Transcript of Trump 2.0: The President’s Affordability Problem

From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Kittrowaf. This is The Daily.

What was your most important issue when you voted in 2024? Probably the economy. Well, the economy, first and foremost. I lived solely on social security, so the economy, it was extremely important to me. I didn't really think my dollar was going as far as it could.

Donald Trump was elected in 2024 on the promise that he would fix the economy, the number one issue for a broad coalition of voters.

Today, just after one year of President Trump, our economy is booming, income is rising, investment is soaring, inflation has been defeated.

Now, as the President goes out into the country to defend his economic agenda. Cost of gas bill isn't where it was when he was in his first term. Housing affordability.

That is nonexistent. Haven't started a family yet, primarily because of the cost of living.

My expectation was for prices to go down and not have to pay outrageous interest rates, but that's not what happened, is it? A new poll from the New York Times reveals that the issue that may have won the election for President Trump may now be driving voters away.

His campaign promises were that the economy was going to be so much better. I don't see a lot of improvement since he has been back in office.

I felt confident that he was going to come and help us, but now that we're just one year into it, I feel bamboozled. I feel like I was stupid to vote for him. I should have known better. I expected this guy to be a populace. I feel like he's not different from any of the other presidents. Today, in the second in a series of episodes evaluating the first year of Trump's presidency, my colleague, Nate Cohn, explains what the poll tells us about how skeptical voters are of Trump, his handling of the economy, and their own chances of living the lives they dreamed of. It's Friday, January 30th. Nate, we are coming to you because right now we're at this moment where we want to step back and try to evaluate how President Trump has fared on his signature issues about a year into his presidency. You, lucky for us, have just put out the latest results from this set of major polls that you're doing as our chief political analyst here at the Times. That poll, it really drills down on Trump's performance on the key issue of the last election, which was the economy.

But just to understand where Trump is at right now with voters, I want to ask you to remind us of where voters were in the run up to the election and right after it as a way of understanding what people's hopes were for this year, what they wanted. Explain that to me.

Donald Trump entered office with relatively broad support among the American people. He won the popular vote, albeit narrowly, but he won the popular vote nonetheless. Voters were optimistic, or at least hopeful, that he would return the economy back to something like the pre-pandemic normal, the economy we had when he was President the first time around. His approval rating as he entered office was in the '50s. These were really strong numbers for him. Usually, Donald Trump had approval ratings in the low '40s or even the '30s. As Donald Trump entered office, he entered with a much broader coalition with an electorate that was much more hopeful about what a second term for President Trump might look like. They thought he might get the border under control and reduce crime. He also entered as a cultural phenomenon in a way that he hadn't previously. You might remember there was talk of conservative vibe shift in the culture a year ago.

A lot of this talk of a vibe shift came down to who was in this broader coalition that you mentioned. Younger voters, more non-white voters, somewhat disengaged, infrequent voters. They all moved towards Trump.

Yeah, Trump made enormous gains in 2024 among young, non-white, less educated, lower-income voters. Voters who traditionally had voted for Democrats and who Democrats had often taken for granted.

The The question was always, how durable is that shift? Was this change in the political landscape permanent or was it just a flash in the pan? Was it just a reaction to Biden? It sounds like we have some information about that now.

That's right. We've just finished a national poll one year into Donald Trump's term, and it does not look like the polls did a year ago or like the polls did in the run up to his victory in 2024. His approval rating is at 40%. That's down considerably from the 48% favorability rating he had heading into the election, let alone the majority support that he had when he entered office. And importantly, those big demographic shifts that we saw in the 2024 election, they have mostly reversed. Young, non-white, lower income, less engaged voters, they have gone from being his relative strong points to, again, looking much weaker for him. In fact, in almost every respect, it looks like a poll that you could have done during Trump's first term. Now, as you pointed out, this does answer this long-standing question about what happened in the 2024 election. Was this a permanent shift or was this just a reaction to Joe Biden? On its face, it looks a little bit more like a reaction to Joe Biden, or at the very least, it's certainly not a permanent shift. I do think, though, that that doesn't mean that what happened during the 2024 campaign wasn't real.

What it may mean is that Donald Trump squandered an opportunity that he did enter with real support from groups that haven't traditionally voted for Republicans, but he has not succeeded in consolidating that support in office. In fact, he's reminded voters of the very reasons why they didn't support him initially in 2016 or in 2020. Fast.

You're saying basically he lost ground with the people that he'd won over. What do we know about why?

