Pinched by higher prices, many Trump voters say: Don’t blame the president

By Julia Harte

December 13 – Ron Dailey went out to eat and was shocked by the prices on the menu.

“Breakfast is $20 no matter how you slice it,” said Dailey, 63, who voted for President Donald Trump in November 2024.

“It’s a back and forth,” thinks Dailey, a Denver-area resident who works for a human resources outsourcing solutions firm. tariffs” increased market uncertainty and increased some costs.

But he also saw other prices fall; recently paid just $1.74 per gallon for gasoline. Overall, he rates Trump 8 out of 10 when it comes to covering living expenses.

“The president doesn’t have a silver bullet,” said Dailey, who believes the president’s tariffs and deregulation agenda will eventually reduce most daily costs.

As both parties prepare for next year’s midterm congressional elections, affordability is front and center in voters’ minds; Republicans especially worry that continued high prices could hurt their chances of keeping control of Congress.

Trump, who campaigned last year on promises to rein in inflation, has vacillated in recent weeks between dismissing affordability issues as a hoax, blaming President Joe Biden for them and promising that his economic policies will benefit Americans next year.

A group of 20 Trump voters from around the country who Reuters has interviewed monthly since February revealed in interviews how high costs have affected their lives and where they place the blame. Reuters asked voters to rate the Trump administration’s approach to affordability on a scale of 1 to 10. Six out of 20 voters gave it a score of 5 or lower, while only one gave it a score above 8.

But a majority of voters staunchly backed the president, either predicting that his policies would increase their purchasing power in the long run or saying he had little control over day-to-day costs. Many blamed larger structural problems in the U.S. economy, such as oligopolies, corporate greed, oversupply of money, as the cause of the rising cost of living.

PRODUCTION OF ANXIETY

Their views roughly align with the results of recent polls. Nearly three-quarters of Trump voters who responded to a Reuters-Ipsos poll in early December said they approved of the president covering living expenses, compared with 30 percent of all respondents. ⁠The number of Trump voters was up 10 percentage points from a smaller survey conducted in November.

Still, Republicans fear economic fragility ahead of next year’s elections; Independents, on the other hand, are more skeptical of the president’s economic policies. Trump hit the road this week to tout his cost-cutting efforts to audiences, starting with a rally in Pennsylvania on Tuesday.

“I have no higher priority than making America affordable again,” Trump said at the rally, where he was credited with lowering the prices of gasoline, energy costs and eggs. Even though Trump has been in office for almost a year, he blamed Biden for high prices of other goods.

Government data show that job growth has slowed during Trump’s second term, unemployment has risen to its highest level in four years and consumer prices remain high. Overall, the growth of the economy has shown some recovery after the contraction in the first few months of the year.

Eight of the voters interviewed by Reuters reported rising prices at local restaurants and grocery stores, especially for meat and coffee, but a handful of voters reported falling food prices and 11 voters said they had seen decreases in the cost of gasoline in their areas.

Many complained that Trump did little to address such problems and that his signature tariffs were clumsily implemented, needlessly raising prices for Americans.

Loretta Torres, a 38-year-old mother of three who lives near Houston, gave Trump an 8 but said holiday shopping is harder this year because tariffs have doubled or tripled some prices. “I certainly hope to see these tariffs decrease and improve over time,” he said.

Gerald Dunn, 67, a martial arts instructor in New York’s Hudson Valley who gave Trump a 6 on affordability, agrees. “Don’t bring up tariffs for no reason. It hurts the economy because uncertainty increases anxiety,” Dunn said.

But other voters said they didn’t notice any price increases due to the tariffs. Terry Alberta, 64, a pilot in Michigan, said US consumers spent record amounts of money online on Black Friday.

“People say they’re hurting, but it doesn’t seem like they’re hurting enough to rein in this kind of spending,” Alberta said. “It’s like attacking management and saying, ‘Oh, these tariffs suck’ and everything, so why are we still getting stuff?”

CORPORATE The Limits of Greed

No matter how they rated Trump, most voters blamed private companies and macroeconomic factors for the rise in prices of basic goods and services.

While the 20 voters are not a statistically representative portrait of all Trump voters, their ages, educational backgrounds, race/ethnicity, location, and voting history roughly match those of Trump’s voters overall. They were selected from 429 respondents to an Ipsos poll in February 2025 who said they voted for Trump in November and were willing to talk to a reporter.

Don Jernigan, a 75-year-old retiree who lives in Virginia Beach, gave Trump a 4 on affordability for not doing enough to control oligopolies.

In industries like meatpacking, “there are very large companies that cover very large portions of our supply chain,” Jernigan said. “The little guys are completely excluded from the system, and I haven’t seen anything happen to change that.”

In Georgia, David Ferguson, 54, said he hoped Trump would use executive orders to enact legislation limiting profits in areas such as health insurance and blamed the high costs on a “feeding frenzy” by dominant companies.

Lou Nunez, an 83-year-old retired army veteran living in Des Moines, Iowa, also pointed out that premium payments for Obamacare health plans will double if US lawmakers do not extend pandemic-era subsidies until the end of the year.

“This is certainly something that the President could get Congress to pass these subsidies if he wanted to, but I think he’s pretty opposed to that,” said Nunez, who gave Trump a ‍2 on affordability.

“I don’t think it’s done much to improve prices,” Nunez added.

‘DRILL, BABY, DRILL’

A common refrain, especially among voters who rate Trump generally highly, was that the president does not have the authority to cut costs immediately.

Kate Mottl, 62, of the Chicago suburbs, and Rich Somora, 62, of Charlotte, North Carolina, who rated the president 8 and 6, respectively, suggested that opening more U.S. territories to oil and gas extraction would help lower the cost of living, echoing one of Trump’s campaign slogans, “drill, baby, drill.”

Both underlined that Trump’s ability to directly lower prices is limited. Mottl said he wants prices to fall on food and utilities but is “very optimistic” about Trump’s economic leadership. “There’s so much he can do in almost a year in office,” he said.

“A big part of this is policy change, and a lot of that needs to go through Congress,” Somora said.

Will Brown, a 20-year-old student in Madison, Wisconsin, blamed the current inflation on the Biden administration’s federal spending initiatives that pump cash into the U.S. money supply.

Brown gave the president a 7 on affordability, even though he said meat prices are “horrific” and housing costs are out of reach for many Americans.

Fixing inflation and the high cost of living is “easy to say but hard to do,” Brown said.

(Reporting by Julia Harte in New York; Editing by Paul Thomasch and Claudia Parsons)