Rural Americans who supported the candidate Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential elections have become disillusioned in the president, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll shows.
Those same rural Americans provided Trump with enough support to beat challenger candidate Hillary Clinton, primarily because Trump gave the impression of speaking to them directly, offering solutions to their problems in language they could understand.
"Feelings of resentment and deprivation have pervaded a lot of these places," Swenson said. "And here comes a candidate [Trump] who's offering simplistic answers" to issues that concern them.
"Rural people are more cynical about the federal government than people in general are," said Karl Stauber, who runs a private economic development agency for manufacturing communities in south central Virginia. "They've heard so many promises, and they've not seen much done."
Yet, Trump has failed to live up to his campaign promises, the poll reveals. Despite praise for Trump from rural Americans for his handling of economic and national security issues, his failure to tackle healthcare and immigration have resulted in increasingly poor approval numbers.
Unlike in metropolitan voters, a surprising number of rural Americans appear to support Trump's aggressive anti-immigration policy. According to the Reuters report, voters blame consistent White House infighting and employee turnover for much of the failure of the Trump agenda.
In dry numbers, according to poll statistics, Trump's approval among rural American voters today is 47 percent, while during the election it was 56 percent.
Questionnaire respondents have revealed that they evaluate the US president according to his actions, not his flamboyant and often polarizing style. The way Trump talks or tweets concerns them little, Reuters reports, as long as the president keeps his promises.
"I like him less, but I support him more," an 87-year old respondent told Reuters.
Conducted online, the poll filtered for answers from areas designated as "non-metro" by the federal government, dividing the responses into nine, four-week periods, each period containing including between 1,300 and 2,000 responses.
