Trump Won Medicaid Recipients in 2024

President Donald Trump and some other Republican leaders have forcefully reiterated that the GOP will not cut Medicaid benefits to help pay for an extension of the party’s 2017 tax cuts, and our data helps explain why: Recipients of the program helped carry the president to his first popular-vote victory last November.

Data from Morning Consult’s Audience platform shows 49% of Medicaid recipients who voted in 2024 backed Trump, compared with 47% who supported Harris. By comparison, our data from 2021 shows Biden won the group by 19 percentage points in 2020 — marking a 21-percentage-point swing toward Trump over four years. 

Speaking on his podcast earlier this month, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon said “a lot of MAGAs are on Medicaid,” tacitly urging the GOP to tread carefully with the program.

To Bannon’s point, 18% of Trump voters said they use the federal insurance program designed to provide health coverage for low-income people — similar to the share of Harris voters who said the same.

The bottom line

The Republican budget passed this week directs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees Medicaid and Medicare, to find at least $880 billion in cuts. But notably, in echoing Trump’s previous comments on the subject, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told CNN that Medicaid funding will not be touched, though he cracked the door open to “go into those programs and carve out the fraud, waste and abuse, and find efficiencies.” 

What that audit ends up amounting to in practice remains an open question, but if their response to the House GOP budget’s passage is any indication, Democrats will spend lots of time, energy and advertising dollars to try to make sure the public interprets any changes to the program as cuts.

Maintaining funding for Medicaid, as well as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and other entitlement programs, has widespread public support, including among Republican voters, the bulk of whom would not slash or end their appropriations. This is true among white and lower-income voters who the GOP has traditionally relied upon, as well as Black and younger voters whose subtle shifts away from the Democratic Party helped to fuel Trump’s decisive victory last year.

While voters have proved willing to buck their self-interest in the past, as our data makes clear, any tinkering with Medicaid risks threatening the longer-term viability of the GOP’s new electoral coalition after recent improvements on gauges of empathy for everyday Americans.