Americans are increasingly down on President Donald Trump’s handling of the economy, according to a new December AP-NORC poll, as both parties get set to duke it out over affordability ahead of the coming midterm elections.
Just 31 percent of respondents approve of Trump’s economic leadership, though results were predictably along partisan lines: 69 percent of Republicans and only 7 percent of Democrats approved. That overall number is down from 33 percent in November and 40 percent in March. But the president continues to insist that the outlook is strong — and that Democrats’ focus on the stubbornly high cost of living is a hoax.
“A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus,” he graded his economy in an interview with POLITICO’s Dasha Burns on Monday.
Voters have thus far disagreed. Republicans took heavy losses in November’s off-year elections, losing races in New Jersey, Virginia and Georgia largely due to affordability concerns. And nearly half of respondents told The POLITICO Poll, released in early December, that Trump was responsible for the current state of the economy.
The White House plans to make affordability a key selling point for Republicans across the board as the 2026 midterm elections come into focus, James Blair, a top Trump political adviser, told POLITICO in November. Trump’s bid to drive down automobile prices by axing former President Joe Biden’s fuel economy requirements last week was the latest salvo in that push.
But the president has struggled to stay on message. In a northeastern Pennsylvania address on Tuesday that was billed as the first stop on a tour of speeches about the economy, Trump spent time denigrating Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). And while the president again referred to voters’ affordability concerns as a “hoax,” he appeared to endorse restraint during the holiday shopping season, reprising an oft-criticized line from May by claiming that children should be happy with “two or three” dolls.
“President Trump inherited the worst inflation crisis in a generation from Joe Biden’s incompetence, and his Administration has rapidly cooled inflation to a 2.5 percent annualized rate. As the Administration’s supply-side policies of tax cuts, deregulation, and energy abundance continue taking effect, Americans can count on inflation continuing to fall and real wages continuing to rise,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai said in a statement.
Respondents are also down on Trump’s handling of immigration, with 38 percent approving of his policies, down from 49 percent in March and 42 percent in November.
The AP-NORC poll was conducted by survey Dec. 4-8, with a random sample of 1,146 respondents. The margin of error for the poll is plus or minus 4.0 percentage points; the margin of error is larger for subgroups.
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