US leaders Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden pictured in 2017. Photo / Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images
President Donald Trump has claimed responsibility for the United States economy virtually every day since his inauguration.
Late last week, the White House declared it a smashing success in a press release called “200 Days of Winning: President Trump is Keeping His Promises.”
Yet many Americans are still struggling to get by amid mediocre economic growth and difficulty affording necessities, from groceries to housing.
This prompts a key political question: When will voters hold Trump - now back on the job for more than six months - responsible for their financial plight?
The answer could decide the battle for Congress in the 2026 Midterm elections and determine the fight to succeed Trump in the White House in 2028.
In an early August YouGov poll for the Economist, voters’ No. 1 issue was “inflation/prices”, which at 21% beat the next most important concern, “jobs/economy” by 7%.
Trump’s job approval rating in this survey was cratering at 41%. The President’s handling of the economy rated roughly the same, at 40%.
Those poor numbers are driven in part by dour reviews from independents and fit with recent data produced by Democratic pollsters.
In a poll conducted in late July for the centrist Democratic think-tank Third Way, Trump’s job approval rating clocked in higher than the YouGov survey, hitting 45%.
But a 41% plurality of registered voters said the President’s second term was unfolding as “worse” than expected and only 42% approved of his signature economic package, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law on July 4.
Approval of the OBBBA among independents, according to this poll? A dismal 32%.
Moreover, an early summer Democratic poll shows that 58% of voters view the economy as “Trump’s economy”, versus blaming former President Joe Biden.
And if the polls are accurate, Trump’s blue-collar voters are running out of patience.
“In the spring, many [blue collar voters] were willing to give Trump the benefit of the doubt on his tariff plan - but by summer, many expressed serious concerns that tariffs are hurting their lives by making things more expensive,” reads a July 30 analysis of a focus group conducted by the Working Class Project, an initiative led by a Democratic super PAC.
Taken together, these findings put congressional Republicans in dire straits. And if such views proliferate among the electorate, it’s not only Republicans on Capitol Hill who will feel the political pinch.
Republicans vying to succeed Trump in 2028, especially Vice-President JD Vance, could pay an extremely high price.
But of course, there are other surveys, and other ways of interpreting the polling.
Let’s begin with Trump’s average job approval rating, calculated by RealClearPolitics at 45.7%. That’s not half bad in our polarised times.
The President’s handling of the economy rated a similar 45% in CNBC’s “All America Economic Survey” fielded from July 3 through to August 3. Granted, that was a high-water mark in recent assessments of Trump’s leadership on this topic.
Ultimately, the President’s fate, and that of his party, will rest not only with how voters feel about the economy and the effectiveness of his governing agenda, but also on what the political alternative is.
Recall, on the eve of President Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012, the unemployment rate was hovering like a dark cloud over the economy at 7.9%, up one point from the previous month.
That’s a lot of Americans out of work - and nearly double the 4.1% rate just prior to Election Day 2024. But Republican Mitt Romney, a career businessman and corporate turnaround artist, did not ride those grim numbers into the White House.
Doug Heye, a Republican strategist in Washington active in campaigns during the Obama era, said there’s a lesson there for Democrats assuming Trump and the GOP are inexorably doomed based on voters’ economic anxiety.
But so, too, must Republicans be careful not to assume the trade deals Trump has lately touted, and macro indicators showing a resilient if not entirely strong US economy, will produce electoral victory.
“It’s a fluid thing,” Heye, an occasional Trump critic, told me.
Heye explained that Trump has been given some latitude (and time) by voters to improve the economy because they blamed Biden almost entirely for the inflation that spiked on his watch.
That’s even though higher prices were in part a reaction to the coronavirus pandemic, and resulting public policy decisions, that began during Trump’s first term.
“That hangover that remains continues to give Trump the ability to blame things on Biden.”
When might voters finally absolve Biden of responsibility and point fingers at Trump?
“Companies are absorbing costs thus far on tariffs. That’s not going to last forever,” Heye said.
Here, another parallel with Obama might be instructive.
The 44th president pursued healthcare reform, convinced the eventual Affordable Care Act was good public policy and, as politicians are wont to say, therefore good politics.
In the short term, the law known as Obamacare was a political disaster for Democrats, costing the party 63 seats in the House seats and seven in the Senate.
With Trump’s firm belief in tariffs and insistence on building a protectionist moat around voters’ access to foreign products, a “shellacking” of his own can’t be ruled out.
But of course, it matters what kind of alternative Democrats are offering.