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

NEW YORK - When Mr Ron Dailey goes out to eat, he is shocked by prices on the menu.

“Breakfast is US$20 (S$25.84) no matter how you slice it,” said Mr Dailey, 63, who voted for US President Donald Trump in November 2024.

Mr 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 IS$1.74 a gallon for gas.

Overall, he rates Mr 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 Mr Dailey, who believes the president’s tariffs and deregulatory agenda will eventually lower most everyday costs.

Affordability is front and centre in voters’ minds as both parties gear up for 2026’s congressional midterm elections, with Republicans particularly concerned that continuing high prices could hurt their chances to retain control of Congress.

After campaigning in 2024 on promises to tame inflation, Mr 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 in 2026.

In interviews, a group of 20 Mr 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 US 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 Mr 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 per cent 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 2026’s elections, with independents more sceptical of the president’s economic policies.

Mr Trump hit the road this week

to tout his cost-reducing efforts to audiences, beginning with a rally in Pennsylvania on Dec 9.

“I have no higher priority than making America affordable again,” Mr Trump said at the rally, where he took credit for bringing down gasoline and energy costs and the price of eggs.

He blamed Mr Biden for high prices on other goods, though Mr Trump has now been in office for almost a year.

Government data shows that job growth has slowed during Mr 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 Mr Trump had done too little to address such issues and that his signature tariffs had been inexpertly deployed, unnecessarily raising prices for Americans.

Ms Loretta Torres, 38, a mother of three near Houston, gave Mr Trump an 8 but said holiday shopping had been harder in 2025 because tariffs had doubled or tripled some prices.

“I would definitely hope to see those tariffs go down and improve over time,” she said.

Mr Gerald Dunn, 67, a martial arts instructor in New York’s Hudson Valley who rated Mr 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,” Mr Dunn said.

Other voters, however, said they had not noticed any price increases due to the tariffs.

Mr Terry Alberta, 64, a pilot in Michigan, noted that US 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, Mr 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 Mr 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 Mr Trump voters, their ages, educational backgrounds, races/ethnicities, locations and voting histories roughly correspond to those of Mr Trump’s overall electorate.

They were selected from 429 respondents to a February 2025 Ipsos poll who said they voted for Mr Trump in November and were willing to speak to a reporter.

Mr Don Jernigan, 75, a retiree in Virginia Beach, rated Mr 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,” Mr Jernigan said. “The small guys are totally regulated out of the system, and I haven’t seen anything happen to change that.”

In Georgia, Mr David Ferguson, 54, said he hoped Mr 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.

Mr 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 US 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 Mr Nunez, who rated Mr Trump a 2 on affordability.

“I don’t think he’s done a whole lot (to improve the) prices of anything,” Mr Nunez added.

‘Drill, baby, drill’

A common refrain, especially among voters who gave Mr Trump high marks overall, was that the president lacks the power to immediately lower costs.

Ms Kate Mottl, 62, of the Chicago suburbs, and Mr Rich Somora, 62, in Charlotte, North Carolina, who rated the president 8 and 6 respectively, repeated one of Mr Trump’s campaign mottos, “drill, baby, drill,” suggesting that opening up more US territory to oil and gas extraction would help lower the cost of living.

Both also underscored that Mr Trump was limited in his ability to directly reduce prices.

Ms Mottl said she would like to see prices drop on groceries and utilities, but was “very optimistic” about Mr 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,” Mr Somora said.

Mr Will Brown, 20, a student in Madison, Wisconsin, blamed current inflation on the Biden administration’s federal spending initiatives which pumped cash into the US money supply.

Although Mr 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,” Mr Brown said. REUTERS