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Perhaps, but I genuinely believe that most Trump supporters will not blame his tariff policies for resulting economic damage. The stock market is fake anyway, the woke (((financiers))) are manipulating prices to make Trump look bad. Reports of inflation are either fake or price gouging by greedy businesses. Unemployment numbers are fake or just lazy people who don't want to work.
I think maybe you underestimate how normie a lot of these people are and how often they check their portfolios.
We're both guessing.
80% of voters don't vote in midterm primaries as compared to 63% in the 2024 general. Assuming that all of the primary voters did vote in the general, essentially 1/3 of the general election voters voted in the midterm primary. So within that slice of voters in Republican primaries, as long as Trumpists maintain 50% control, you can't win a primary. Even if the anti-Trump candidate would do better in the general, or even among R voters who don't show up, it doesn't matter because they'll lose the primary before any of those people get a vote.
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There’s certainly a never-say-die subset of true believers but I doubt that’s even the majority of the coalition that elected him in November. I think most people were voting against democrat incompetence on inflation and illegal immigration in that order.
If trumpflation ends up being even worse than Biden’s and comes with stagflation and layoffs to boot, I can easily see a new GOP coalition that unites around “Trump but minus tariffs”. And there’s a very clear and straightforward process to make that happen, just need the veto-proof majority in congress to take away tariff powers and let Trump do whatever else he wants
You're confusing units of analysis. We're not talking about the coalition that elected him in the presidential general election; they only need to be an effective majority of the Republican primary voters in the midterms. Which is a much smaller and more motivated subset. It doesn't even need to be a true majority, just a sufficient plurality that you'd need to run the table otherwise to win the primary.
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