Americans would trade jobs for cheaper eggs
Trump is losing the only thing that ever saved him
What do you get when you cross a cost-of-living crisis with an unpopular war and tariff policies from the 1930s?
For Donald Trump, the answer is “a disaster.”
The public opinion landscape on the economy resembles an apocalyptic wasteland for the Republican Party. Driven by immense economic dissatisfaction from a public crying out for lower costs, Donald Trump’s approval ratings are plumbing all-time lows in our latest survey of national registered voters at The Argument.
With just 40% of respondents approving and 58% disapproving in our March survey, Trump’s net approval rating is the worst that we have ever seen for him in any of our polls.
I’ll go a step further, though. Donald Trump isn’t just the most unpopular he’s ever been in this current presidential term. He’s more unpopular than any prior president has been at the equivalent point in time — including Trump in his first term.
Why? To quote a prominent Democratic strategist, it’s the economy, stupid.
Trump’s numbers on the economy are radioactive. Every major demographic group of voters disapproves of his economic stewardship, including supermajorities of young and nonwhite voters. He’s even underwater on this issue with white, non-college voters, a group he won in 2024 by more than 20 percentage points.
Looking through our questions, it’s exceptionally clear why: Voters believe that things are getting more expensive and that their wages aren’t rising to meet the moment. Just 31% of voters agreed that their income is keeping up with the cost of living, while 65% disagreed.
This spills into a larger sense of pessimism, where most Americans believe that their financial situation is simply not improving (or, in many cases, actively deteriorating). Thirty-six percent of voters believe that they are now worse off financially than they were a year ago, while just 24% think they’re better off.
This is very different from Trump’s first presidency. Back then, his economic numbers were consistently the best for him, even as he took major hits in public opinion on virtually every other issue, ranging from healthcare to immigration.
This gave him a lifeline, because no matter how bad things got elsewhere, he had a booming economy to latch onto as a major success. It also helped buttress his approval and gave him a lane to rebound from the lows of Charlottesville and the failed Obamacare repeal bill.
This time, however, his approval rating has followed a very different trend: It began with high approvals, fueled a buoyant and optimistic public eager for a relief from rising costs, and quickly began to follow a near-linear decline that was mostly correlated with plummeting economic sentiment.
Perhaps the most dangerous warning flag for Trump? A majority of voters expect that the economy will get even worse over the next year.
A big problem for the president here is that these wounds are almost entirely self-inflicted. Tariffs, which have caused a global supply-chain shock, are one of the most unpopular economic policies in Trump’s arsenal, despite being among his most frequently deployed tools.
The reason that tariffs are so unpopular is astoundingly clear. Voters believe that they are compounding the cost-of-living crisis by making things more expensive.
Trump’s rationale for tariffs has actually been pretty easy to follow, as he sincerely believes that slightly higher prices are a small price to pay in exchange for increased job growth. There are two problems with this rationale, though: First, voters actually believe that the tariffs have hurt job growth, and second, voters want lower prices above everything else — even if it means higher unemployment.
The standard macroeconomics framework argues that there is a trade-off between lower inflation and lower unemployment. This is why the Fed has such a difficult job; it’s trying to balance between moderating the rate of price increases and keeping unemployment low.
Economic research has found that very few Americans (roughly 25%) even agree that there is a trade-off at all. Most don’t think it exists.
But we wanted to see, when forced to pick between these two outcomes, which voters would pick. And they decisively picked higher unemployment.
There are two potential reasons for this: First, people don’t attribute the wage increases they get during inflationary periods to the larger inflationary environment, so rapidly rising prices are experienced entirely as a policy failure.
But second, unemployment is different and directly felt by far fewer people. Even in really bad unemployment spells, the large majority of people don’t lose their jobs — recall that during the peak of the Great Recession, unemployment still only hovered around 10%. So the trade-off for voters is logical, and they’re probably more willing to risk that someone else will lose their job over everyone having to pay higher prices for eggs.
During the Biden years, economists and policymakers were slow to acknowledge just how much of a political emergency inflation was. Scarred from the Great Recession policy and discourse wars, there was a real effort to avoid long spells of unemployment resulting from the COVID-19 recession. As a result, there was a period of underreaction toward inflation.
Some people called this a manufactured crisis or a “vibecession.” But the sentiment from Americans was grounded in a sobering reality: Even as prices skyrocketed, income didn’t. Ultimately, that simple reality was enough to doom the Biden presidency, and it added rocket fuel to Trump’s reelection campaign.
Given that voters sent Trump back to the White House expecting some relief in prices, the current backlash is entirely rational. Trump is doing the exact opposite of what people asked for.
Tariffs have resulted in global economic upheaval. The war in Iran — which began before the fielding of this survey — resulted in an oil shock that has sent gas prices soaring. And Trump’s actions on immigration have shrunk the labor pool, leading voters to partially blame the administration’s immigration policies for exacerbating the cost of living crisis.
I want to be crystal clear about this last finding, because it reinforces a simple reality: Virtually everything in politics revolves around the economy. Voters certainly don’t like the chaos around enforcement, but a large chunk of the disapproval of Trump’s immigration handling also has to do with the economic effects of the policies themselves, which have exacerbated a spike in grocery prices.
This is part of why swing-seat Republicans like Rep. David Valadao have expressed immense unease with the administration’s approach, citing potential economic downturns as a notable adverse side effect.
One way or another, it all comes back to the same thing: Voters want things to be cheaper.
This data also comes with sharp implications for the midterm elections. By this point, it is difficult to see a way in which an aging Trump can escape the death spiral that has enveloped his presidency.
What’s more, the loss of trust the Republican Party has experienced on the economy has been nothing short of staggering. In fact, in our latest survey, Democrats actually had a slight edge when it came to the economy, which marked a shocking reversal from the 14-point edge Republicans enjoyed during the Biden years.