We know a lot about why in one respect, which is that on almost every question we ask about, voters disapprove of his handling of the issues. They disapprove of his handling of the economy. They disapprove of his handling of immigration. They disapprove of his handling of the federal government spending. They disapprove of the big, beautiful bill. They disapprove of his foreign policy on Israel and Ukraine and Venezuela. There's no shortage of explanations. There are only a very small number of bright spots for Trump in this poll. I would say his handling of the border is really the only unequivocal strong point here. I do think that the poll suggests that of all of those things, that the economy is still the single most important reason why Donald Trump has lost ground. That's partly because many of his worst numbers are on the economy. It's partly because when you really dig into the attitudes of the individual voters who say that they no longer support him, those voters are really unusually likely to say that the economy and affordability is the biggest problem facing the country.

Is it fair to say that those switchers, they went to Trump in 2024 because of the economy, and now you see them moving away from him, turning away from Trump because of the economy?

I think that's right. Now, again, Donald Trump is unpopular on almost every issue we asked about. It's possible that if the economy was fine, they'd still be upset at him over his handling of ICE, for instance. What we know, though, is that these voters say that The economy is the biggest problem facing the country. 44% of the Trump defectors cite economic issues compared with 24% of other voters. We know that they give him really negative marks on his handling of the economy, even though that used to be one of his greatest strengths. To me, the economy looks like the most straightforward central explanation for why these voters swing back against Donald Trump in our poll, even though there are undoubtedly other factors as well.

What about the handling of the economy are these voters so frustrated with? What's their specific beef?

How far down the affordability rabbit hole do you want to go here, by the way?

Let's go all the way.

Well, standing on the outside of the hole for a second. I think that Most people say that he just hasn't made the country more affordable. A majority say that his policies have made life less affordable. So he was elected to make things more affordable. They think it's less affordable. The tariffs are probably part of that. Continuing long term inflation that he's not responsible for is probably part of that. Medicaid cuts, for instance, is another example of a way in which Trump's policies don't seem like they're making things easier for ordinary people. Fundamentally, they just don't think he's focused on dealing with the problem that they elected him to address. A majority of voters say that he's not focused on the issues that they care about most.

Maybe a reference to the complaint or the criticism of Trump for spending so much time abroad Building the ball room, being out of touch.

Absolutely. What it all adds up to, though, is a very low approval rate on his handling of the cost of living. Only 34% of voters approve of his handling of the cost of living, 64% disapproved. That's his second worst result in the poll, trailing only the Epstein files. Wow.

I want to break down exactly what we're talking about here and what people mean when they say they're worried about affordability. What does the poll tell us about that, Nate?

We asked people what they worried most about affording, and a majority of people listed, call it a big ticket, middle class essential, health care, housing, education, education, children, the things that if you can't afford them, you're no longer living a middle class life. They were less likely to mention, call them regular or monthly expenses, food, utilities, transportation. That's not to say that they aren't concerned about those things, too, or that they aren't really upset about the price of eggs, but only about a fifth of people said that that's what they worried most about affording. We also asked people just whether something was unaffordable affordable to them or not. Once again, those monthly expenses, utilities, gas, food, only about a fifth of people said that they couldn't afford those items. Now, it's worth noting, of course, that for lower income people, the story is pretty different. Lower income people living paycheck to paycheck, they are being kept up at night over those regular monthly expenses. But when talking about the electorate overall or middle class, let alone upper middle class people, those big ticket items like housing and education tend to prevail.

What you're describing is this deeper worry. People obviously don't like that things that they have to buy on a daily basis are so expensive that they can buy less. But the thing really on people's minds, it sounds like, especially middle class people's minds, are these long term life prospect level concerns. It does strike me, though, Nate, that there was just no way that any president was going to solve those lose concerns in a single year, right?

I think that's right. I do think that there is a question about whether voters think any progress is being made. Voters think that Donald Trump's policies have made things less affordable. I can imagine that if Trump had made some progress on these issues or was seen as focused on these issues, that his political standing would be much better, even if there was still a very long way to go before the ordinary 28-year-old could buy a house like we imagine someone in 1970 But I think you're right that the problems that we're talking about, education, health care, housing, child care, and so on, these are long-standing problems. They're problems where costs have been going up even during periods of low inflation. It's unlikely that they'll be addressed in Donald Trump's presidency, even if he was focused on them.

What this tells us, basically, is that people don't see him making enough progress or trying hard enough to have made a difference for them, even in this short period of time.

Yeah, and I would also point out they think he's made these problems worse. So not only is he not doing enough to solve them, but they think he's making things more expensive, too. And that adds up to something really big. 65% of people said that a middle-class life was out of reach for most people. More than three quarters say it's gotten harder to achieve that middle-class life than a generation ago. Making this problem worse is a really big deal. It means putting what people ordinarily expect out of their life and out of the life of most Americans out of reach for them.

