Frank Yuan
Postdoctoral Research Fellow

A new poll published on CNN shows the American public’s downbeat outlook on the economy and the impact of tariffs. When you dig into the data, it’s clear many Trump voters are feeling the consequences of Trump doing what he promised to do.

Surveyed in the past two weeks, around 1-in-5 or 1-in-4 of those who voted for Trump now believed that the president has worsened America’s economic conditions and increased cost of living, and expressed pessimism about the economy. And about 1-in-10 of them feel that increased tariffs, even those targeting China, were bad policy! Why would you vote for him in the first place then…

Overall, only about one-third of the public agree that tariffs against China were good, while half of the public believe it’s bad policy.

Nearly half of Trump voters seem resigned to the view that tariffs would cause short-term pain for the economy, though most of them still seemed to believe that they would bring long-term benefits. The rest of the country strongly disagree, of course.

These numbers will likely continue shifting against Trump, since only about 1-in-3 of his voters agree that the tariffs would help their personal finances or the industries they worked in, though even fewer thought the tariffs would directly harm them. However, if Trump continues down this path, the growing pain on ordinary Americas should bring more to the realisation that those ‘long-term benefits’ will never come.

What has forced Trump into a partial retreat was not the sentiments of working-class Americans, but the bond market, as the rising borrowing cost and depreciating US dollar signalled investors voting with their feet and leaving the US.

If Trump’s base starts to turn against the policy as well, then he’d probably have to go back to square one, but the MAGA movement itself was fuelled by dissatisfaction with that status quo in the first place!