Voters sour on Trump's tariffs but favor immigration policies, polls show
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President Trump in the Oval Office of the White House on April 14. Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images
Immigration is a winning issue for President Trump, while his historic tariffs have plummeting favorability among voters, polls show.
The big picture: Trump has made sweeping changes on both the immigration and economic fronts — two key areas he campaigned on and won voters' support. But now that he's implemented some of his promised policies, the poll numbers shows mixed reviews.
- A YouGov/Economist poll found Trump's approval in general among young voters has fallen from +5 at the start of his term to -29 now.
- Another survey from the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that only about 4 in 10 U.S. adults approve of the way he's handling the job.
Zoom in: Trump's tariffs have become a liability for him: A vast majority of voters (72%) said they think Trump's tariffs will hurt the U.S. economy in the short-term, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll of registered voters released last week.
- That's true across 97% of Democrats, 77% of independents and 44% of Republicans.
- A smaller majority (53%) said they think the tariffs will hurt the U.S. economy in the long-term too.
Between the lines: Trump's tariffs will likely lead to a faster rise in prices and weigh on economic growth, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell said Wednesday.
- That's exactly what voters fear: The price of food and consumer goods is their top economic worry, the Quinnipiac poll found.
- Trump campaigned on lowering prices for Americans weary of inflation, but Powell is the latest to suggest Trump's trade war might do the opposite, Axios' Courtenay Brown reports.
Zoom out: The president is polling better on immigration: About half of U.S. adults approve of his approach to immigration, per the AP-NORC survey.
- That's higher than his approval rating for his approach to the presidency as a whole, and indicates approval for the administration's immigration crackdown and deportation drives.
- The same poll found that only about 4 in 10 have a positive view of the way Trump is handling the economy and trade negotiations.
For the record: The Economist/YouGovPoll was done April 5-8, surveying 1.741 U.S. adult citizens. The margin of error is ±3.1% (adjusted for weighting) and ±2.9% (registered voters).
- The Quinnipiac University telephone survey was conducted from April 3-7 with responses from 1,407 self-identified registered voters with a margin of sampling error of ±2.6 percentage points.
- The AP-NORC poll of 1,229 adults was conducted March 20-24, using a sample drawn from NORC's probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is ±3.9 percentage points.
Go deeper: Trump's tariffs "highly likely" to reignite inflation, Fed chair Powell says