When we come back, we'll hear from voters that our producers Olivia Nat and Stella Tan spoke to on the phone about the lives they want to live and how far they are from achieving them. We'll be right back. Hello, this is Kelsey. Hi, Kelsey. This is Olivia calling from the New York Times.

This is Stella Tan. I'm calling because you recently participated in a New York Times poll.

Would you have a few minutes to chat? Sure.

Okay.

My name is Marcus Villa. I'm 38 years old.

nick Syracuse, 24 years old.

I am a current student, and I'm 31. I work as an event manager for a security company. I'm a caregiver.

I'm a reinsurance broker.

I work at a comic book retail shop.

Senior sales consultant at the number one key dealership in the state of Michigan.

And how would you describe your financial situation right now? Surviving, Paycheck to paycheck at the moment. We've made the most money I ever thought I'd ever make, and it just doesn't seem like it's enough. Drowning. I can barely afford to survive, and I'm making a lot of money.

Can I ask how much you're making? I make 84,000 a year. Last year, I made 90,000. You're going to laugh. I made just over 20,000 this last year. Is there an aspect of the economy or the cost of living that makes you most anxious right now?

I mean, honestly, the inability of people in my generation to afford housing.

Housing, food, and health care, obviously, those are the three big ones.

Health insurance, car insurance, rent. Every paycheck is two bills only. Definitely anxious about having children. With your income, do you feel like you're able to afford the life you want?

No, not by any I feel like I can eventually, but it's definitely harder and more expensive than it once was. It seems like almost you got to make a couple of hundred thousand dollars now to have any chance to save it any money and live in a decent lifestyle. I mean, we have a fixed income. We should be able to own a single family home, drive a decent vehicle, take a little bit of money away for retirement, and that seems to be far away from where we're at right now, unfortunately.

If I'm receiving promotions and getting a better I check.

I should be feeling like I'm succeeding. I drive a 2001 Ford Focus. I shouldn't be driving a car from 2001.

I remember parents back in the early 2000s being able to get off work, go home, watch the news, have dinner, enjoy time with their kids. We are no longer afforded that. Nate, what our producers heard when they called some of the voters that you pulled was just how deep their fears and anxieties were about their economic future. I want to ask you, since you've spent all this time parsing these numbers, what struck you about this group of Americans that are so on edge right now?

I think the thing that struck me most about it was that there was a really deep generational divide. Young people were just much more concerned about affordability and the ability to achieve a middle class life than older people. Only 24% of our 18 to 29-year-old respondents said that they thought they could afford the life they thought they should be able to afford compared to 63% of people over age 65.

Wow, that's a big difference.

It's a big difference. Only 27% of young people said they had achieved a middle class lifestyle compared with two-thirds of older voters. Those are really big differences. I think it's pretty easy to explain why young people are much more anxious about this. They haven't yet bought that middle class life. They don't own a home. They haven't raised their kids. They haven't sent them to college or retired. Older people, in contrast, bought all those things. They've purchased a home many years ago. They have Medicare. They already raise their family. While on the other hand, now, a majority of voters under 45 say that the cost of having a family has gotten so high that it's become unaffordable.

You said this, but what you're seeing is that people are having a really hard time feeling like they can't achieve what they expected they would be able to achieve. I guess what I'm wondering is Is that sense actually grounded in reality? Because my understanding is that the overall economy is actually doing okay on the whole. So help me understand that.

It's a really good question, and it's one people have been debating about for years now. I think that it's useful to step back and think about what the economic data we're talking about really is and what it says. The main measure that people are looking at to say that things aren't that bad is real median income. That's how much money people are making a just inflation. Inflation is measured by something called the consumer price index, which is a basket of goods, everything from food to electronics to childcare. It looks at how much the average person spends and how much the cost of that average person spending changes over time. By that measure, people's wages have been keeping up with the growing costs of goods. That's where you get the argument that maybe things aren't actually that bad, and maybe we're actually better off than ever before, even if it doesn't feel like it. I think the catch, though, is that that story doesn't necessarily hold up for the goods that we've been talking about. The price of housing, health care, education, Those middle class necessities, the prices of those goods has increased more than wages in recent decades.

