Tomatoes are sorted and packed at the DiMare Ruskin tomato packing plant in April in Apollo Beach, Florida. Photo / Thomas Simonetti, for The Washington Post
Four months after voters and financial markets recoiled at global trade wars, Wall Street and Main Street have taken sharply different views about President Donald Trump’s signature economic policy.
Despite the imposition of what appear to be permanent tariffs, global markets have shown little concern about the growing costs of production.
After a roughly 10% drop over one week in early April, the Dow Jones Industrial Average quickly recovered those losses after Trump delayed a wide swathe of tariffs and now sits at near-record highs every time the closing bell rings.
However, among regular voters, these tariff policies remain as unpopular as ever - even though consumers arguably have yet to feel their full effects.
New tariffs have just come into force. This week, Indian goods got hit with a 50% tariff because of that nation’s purchases of Russian oil. Also this week, low-cost goods that were commonly exempt from tariffs will get slapped with trade taxes.
When Americans were asked in mid-August ahead of this week’s tariffs if they support “substantially increasing tariffs on goods imported from most countries”, 61% disapproved of the policy while just 38% approved, according to a poll by Pew Research Centre.
“These views are largely unchanged since April,” the pollsters wrote.
That’s when Trump launched his self-proclaimed “Liberation Day” that imposed sweeping tariffs on almost every nation, which sent the financial markets reeling. Trump temporarily pulled back most of the tariffs.
Anyone who glanced at their 401(k) balance would’ve been furious, and Pew found that only 39% of Americans supported the policy at that time.
By August 7, most of the delayed tariffs had taken effect, hitting friend and foe alike.
Despite those tariffs becoming policy, however, Wall Street didn’t react like it did in April.
That’s partially because traders have been optimistic about the economy, given that inflation reports have not been as high as they feared.
And many analysts anticipate a drop in interest rates when the Federal Reserve Board meets next month, making it easier for businesses to borrow and expand.
Polling suggests that hasn’t helped settle down anxious consumers who saw plenty of reports about inflation receding during the last year of the Biden Administration and still rated the economy poorly, while ranking cost of living as a top issue in the 2024 elections.
That has some Republicans uncertain - and some Democrats optimistic - about their political fortunes.
One of the most troubling signs for congressional Republicans is how small Trump’s base of support is for trade wars.
Pew’s aforementioned mid-August poll found that just 15% of Americans strongly approve of the Trump Administration’s policy of imposing higher tariffs on goods, while 39% strongly disapprove of Trump’s policy.
That is also statistically unchanged from mid-April, when Pew found 17% of Americans strongly approved of increased tariffs and 43% strongly disapproved of them.
This result came about in a largely organic manner, with voters reaching these conclusions on their own, not after some long opposition campaign.
Democrats have not spent much time or money arguing against the tariffs.
Instead, the party has lately devoted most of its attention to the GOP’s massive domestic policy bill that delivered tax-cut extensions, dramatically enhanced border security and cut Medicaid funds to states.
Democrats spent the late-summer break from Congress running ads about the potential for millions of working-class Americans to lose their healthcare, while holding events attacking the law across their districts.
In the spring, as Trump’s tariff policy was coming together, Democrats homed in on presidential adviser and billionaire Elon Musk’s effort to slash government agencies as the policy they most opposed; their anti-Musk attacks helped them win a key Wisconsin state Supreme Court race where Musk spent millions.
In July, with the August 7 tariff deadline looming, Democrats on Capitol Hill focused on dividing Republicans over releasing all the files related to the late Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex offender.
And yet tariff policy seems to have become something voters quickly equated with higher costs, even before Liberation Day.
A flash Washington Post poll in early March found only 40% of voters supported Trump’s vision for tariffs on Canada, China and Mexico - the focus of the President’s tariff policy at the time.
While 60% opposed the tariffs, 46% said they were “very concerned” about higher prices and 29% said they were “somewhat concerned” about costs soaring from the tariffs. Just 7% said they were “not at all concerned”.
“I don’t want to pay more for anything,” a 43-year-old woman from Connecticut, who voted for Trump, told the Post in March.
The Winston Group, a research firm that advises Republican leaders, sent a memo to Capitol Hill that could have come with a flashing warning sign on it, declaring that Trump “was elected in large part because of inflation” but he had begun to lose support from critical independent voters over economic concerns.
“At this point, Republicans have faith in the long game strategy, but the rest of the country is not yet convinced,” the firm wrote in mid-April.
A CBS-YouGov poll from that time found that if the question on support for tariffs focused on the eventual broad impact, Trump’s standing was a bit better: 34% of voters said that “in the long term/coming years” the US economy would be better because of tariffs, while 42% said it would be worse.
That poll found that Republican voters especially believed that the tariffs were merely a negotiating tactic with other nations and would eventually be removed.
The unpopularity of tariffs mirrors the decline in Trump’s handling of the economy.
A Gallup poll released on Wednesday found that just 37% of voters approve of his handling of the economy, almost identical to Pew’s question on support for tariffs.
In his first term, Gallup found Trump averaged 52% approval for his stewardship of the economy, a stark reversal.
That same poll found only 29% of independents support his handling of the economy.
Some Republicans argue that the polls don’t tell the whole story. They say there are signs Americans will have a lot to like about Trump’s economy.
For one thing, the overall consumer price index has not risen as fast as some economists feared, edging up from 2.3% in April to 2.7% in July, suggesting inflation is in a relatively stable place.
And David Winston, co-founder of the Winston Group, cited positive data in July’s economic reports that could create a political buffer for Republicans, as wages increased last month at a faster rate than inflation.
“What we don’t know yet is whether it will be enough for Americans to feel the impact and stop the President’s sliding numbers on his handling of the economy,” Winston wrote in an op-ed in Roll Call.
Democrats believe these factors will not be enough, and that Trump’s tariffs will lead to a big political backlash against Republicans.
In Virginia, Democrat Abigail Spanberger is running ads consistently focused on inflation and the cost of living and holds a steady lead in the governor’s race.
In western Iowa on Wednesday, Democrats won a special election for a state Senate seat with a constituency that favoured Trump by 11% last year. Turnout was low, but the result still represents a more than 20-point net swing in their direction.
Catelin Drey, the leader of a group opposing guns and supporting abortion rights, ran her winning campaign focused on pocketbook issues.
“Overwhelmingly the main frustration point that I am hearing is that we have an affordability crisis, whether that’s housing, childcare or healthcare,” Drey told the Des Moines Register in an interview before the election. “And folks are really feeling that in their pocketbooks and in their spending decisions.”
Drey did not single out Trump’s tariff policy specifically, but she noted how Iowa’s farm industry, particularly corn and soybean producers, have grown anxious over their ability to sell their crops overseas.
“We’ve seen policies come down from the federal level, as well as the state level, that are making it very difficult for people to make ends meet here,” she told the Guardian.
Across the state, major local employer John Deere announced last week another round of layoffs, this time knocking out 71 employees at their Waterloo site and a couple hundred more from plants that employ many Iowans who cross the Mississippi River into western Illinois. The company cited the cost of tariffs for driving down its earnings.
The layoffs, and the apparent power of Drey’s and Spanberger’s messages, seem to reflect the anxieties showing up in polling.
It’s difficult to predict exactly what the tariffs’ effects will be as the nation moves into a Midterm year in 2026 - or if the tariffs will still be in force. If Drey’s success is mirrored by Spanberger in November’s Virginia election, Democrats may embrace tariffs as a key line of attack.
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