President Donald Trump once relied on voter trust on economic issues to propel him into office and to minimize his party's losses once he was in office. But after a few months back in power, the economy is instead one of his biggest weaknesses, wrote election data firm Split Ticket's Leon Sit and Max McCall for The Washington Post on Monday.
"Donald Trump rode a wave of economic discontent back into the White House, with nostalgia for the pre-covid economy guiding voters to reelect the president who presided over that time period," they wrote. "Trump’s voters entrusted him to work to assuage cost-of-living concerns and supercharge the national economy. But just three months into his second presidential term, Trump’s promised protectionist push has opened cracks in the Republican coalition — and could prove to transform economic issues from Republicans’ spearpoint into their Achilles’ heel."
The big problem is Trump's trade war, which he escalated this month with his so-called "Liberation Day" tariffs imposing 10 to 49 percent import duties on essentially every country in the world, with trade deficits determining which countries get penalized the most.
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Trump ultimately dialed it back somewhat with a 90-day grace period in which every country except China will only be subject to the minimum of 10 percent — but not before markets plunged, members of his party turned on him, the world began retaliating and pivoting away from U.S. markets, and voters began to blame him for the chaos.
"While his overall approval is still higher than his first-term lows, the economic numbers are a potential leading indicator that he has further to drop," wrote Sit and McCall. "Though Trump’s economic approval began to sink even before 'Liberation Day,' it appears the recent chaos in the markets has further accelerated their decline. Disapproval is predictably high among Democrats, but the president’s position is also deeply unpopular among independents."
Even Republicans, who are still largely on Trump's side, don't have the same obsession with wiping out trade deficits.
Trump sinking on the economy would be a huge problem for him, they wrote — because even at his low points, he has generally polled solidly on it. It's arguably what helped him win in 2016 and 2024, and even in 2018, when the GOP was wiped out, it was over health care issues and Trump's personal character, with voters still broadly trusting Trump and Republicans on the economy.
"Republicans would be foolish to ignore this rising discontent: Biden and the Democratic brand were heavily damaged by concerns about rising costs of living and inflation, which might have doomed the Harris campaign," they concluded. "If Republicans cannot restore the faith Americans once had in their economic vision, they risk serious losses in the 2026 midterms — and potentially even the 2028 presidential election."