If you are the person who is trying to buy those goods today, you really are finding it harder to buy those things than you would have 40 or 50 years ago. For the people that we're talking about who are trying to get that middle class life, who haven't bought it yet, people in their late 20s, 30s who are now staring at having to buy those things, they are going to try and tackle those big and growing costs head-on. For that person, I think that there's a really good argument that their incomes haven't necessarily kept up with the ability to buy into this middle class life.

You're saying people aren't wrong when they look at their incomes and what they're able to afford in terms of these big purchases, they notice a deficit there that's real and that is perhaps bigger than in past generations.

Yeah, there are a lot of different layers here. Because these things are so expensive and because they are so essential, they are very difficult to compromise on. Families are often being put in a position where if things get harder, they may just simply not be able to do it. You simply may not be able to have a home. You may not be able to send your kid to college. That's how it feels. It means that even though income have kept up with inflation, it's probably the case that more people have had to compromise on their life goals or stare down the of compromising on their life goals.

Nate, given how weighty all of this is sounding, I want to turn to what the political implications of it may be. Does the reversal on Trump for many people as the best steward of the economy, especially among younger people. Does that represent an opportunity for Democrats? Is that a bright spot for them?

It's definitely a bright spot for Democrats. It creates an opening for them. They're going to do well in all likelihood in the midterm elections, which historically are basically just an up or down referendum on the party in power. People are upset at Trump. The Democrats are going to do well this November. Looking farther down the line, say, to 2028, there's a new opportunity for Democrats to try and capitalize on these issues, but it's worth noting that they don't enter with much credibility on affordability either. It's not obvious to me that they are teed up to fair exceptionally well or as well as you might guess, given the President's approval rating. They have their work cut out for them.

So just because voters are turning on Trump right now on the economy, it doesn't mean they're turning toward Democrats. Is that something you see in the poll? Do we know that for sure that they don't trust Democrats on this?

So we didn't ask them in the poll, but I think it's worth juxtaposing two different findings that the poll had. One was that we asked people whether they'll vote for Democrats or Republicans in the midterm election, and Democrats led by five among registered voters. It's quite a bit better than ahead of the 2024 election when the Republicans, as you know, won the popular vote, not only for the presidency, but also for the House of Representatives. On the other hand, we asked people whether they see themselves as Democrats or Republicans. More people still consider themselves Republicans than Democrats. People are dissatisfied with Trump. They may now be open to the Democrats, should the Democrats be able to put forward a message that convinces them to support them. But they haven't yet turned toward the Democrats in the same way, by the way, that voters did turn towards the Republicans during the Biden era, in no small part because Trump had credibility on these issues already. It's also worth noting that in the poll, more people blame Joe Biden for our biggest economic problems still than Donald Trump. This may be really counterintuitive, but when we ask people how well the economy is doing, more people say the economy is doing well than at any other point in our polling since the pandemic.

Wow. So even as they disapprove of how Trump is handling the economy, people do seem to gradually be feeling better about the economy over the last year and over the last few years. Now, it may mostly be Republicans coming around the Trump economy, but the proportion of voters who say the economy is good or excellent has gone up seven points since the election, and it's gone up a lot more than that since, say, 2022 when inflation was peaking. There's a steady long term trend where people think the economy is doing a little better.

Wait, Well, how do you square that, Nate, with what you've told us?

I'm going to take a shot at it, and I'm not sure I will fully be able to do that. But I think the story is voters thought Joe Biden was a complete catastrophe on the economy. Views of his presidency and the economy really bottled out in 2022 as a result of that. Voters still look back today and say, What happened then, that's the biggest reason why things are bad now, is the stuff that happened when Joe Biden was President. As we get further and further from 2021 and 2022, people are gradually reevaluating the state of the economy upward as we move away from that post-pandemic upheaval.

It's like people are saying, We were in this incredibly deep hole. We've dug out of that hole a little bit, but We still have a really long way to go, and I'm not satisfied with where we are.

Still have a long way to go, and they don't even think Trump is helping here.

So on the whole, neither side is making a compelling case to voters that they're going to successfully tackle these huge forces that are just bearing down on people right now economically. I have to ask, though, Trump does seem to be recognizing that this has become a big problem for him and the party. He's been proposing these radical solutions to the affordability problems, things like capping credit card interest rates, banning private equity from buying single family homes, announcing deals with pharmaceutical companies to lower drug prices. I think there are a lot of questions about whether he's actually going to be able to do these things, but do you view that as a potentially helpful push by the President to try to claw back what he's lost on this issue?

