Trump's economic agenda is losing support, but Democrats see few gains

Japan Times

16 hours ago

U.S. voters are increasingly souring on President Donald Trump's handling of the economy, according to a raft of new polling, but that disapproval still isn't translating into a political windfall for Democrats.
Just 37% of voters approve of Trump's approach to the economy as of July, according to Gallup polling, down from 42% in February 2025. While Republicans still strongly back the president, the bulk of the drop comes from falling support among independents — less than a third of whom now think he's doing a good job.
This new polling from Gallup, plus similar findings from the Wall Street Journal, CBS News and others, highlights the potential warning signs for both political parties heading into the 2026 midterms.
For Trump, an economy he has openly celebrated is flashing warning signs, including in hiring data. A slower-than-expected jobs report Friday sparked a furious backlash from the president, who questioned without evidence whether the numbers had been politically manipulated and fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Democrats looking to retake the House of Representatives need to convince voters they can be trusted on issues like fighting inflation, bringing down the cost of housing and creating new jobs for the working class — messages Democrats failed to adequately convey during the 2024 presidential election.
Yet even while voters express some skepticism of Trump's agenda on both questions, a recent Wall Street Journal poll showed they trust Republicans more than Democrats to tackle both inflation and tariffs — even though Republicans in Congress have nearly unanimously voted to back the president's policies.
The same poll showed 63% of voters hold an unfavorable view of Democrats overall — double the amount (30%) who hold a favorable view.
"Trump's support on the economy is eroding, but Democrats are not gaining in kind,' said Lanae Erickson, senior vice president for social policy, education and politics at Third Way. "Even on things Trump is underwater on, like tariffs, voters are blaming Trump but not Republicans broadly.'
Republicans have their own set of challenges, as they too plan to center their midterm message on the state of the economy.
Trump likes to talk about the way America has entered a so-called golden age, pointing to stock market gains, but data show a more mixed picture of the overall economy.
While layoffs remain low, hiring has slowed. Employment growth has averaged just 35,000 jobs in the past three months, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the worst since the pandemic. Friday's jobs report — which preceded Trump's social media outburst — showed payrolls up 73,000 in July while the prior two months were downgraded by nearly 260,000.
What's more, tariffs threaten to raise consumer prices, even if the impact has been limited so far, and company earnings are expected to clock in a lowest amount in the last two years.
"Running an inflationary trade war is probably not smart politics,' said Michael Strain, director of Economic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. "It's a big gamble that the trade war won't result in inflation.'
Trump's signature legislative accomplishment, the sweeping tax, budget and health care law he calls the "One Big, Beautiful Bill,' also remains unpopular with a huge swath of voters. Some 46% of adults say the tax legislation will hurt their families, while 28% do not expect to be affected, according to polling from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
That's a problem the party will need to overcome, if it's meant to serve as a cornerstone of its accomplishments in Trump's first year.
It also echoes a problem Democrats never found a way to solve with former President Joe Biden's signature bills, an infrastructure package and a climate and tax law that were largely ignored by voters in 2022, when Republicans narrowly won control of the House.
Barack Obama's signature legislation, the Obamacare health care law, became so politically toxic that it helped Republicans sweep to a more than 60-seat gain in the 2010 House elections in what became known as the Tea Party wave on promises to repeal it. The law, which recovered in political popularity over subsequent years as its effects began to take hold, has mostly survived.
To hold onto the House, Republicans will need the support of independents and non-MAGA Republicans. Trump's support appears to be softening with both groups.
A recent Gallup poll showed some movement toward Democrats as Trump began implementing his economic agenda. By a narrow margin — 46% to 43% — voters said they leaned more toward the Democratic Party than the Republican Party in the second quarter of 2025. That's a reversal from the last quarter before Trump took office, when Democrats trailed Republicans by a nearly identical margin, 43%-47%.
Democrats say they plan to capitalize on voters' uneven view of the economy, by building their midterm message on the issue of affordability.
"Folks are struggling to limit the cost of housing, food, child care, health care, energy costs — and that was the big promise Republicans made, that they were going to lower costs on Day 1. They are absolutely not focused on that at all,' said Rep. Suzan DelBene, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee at a recent gathering with reporters. "Their focus is on helping the wealthiest and well-connected.'
That focus would be a change from 2024, when the party was torn on whether to emphasize an economic message, or to talk about the threat they believed Trump posed to democracy. Kamala Harris toggled between the two ideas during the final sprint of her campaign.
Yet Trump's signature style is to move so fast and on so many fronts, from immigration to foreign policy, that Democrats have struggled to stay on an economic message. Issues like Israel and Gaza have exposed rifts among Democrats that Republicans, largely united behind the president, are eager to exploit.
In recent days, Democrats have also seized on stories about Trump's connections to the late disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, sensing a vulnerability for the president's party on that story among independent voters.
Historically, Republicans have held the advantage on being the party most trusted to handle the economy and that's something Democrats will have to try to overcome in both the midterms and in the 2028 presidential race.
When Trump lost in 2020 and Biden prevailed, political pundits attributed those election results to the aftermath of the once-in-a-century pandemic — not any increased confidence in Democrats' ability to manage the economy. Trump — who, at one point, had suggested Americans could inject bleach into their bodies to fight COVID-19 — had lost voters' trust to handle a massive health care crisis that had upended American life.
Then, once he was in office, Biden lost trust. The return to normalcy and stable leadership promised by his campaign collapsed in the messy U.S. exit from Afghanistan, and his approval ratings never recovered.
Americans broadly didn't buy the idea that the economy was in good shape overall, and weren't swayed when he and his aides tried to convince Americans that soaring post-COVID inflation was only temporary.
"The American people rendered a pretty clear judgment,' AEI's Strain said, speaking about one of the challenges Democrats face for the midterms. "They held President Biden responsible for the inflation we experienced in 2021 and 2022 and that is still fresh in people's mind.'