What a New Survey Shows about Trump’s Tariffs

For most of the past century, politics has helped tariffs endure in Washington despite a pile of research arguing against them. Trade has long ranked near the bottom of American voters’ policy priorities because the issue is complicated and counterintuitive — and because relatively few Americans’ livelihoods depend on the import-export business. Advocacy is also a one-sided affair: The benefits of trade barriers motivate the few protected producers who gain, while the costs are spread too thin for millions of payers to notice. Until now.

In a new Cato Institute-Morning Consult survey of 4,150 registered voters, a startling 75 percent said tariffs will be important to their vote in the midterms this November, including 35 percent who said the issue is very important. Trade has been yanked from the political shadows, and those responsible won’t like what they see.

Among respondents, 74 percent said tariffs raised prices at the store. Fifty-three percent said tariffs weakened the U.S. economy, versus 33 percent who said they strengthened it. Forty-nine percent said tariffs made their own lives worse; just 23 percent said better. Only 21 percent accepted President Donald Trump’s position that foreigners primarily pay tariffs. Fifty-seven percent also viewed his handling of trade unfavorably.

Given the president’s affection for tariffs, Democrats unsurprisingly led the opposition, but independents — who often decide elections — weren’t far behind. Seventy-three percent of independents had an unfavorable view of Trump’s handling of trade policy, and opposition to broad tariffs tilted 47 percent to 28 percent. Fifty-two percent of independents said tariffs weakened the economy, and just 11 percent said the measures improved their quality of life — even lower than the 16 percent of Democrats who said the same. Sixty-four percent of independents said tariffs would be important to their midterm vote.

The current trade policy also lacks support from the working-class voters that Trump claims his tariffs champion. Across numerous questions, the views of both non-college-educated respondents and those whose households make less than $50,000 per year were within a few percentage points of the population overall. More than 70 percent of each group thought tariffs raised prices, while more than half thought the measures weakened the economy. Contrary to the White House’s narrative, the nation’s “forgotten” men and women are not demanding more tariffs.

Just as important are the survey’s questions on real-world trade-offs. When asked about using tariffs to boost American manufacturing and jobs, 45 percent of respondents favored taxing most imports. Yet this support fell as tariffs’ annual price tag rose: 38 percent were willing to pay $100 per household, and just 29 percent would pay $1,000. (The Yale Budget Lab puts the real bill at roughly $1,100 per household annually.)

These responses show that many voters willing to support tariffs in the abstract oppose them when asked to pay less than they’re actually paying today. Republicans are no exception: Their support dropped from 70 percent to just 39 percent when asked to pay $1,000 per year to fund their guy’s signature policy.

The Cato survey’s results are hardly outliers. In nearly every major poll over the past year, tariffs drew 55 to 65 percent opposition or disapproval. Even more respondents, 70 to 75 percent, believed that tariffs raised prices. State battleground polls showed similar findings. This month, CBS-YouGov found that likely voters preferred a congressional candidate who opposed the president’s tariff approach by a 26-point margin. And, per a September Fox News poll, GOP support for tariffs has declined 21 points since “Liberation Day” last year, with only “MAGA Republicans” still saying the measures help the economy.

Campaigns have noticed. In contested Senate races in Texas, Georgia and North Carolina, the Democratic candidates’ affordability pitch includes nixing Trump’s tariffs. Iowa’s Senate race is suddenly a toss-up, where populist Democrat Josh Turek promised to “end the chaotic tariffs that are sending farms toward a 1980s-style farm crisis.” Even Democrat Sherrod Brown, long the Senate’s most reliable protectionist, is now running against tariffs in Ohio. Wonders never cease.

Back in Washington, Senate Republicans such as Thom Tillis, John Cornyn and Susan Collins — echoed by many anonymous colleagues — have openly warned about the consequences of Trump’s tariffs. Prominent Senate Democrats Ron Wyden and Chuck Schumer — the latter of whom once co-sponsored a pro-tariff bill (repeatedly) — have each introduced “messaging” bills to repeal Trump’s tariffs and the laws authorizing them. Other Democrats have, too.

In their words and deeds, American politicians of both parties have confirmed what the polls show: Trump’s “populist” tariffs are historically unpopular.

Several lessons emerge. First, after winning on an affordability message in 2024, Trump’s early-term decision to repeatedly embrace a policy that, in both design and result, raises domestic prices was an epic political blunder. Voters now widely distrust Republicans’ handling of the economy. And defending tariffs by deriding inflation-weary Americans’ desire to have cheap and abundant goods added literal insult to injury.

Second, voters’ hostility toward tariffs today reflects an important policy reality: Things that might sound good in a theoretical vacuum are often rejected when their real and predictable trade-offs become apparent. It was easy for armchair populists to sell tariffs by blaming the modern, dynamic economy’s inevitable disruptions on a single cause — imports — and promising a magical, costless alternative implemented by enlightened technocrats. Today’s real-world tariffs are far more difficult to defend now that their drawbacks (higher prices, legal and economic uncertainty, diminished influence abroad, cronyism, and more) have once again been revealed. Even diffuse costs become visible when they’re regularly in the press and itemized on a receipt.

Finally, the public’s growing opposition to tariffs undermines the conventional wisdom in Washington that protectionism is widely popular and electorally necessary in the United States. American voters across partisan lines recoiling at the first whiff of trouble indicates that the 2016–2024 realignment was not the grassroots mandate for global tariffs it’s often made out to be.

None of this means protectionism is, in all cases, a permanent political loser. For the select few who benefit from them, tariffs’ concentrated rewards will still drown out even broad public opposition. Few Democrats have become full-throated globalists. Committed free traders acknowledge, moreover, that national security might warrant restrictions on defense-related goods made by U.S. adversaries. But research and experience consistently show why tariffs should remain a narrow exception, not a general rule, and American voters now overwhelmingly agree.

How long will it take the president — and a U.S. Congress that just gave him even more tariff authority — to catch up?