Voters’ opposition to the state of Trump’s economy is well established – despite his desperate attempts to deflect
Our reporters answer your questions about the US economy and the midterm elections
It’s indisputable that the political polarization of our time has reduced (and confused) the influence of economic conditions on US elections.
In September of 2024, in the waning weeks of the Joe Biden presidency, 65% of Republicans believed the US economy was getting worse. About six months later, as Donald Trump launched a trade war on the rest of the world with his “liberation day” tariffs, the share of Republican pessimists had dropped to 33%.
It’s hard to detect a reason for this in the economic data. Annual consumer price inflation fell from 2.4% to 2.3% between the two polls. The unemployment rate ticked up from 4.1% to 4.2%. Indeed, Democrats disagreed sharply with their Republican neighbors: from the last Harris poll of the Biden era to the first under Trump, the share who thought the US economy was worsening jumped from 28% to 73%.
As the midterm elections loom into focus, suggesting a stark Republican defeat, Trump and his minions are hoping that this ideological lens, shaping economic reality to fit political preferences, can prevent an electoral bloodbath in November. Maybe Trump can somehow dupe the Maga base into believing that “we’re growing at a faster rate than we’ve ever grown before.”
From three weeks out, it seems pretty clear that the gambit is not going to work. Polling by Harris for the Guardian suggests that the economy is looking pretty bad even for their most loyal acolytes. Too bad to convince them otherwise.
The September reading of the consumer price index, which recorded a spike in annual inflation to 3.7%, had not yet been published when Harris performed its latest round of polling earlier this month. Still, the pollster reported that 38% of Republicans believe the economy is worsening. That is up from 29% a year ago.
The pattern is evident among cohorts that have proven historical Republican bulwarks. Rural Americans, loyal Republican allies for decades, are being battered by Trump’s policies. They were hit not only by his trade war, largely barred from China’s markets. They have been hammered by the rising price of diesel and fertilizer, for which they can thank Trump’s war in Iran. They have been hamstrung by Trump’s raids against the many immigrants in their labor force. And they feel roundly attacked by Trump’s attempt to tame rising beef prices by lowering tariffs on imported meat.
Unsurprisingly, this is showing up in the polling. Sixty-four per cent of rural Americans polled this month said the economy was getting worse, compared with only 52% of city dwellers. Six per cent more rural residents think the economy is worsening than in September 2024, during the last poll of the Biden administration. White Americans, another pillar of Republican support, are also turning sour: 61% believe the economy is getting worse, up from 48% in September of 2024. The share of men who believe the economy is getting worse increased from 46% to 52% over those two years.
Bill Clinton famously won the presidency in 1992 campaigning on: “It’s the economy, stupid.” For much of the 20th century the state of the economy was critical in deciding presidential and congressional elections. Voters blamed or rewarded incumbents for the state of the economy. The relationship was always moderated by partisan preferences, though. And it has weakened dramatically as the electorate has set on divergent ideological paths, ultimately splitting into rival camps with diametrically opposed perceptions of reality.
“The economic perceptions of Democrats and Republicans have polarized relative to Independents and that this polarization is not asymmetric in magnitude,” argued a recent study by political scientists from Stanford and New York University. They estimate the partisan gap in economic perceptions rose “from about 20 percentage-points at the beginning of the Bush II administration to a maximum of 73 percentage-points during the (first) Trump administration”.
Partisanship doesn’t just affect voters’ perceptions of the economy. As reported by political scientists at Bucknell University and Texas A&M University, polarization reduces policymakers’ incentive to tailor policy to deliver broad economic prosperity.
“If voters are relatively unwilling to cross party lines to reward good economic performance or punish economic decline, then elected officials can pursue policies that distribute economic benefits narrowly without affecting their chances of re-election,” they wrote. “This might include aiming policy to deliver rewards to co-partisans, donors, or even to the office-holder himself or herself.”
This would explain Trump’s tactics to a T. Not only has he taken to scaring voters with culture war stuff – variously branding Democrats as apologists of Vladimir Lenin and claiming that they want to change the sex of young children. He seems to believe that he can sway the electorate by doing violence to groups that his Maga base dislikes, like immigrants and the “undeserving” poor. Maybe they will pay less attention to the cost of living, and to the Trump family’s self-dealing.
It seems too late, though. Voters’ opposition to Trump’s economic stewardship is too well established, having built up since the “liberation day” tariffs through countless destructive decisions over the last 21 months. He has not only lost average US voters – 58% of those think the economy is getting worse, 10 percentage points more than in the last poll of the Biden era. His shots at distracting the base are unlikely to convince them that they are not, in fact, miserable too.
