As inflation weighs on voters, Trump is paying a high price, too
This is as difficult a policy challenge as any in the modern era: inflation.
This week, President Donald Trump may have made the issue even more difficult for him and his Republican Party as they prepare for next fall’s midterm congressional elections.
Nearly 11 months into his second term, President Trump began the week by giving the economy a superlative rating: “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.”
Why we wrote this
As his economic leadership rating plummets in polls, President Trump has tried to downplay voters’ concerns about affordability. The same problem that tripped Joe Biden now haunts Mr. Trump.
Then, in a speech Tuesday in rural Pennsylvania billed as the launch of an “affordability tour” aimed at reassuring voters about the economy, Mr. Trump mocked the idea of affordability.
Moments later, it reversed itself.
“I can’t say affordability is a hoax,” the president told a packed ballroom at a casino in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania.
In real time, Mr. Trump is playing out the classic conundrum of a newly elected president seeking to anticipate the fate of many predecessors: a midterm election that severely limits his ability to get his agenda through Congress.
For now, the president is trying to convince voters that their economic situation is not so bad, even if they are struggling to make ends meet. Despite the optimism based on falling interest rates and the strength of the stock market, inflation remains difficult to control. It continues to be relatively warm at 3% in September, according to the latest available monthly report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target rate.
The challenge for President Trump is to acknowledge reality while helping voters maintain hope.
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the conservative think tank American Action Forum, says Mr. Trump must express the reality voters are experiencing.
“It’s not effective to tell people they’re wrong about the price they’re paying for things,” Mr. Holtz-Eakin says.
Decline in polls on economic leadership
The latest public opinion polls highlight Mr. Trump’s challenge. The AP-NORC survey released Dec. 11 puts the president’s approval rating on economic leadership at just 31 percent, down from 40 percent in March. The December figure is his lowest economic approval rating in this poll, either for his first or second term. Similarly, the RealClearPolitics polling average shows the president underwater on the economy.
Mr. Trump’s overall job approval rating is now 36 percent, according to AP-NORC, up from 42 percent in March. Among Republicans, it remains relatively strong at 69%.
But the overall numbers reflect the president’s challenge as voters balance their personal circumstances and voting preferences.
“Fundamentally, I think the problem is that voters are still [ticked] “Trump is frustrated that prices are 25 to 30 percent higher than they were five years ago,” says Ryan Bourne, an economist at the libertarian Cato Institute.
Mr Bourne adds that for most of this year wages have risen faster than prices, but “despite that, people are still annoyed”.
Another major factor that could factor into voters’ calculations is health care. The Senate on Thursday rejected proposals from Republicans and Democrats to address health care subsidies set to expire at the end of the year with the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. With Congress set to recess for the holidays, this effectively ensures that the more than 20 million Americans who receive their health care through the Obamacare exchanges will see their premiums increase significantly on January 1.
Manage expectations
The challenge for Mr. Trump, his administration and the Republican Party will be managing expectations. At his rally in Pennsylvania this week, the president delivered a 90-minute speech that was classic Trump: part prepared remarks, part greatest hits of his campaigns, part apparent stream of consciousness.
Whether this message is effective is an open question. MAGA faithful are happy that he is back at rallies in the United States, after a first year in office dominated by foreign travel and diplomatic adventures. But the president’s approval ratings largely revolve around the economy, whether it’s fair or not, and Mr. Trump is now trying to convince voters he’s on the case.
After his mixed messages at the Pennsylvania rally, it was unclear how the president’s “affordability tour” would play out.
On Friday, the White House announced that Vice President JD Vance would travel to Allentown, Pennsylvania, on December 16 to “deliver a speech celebrating President Trump’s economic success and the administration’s commitment to lower prices and raise wages.”
The key is to ensure that Trump supporters are motivated to participate in the midterm elections next November, when Republicans are at serious risk of losing the House. Reconquering the Senate, even if it represents greater scope for the Democrats, is not completely out of the question.
Furthermore, Mr. Trump’s second-term focus on sprucing up the White House — building a grand ballroom, gilding the Oval Office, turning the Rose Garden into a garden café — and mingling with billionaires may not help his image with the influential voters he will need to win over.
Manage message
The overall message to voters must be realistic, says Mr. Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office.
“If I were on the White House economic team, I wouldn’t talk about prices or inflation at all,” he says. “I would talk about overall policies, taken as a whole, to ensure that Americans have good jobs with rising wages so they can afford the things they enjoy.”
Mr. Bourne, the Cato economist, sees opportunities for Democrats to take advantage of Mr. Trump’s mixed messaging on affordability — which, in Pennsylvania, included a repeat of his famous comment that “you don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is good.”
Democrats can use the fact that “people are frustrated that Trump can’t get the price level back to where it was in 2019,” Mr. Bourne says.
“For some people directly affected by the president’s tariffs, whether households or businesses, it may seem that in some areas Trump has made the situation unnecessarily worse.”
