anything, ever, to harm the social safety net program. One reason for this widespread concern is that more than half of America lives paycheck to paycheck.

And yet, voters trust Trump and the GOP more than Democrats on Social Security, Blue Rose found. The Republican Party has spent years trying to dismantle the Social Security program and has now turned Elon Musk and his DOGE team loose to destroy both the social safety net program and the agency that administers it. Despite this observable fact, voters say they trust Trump and the GOP more than Democrats to protect and preserve Social Security.

That is absurd and insane on its face. Democrats have fought for years to keep the Social Security program strong. The GOP has tried budget tricks, privatization end runs and, now, the Musk-DOGE effort to simply destroy the federal agency that administers Social Security in order to break the trust the program clearly has with the American people.

Yet Republican voters believe the complete opposite of this easily observable set of facts, according to the Blue Rose research.

Why would Republican voters trust Trump’s White House to protect their Social Security benefits—especially when they can see with their own eyes that Trump, Musk and the DOGE team are trying to blow up Social Security by hunting for non-existing fraud, rewriting code inside the agency’s data system and firing thousands of agency personnel to cause immense harm to the agency responsible for administering the social safety net program?

The reason is that these voters simply are not seeing this happen in real time. They only believe what they hear on Fox News and in their immediate media ecosystem. And, in that media ecosystem, Trump loves Social Security while his Musk-DOGE team dismantles it. And the GOP voters then say they trust the GOP more than Democrats to protect Social Security.

Then there’s Medicaid and core anti-poverty programs such as SNAP, EITC, TANF, SSI, Head Start and child care support that Democrats have consistently fought to protect and expand while the GOP attacks these big, core anti-poverty programs at every turn.

Voters say that anti-poverty programs are very important to them—nearly as important as Social Security, civil liberties, drug abuse prevention and bipartisanship. But, despite the observable fact that the GOP consistently tries to reduce or dismantle anti-poverty programs, voters say they believe Trump and the GOP as much or more than Democrats.

Which, again, is absurd on its face.

The same gaslighting goes on in other areas that voters say are important to them. For instance, voters trust Trump and the GOP more than Democrats on protecting our civil liberties. Meanwhile, Trump’s White House is threatening to ignore the rule of law that undergirds each and every one of those civil liberties that Democrats have championed. Quite simply, Trump has launched the most systemic and aggressive assault on human rights in U.S. history.

Meanwhile, voters say they trust Trump’s GOP more on efforts to fight drug abuse and addiction, despite the easily observable fact that President Joe Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services created, funded, and expanded dozens of drug abuse and addiction programs and multiple mental health and addiction counseling programs (that Trump’s Health and Human Services is also trying to kill).

Voters even say they trust Trump’s GOP more than the Democrats on the willingness to find common ground surrounding big political divisions—even though Trump is literally threatening to jail his political enemies and is promising to block federal aid and assistance to blue states and Democratic congressional districts while rewarding his GOP political allies.

Who in their right mind would think that Trump—who denounces and threatens Democrats from his bully pulpit on a daily basis—is more trustworthy when it comes to reaching across the political aisle? Well, American voters do, according to the Blue Rose findings.

The Democratic Party brand is the lowest it’s been for decades. What the Blue Rose and other 2024 post-mortems clearly show is that Democrats have a long, hard, tough road ahead while Trump’s GOP marches along its merry, gaslighting way.

Jeff Nesbit was the public affairs chief for five Cabinet departments or agencies under four presidents.

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