I think the short answer is no. I think that it is better for Donald Trump to acknowledge the issue and to seem to be proposing solutions than to do nothing or to deny the problem. In that sense, it's probably better for him to be talking about these things than to call affordability a hoax as he did last month. However, I am generally pretty skeptical of gimmicky policies. It reminds me actually a little bit about how Biden and Harris handled this. You may remember shrinkflation, and they were going to go after price gouging. They had their own bucket of gimmicks that they proposed in 2023 and 2024. It probably did help them compared to saying nothing at all, but it didn't solve the problem. It wasn't going to solve the problem. They didn't champion these ideas in a full in a throated, incredible way that had a chance to persuade voters that they were going to be solutions either. As long as the problems persist, Donald Trump is still going to be weighed down by this issue. If these gimmicks don't amount to actual solutions, he's still going to be weighed down by the problem.

When you look at the people that this poll focused on, the people who moved to Trump in 2024, who we looked at as part of this realignment, who are now turning away from him, largely because of the economy, where do you think of them politically now? Are they unmoored? Are they up for grabs?

I think that they're absolutely up for grabs. I think that some of them probably lean Republican. The political damage that was done to the Democrats during the Biden years will prove to be lasting to some extent or another. That's usually what happens in politics. When groups swing, they rarely go all the way back. Someone in this process was won over to the Republicans for good or alternately, if you prefer, has been alienated from the Democrats for life. That said, a lot of them are likely dissatisfied now with both sides. I would guess that many could return to the sidelines of politics, that they may not vote in the next election, while others will be more genuinely persuadable voters who, if Democrats introduce a new set of ideas, a new message, a new candidate, and things continue to stay this bad, then Democrats will have a chance to win many of them back.

It does seem like what this poll shows is that the thing that people are most concerned about are these massive issues that are very difficult to solve with campaign promises, with a single year of policy, maybe even with four years of policy. I'm wondering, when you look at that, what is the Democratic or the Republican Party party to make of it? What do they do in that scenario?

I think that stepping back for a second, you can see the signs of these issues beginning to weigh on the parties for a long time. I mean, beginning in the 2015 campaign, whether it was Bernie on the left or Donald Trump on the right, or the emergence of Mamdani in the New York mayoral race this year. What all these things have in common is that there's a growing share of the electorate, relatively young, relatively low income. It seems relatively non-white as well, that is so dissatisfied with the country and with their prospects and with the opportunities that they have in life, that they're open to very nontraditional political candidacies that we wouldn't have imagined in 1997. I think we have reason to believe that those pressures are still building. We've been in an era of change elections now for at least a decade and perhaps going all the way back to 2008. The mainstream of both parties has been discredited by failures in government, whether it was the failures of Bush or the failures of Obama and Biden or now the failures of Trump. Those failures by mainstream politicians creates openings for new ideas, outsiders.

Now, as we've seen from these same efforts, including Donald Trump himself, if those change candidates win and then fail to address the problems that they campaigned on, We just start the cycle all over again, where voters then will go back to the drawing board looking for change. That may mean the next change candidate looks nothing like the last one. But as long as these deep, simmering problems continue to exist in American society, society. We're going to keep having voters looking for something very different from what they've had before.

Well, Nate, thank you so much.

Thanks for having me.

We'll We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Senate Democrats reached a deal with President Trump to pass five bills funding large parts of the government while continuing to hammer out restrictions on the administration's immigration crackdown. To avert a shutdown, Congress has to pass the spending package before a deadline of midnight on Friday. If the agreement does hold, it will provide two weeks of funding to the Department of Homeland Security while Democrats negotiate with the White House over their demands to rein in federal immigration agents. The deal reflected an abrupt shift on Capitol Hill after the fatal shooting of Alex Pretty last weekend. Democrats initially blocked the spending package, which includes $64 billion for DHS, saying they wouldn't fund the Department unless there were limits put on the actions of immigration officers. Today's episode was produced by Stella Tan, Olivia Nat, and Carlos Prieto. It was edited by Mark George with help from Paige Cawet. Contains music by Marion Lozano, Dan Powell, and Ron Nemistow, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. The Daily's engineers are Chris Wood and Alyssa Moxley, with engineering support from Maddie Macielo, nick Pitman, and Kyle Grandillo.

Our theme song is by Ben Lansberg and Jim Brunberg of Alexander Lee. Our radio team is Jody Becker, Ron Nemistow, Diane Wong, and Katherine Anderson. Alexander Lee Young is our Deputy Executive Producer. Michael Benoit is our Deputy Editor. Paige Cahit is the Editor of The Daily. Ben Calhoun is our executive producer. Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Larissa Anderson, Sam Dolnik, and to the founding editor of the show, Lisa Tobin. It for The Daily. I'm Natalie Kytrowet. See you on Sunday.