Companies should be aware
G. Elliott Morris has a good piece today about a blind spot American companies have about the make-up of their customer base. (If you’re interested in this stuff I highly recommend his Substack. It’s worth the money and he’s building out something we are going to need now that the media is caving to MAGA.)
Last week, ABC/Disney canceled Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show after the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of television stations that carry the program. The backlash has been swift: As I pointed out Saturday morning, search interest for “Cancel Disney+” has hit an all-time high — even higher than the boycott movements from when Disney “went woke” in 2020-2022. The current Disney boycott is now 4x as large as any over the last 5 years, gauged by search interest:
This is not limited to internet posters and Google searchers; investors are worried too. Disney’s stock is down 2% over the last week, while the overall market is up nearly 1%.
This all intersects with a point I’ve been making in this newsletter for a while: many people fundamentally underestimate how unpopular Trump is. As the Disney episode illustrates, they do this at their own peril.
Compare Trump’s topline job approval (-11) to that of other recent presidents, and he stands out quite clearly (not in a good way):
And this is an even bigger problem: the intensity gap
He wonders why all these companies are capitulating considering the threat to their customer base. He hypothesizes:
From what I can tell, executives at these companies are making a simple statistical mistake that is imperiling their decision-making: They are assuming that all U.S. adults, in 2025, look like U.S. voters in 2024. Let’s do some quick math:
- 53%: Trump’s topline disapproval in our polling average today
- 48%: The percent of U.S. adults who “strongly disapprove” of Trump’s job as president.
- 49.8%: The share of the vote Trump won among voters in 2024
Now, you could say that since 49.8% is bigger than 48% — or, similarly, that Kamala Harris only won 48.3% of the vote in 2024 — then to keep the public on your side, you need to do whatever the 49.8% wants. But this ignores a crucial fourth statistic:
- 64.1%: The share of voting-eligible adults who turned out to vote in 2024
That’s right, not all adults voted in 2024. To calculate the share of adults who voted for Trump, you need to multiply the percentage of adults who voted by the percentage of people who voted for Trump:
- 64.1 * 0.498 = 31.9%
That gives us 32%. So:
- Under a third of American adults are Trump voters
- 53% of adults are Trump disapprovers — with 48% intensely opposed
It’s not hard to see how making decisions for the former, pissing off the latter, would be bad for business. Elections reward coalitions of voters, while markets respond to consumers — voters and non-voters — whose preferences show up not just on Election Day, but in audience ratings, subscription revenue, purchases (like trips to Disney World), etc. If a president is unpopular with the broader public (and not just the out-party), you should expect friction for brands, platforms, and legacy media that appear to bend toward him.
This is an excellent point. Looking at the election as a guide to your customer base is true folly. A whole lot of people don’t vote but they do buy your stuff. And a large majority of those people can’t stand Donald Trump.
He goes on to analyze the media companies specifically (he used to work for ABC so knows whereof he speaks) and believes that they just really don’t understand the modern news ecosystem, their place in it or how the audience has accepted the “brand” that says facts have a liberal bias. He’s got a point although I would suggest this was a very long term right wing project that was begun long before Rush Limbaugh or Donald Trump. This goes back to Nixon and Roger Ailes in the 1970s.
Anyway, the bottom line is this:
Trump won a close national vote in 2024, but he remains broadly unpopular today. The share of the adult population that voted for Trump is closer to one-third than to “most,” and the intensity of resistance against him is 2x the intensity of his supporters. Businesses that don’t understand this are destined to make key strategic and tactical errors — as are parties and politicians.
I think he’s right. Fingers crossed that it translates into a block on Trump’s power in 2026.