By Julia Harte
Dec 13 – When Ron Dailey goes out to eat, he is shocked by 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.
Dailey, a Denver-area resident who works for a human resources outsourcing solutions firm, thinks “the back-and-forthing of the tariffs” sowed market uncertainty, pushing up some costs.
But he has seen other prices fall – he recently paid just $1.74 a gallon for gas. Overall, he rates Trump an 8 out of 10 on his handling of the cost of living.
“There’s nothing the president has a magic wand on,” said Dailey, who believes the president’s tariffs and deregulatory agenda will eventually lower most everyday costs.
Affordability is front and center in voters’ minds as both parties gear up for next year’s congressional midterm elections, with Republicans particularly concerned that continuing high prices could hurt their chances to retain control of Congress.
After campaigning last year on promises to tame inflation, Trump has in recent weeks alternated between dismissing affordability problems as a hoax, blaming President Joe Biden for them, and promising his economic policies will benefit Americans next year.
In interviews, a group of 20 Trump voters from around the country whom Reuters has spoken with monthly since February revealed how high costs are impacting their lives, and where they lay the blame. Reuters asked the voters to rate the Trump administration’s approach toward affordability on a scale of 1 to 10. Six of the 20 voters gave it a score of 5 or lower, and only one rated it higher than 8.
But a majority of the voters staunchly supported the president, predicting that his policies would improve their purchasing power in the long term or saying he had little control over everyday costs. Most of them blamed larger structural issues in the U.S. economy – oligopolies, corporate greed, excessive money supply – for the rising cost of living.
BREEDING ANXIETY
Their views roughly match 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’s handling of the cost of living, compared to 30% of all respondents. The figure for Trump voters was a 10 percentage point jump from a smaller November poll.
Still, Republicans fear they are vulnerable on the economy ahead of next year’s elections, with independents more skeptical of the president’s economic policies. Trump hit the road this week to tout his cost-reducing efforts to audiences, beginning with a rally in Pennsylvania on Tuesday.
“I have no higher priority than making America affordable again,” Trump said at the rally, where he took credit for bringing down gasoline and energy costs and the price of eggs. He blamed Biden for high prices on other goods, though Trump has now been in office for almost a year.
Government data shows 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 economy’s growth has rebounded somewhat after it contracted during the first few months of the year.
Eight of the voters interviewed by Reuters reported rising prices at their local restaurants and grocery stores, especially for meat and coffee, although a handful reported food prices were down, and 11 said they had seen dips in the cost of gasoline in their area.
Several complained that Trump had done too little to address such issues and that his signature tariffs had been inexpertly deployed, unnecessarily raising prices for Americans.
Loretta Torres, 38, a mother of three near Houston, gave Trump an 8 but said holiday shopping had been harder this year because tariffs had doubled or tripled some prices. “I would definitely hope to see those tariffs go down and improve over time,” she said.
Gerald Dunn, 67, a martial arts instructor in New York’s Hudson Valley who rated Trump a 6 on affordability, agreed. “Don’t just throw tariffs out there just for no reason. That hurts the economy because uncertainty breeds anxiety,” Dunn said.
Other voters, however, said they had not noticed any price increases due to the tariffs. Terry Alberta, 64, a pilot in Michigan, noted that U.S. shoppers on Black Friday spent a record amount of money online.
“People are saying they’re hurting, but apparently they’re not hurting” enough to curb such spending, Alberta said. “To bash on the administration and say, ‘Oh, these tariffs are horrible’ and everything, it’s like, then why are we still buying things?”
CAPS ON CORPORATE GREED
Regardless of how they rated Trump, most voters blamed private companies and macroeconomic factors for hiking the cost of basic goods and services.
While the 20 voters are not a statistically representative portrait of all Trump voters, their ages, educational backgrounds, races/ethnicities, locations and voting histories roughly correspond to those of Trump’s overall electorate. They were selected from 429 respondents to a February 2025 Ipsos poll who said they voted for Trump in November and were willing to speak to a reporter.
Don Jernigan, 75, a retiree in Virginia Beach, rated Trump a 4 on affordability for not doing enough to check oligopolies.
In industries like meatpacking, “you have such large corporations covering such large portions of our supply chain of products,” Jernigan said. “The small guys are totally regulated out of 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 push legislation capping profits in fields such as health insurance, blaming a “feeding frenzy” of dominant companies for high costs.
Lou Nunez, an 83-year-old retired Army veteran in Des Moines, Iowa, also pointed to the fact that premium payments for Obamacare health plans will double if U.S. lawmakers do not extend pandemic-era subsidies by year’s end.
“That’s something that certainly the president, if he chose, he could probably get Congress to pass those subsidies, but I think he’s pretty set against it,” said Nunez, who rated Trump a 2 on affordability.
“I don’t think he’s done a whole lot (to improve the) prices of anything,” Nunez added.
‘DRILL, BABY, DRILL’
A common refrain, especially among voters who gave Trump high marks overall, was that the president lacks the power to immediately lower costs.
Kate Mottl, 62, of the Chicago suburbs, and Rich Somora, 62, in Charlotte, North Carolina, who rated the president 8 and 6 respectively, repeated one of Trump’s campaign mottos, “drill, baby, drill,” suggesting that opening up more U.S. territory to oil and gas extraction would help lower the cost of living.
Both also underscored that Trump was limited in his ability to directly reduce prices. Mottl said she would like to see prices drop on groceries and utilities, but was “very optimistic” about Trump’s economic leadership. “There’s just so much he can do in the almost a year that he’s been in office,” she said.
“A lot of it is policy change, and a lot of that has to go through Congress,” Somora said.
Will Brown, 20, a student in Madison, Wisconsin, blamed current inflation on the Biden administration’s federal spending initiatives which pumped cash into the U.S. money supply.
Although Brown said meat prices were “egregious” and housing costs were out of reach for many Americans, he gave the president a 7 on affordability.
Fixing inflation and the high cost of living is “easy to say, but it’s hard to do,” Brown said.
(Reporting by Julia Harte in New York; editing by Paul Thomasch and Claudia Parsons)
Comments