President Trump’s support among America’s union workers has dropped 15 points in just a year, according to a Reuters–Ipsos poll released Friday.
The president enjoyed an all-time high of more than 60 percent support among union workers in the same poll last March, an unusually strong number for a Republican.
But his support among the demographic has dropped steadily nearly every month since then, Reuters reports, despite his pursuit of trade tariffs that labor unions have traditionally supported.
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Trump’s support among union workers now sits at 47 percent, down from its all-time high of 62 percent, according to the poll. April numbers have not yet been released.
A graph released by Reuters notes that Trump tended to win union supporters in areas of the country, such as the Southwest and the Carolinas, where union workers make up a smaller percentage of the overall workforce.
Democrats are working hard to win back union voters, a bloc that has typically been a stronghold for them, ahead of the 2018 midterm elections. Party strategists are hoping to avoid a repeat of 2016, which saw many union workers flipping from supporting President Obama just four years earlier to supporting Trump.
“There was a collapse of union support,” said former AFL-CIO political director Steve Rosenthal.
Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton won 8 percent more of the union vote than Trump in 2016, a victory that was still a significant double-digit drop in support from unions’ support for Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012.
Her husband, former President Bill Clinton, won a 30-point advantage among union households in 1992 during his successful run for president.
The Reuters–Ipsos poll contacts 902–1,558 union members every month, and carries a margin of error of 3–4 percentage points for union member questions.