Polling analysis has shown that President Donald Trump won the 2024 election with a coalition of blue-collar voters who were concerned about inflation in the American economy.
The New Republic's Greg Sargent, however, looked at some recent polling on Trump's signature policies of slapping tariffs on nearly every nation in the world and has found that it is not at all popular among the people Trump has claimed it would benefit.
"Public polls actually suggest that Trump’s tariffs threaten to alienate such voters—in a way that provides Democrats an opening to fracture the working-class coalition that elected Trump in 2024," writes Sargent.
Although he notes that Trump's tariff policies have been erratic and subject to change on a whim, he still believes that "the politics of this will get worse, including with working-class voters."
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A recent poll from Marquette Law School, for example, finds a majority of voters without college degrees believe that Trump's tariffs will make them worse off by increasing the amount they will have to pay for staple goods that are imported from overseas.
Labor analyst Richard Yeselson tells Sargent that it's notable that nonwhite blue-collar voters appear particularly skeptical of Trump's tariffs given that they are more likely than white blue-collar workers to work in industries that will be more aversely impacted by the policy.
“The nonwhite working class are disproportionately working in those industries where they perceive they’re not going to get a benefit,” he tells Sargent. “If you’re working in an Amazon warehouse, Amazon is getting all these 50-inch televisions and iPhones from China. Those will not only be more expensive for consumers, but Amazon is already canceling some of these orders altogether. That’s bad news for port truck drivers and warehouse workers who are disproportionately nonwhite.”
