By Julia Harte
Dec 13 – When Ron Dailey goes out to eat, he is shocked by the prices on the menu.
“Breakfast is $20 no matter how you slice it,” said Dailey, 63, who voted for President Donald Trump in November 2024.
Dailey, a Denver-area resident who works for an HR outsourcing solutions firm, believes the “back and forth of rates” has sown market uncertainty, driving up some costs.
But he’s seen other prices drop — he recently paid just $1.74 a gallon for gas. Overall, he rates Trump an 8 out of 10 on handling the cost of living.
“There’s nothing the president has a magic wand about,” said Dailey, who believes the president’s tariffs and deregulatory agenda will eventually reduce most day-to-day costs.
Affordability is at the forefront of voters’ minds as both parties prepare for next year’s midterm congressional elections, with Republicans in particular concerned that continued high prices could hurt their chances of retaining control of Congress.
After campaigning last year on promises to tame inflation, Trump has alternated in recent weeks between dismissing affordability issues as a hoax, blaming President Joe Biden for them and promising that his economic policies will benefit Americans next year.
In interviews, a group of 20 Trump voters across the country whom Reuters has spoken to monthly since February revealed how much the costs are impacting their lives and where they place the blame. Reuters asked voters to rate the Trump administration’s approach to affordability on a scale of 1 to 10. Six of the 20 voters gave it a score of 5 or lower, and only one rated it higher than an 8.
But most voters strongly supported the president, predicting his policies would improve their long-term purchasing power or saying he had little control over day-to-day costs. Most blamed larger structural problems in the US economy—oligopolies, corporate greed, excessive money supply—for the rising cost of living.
GROWTH ANXIETY
Their views roughly match the results of recent polls. Nearly three-quarters of Trump voters who responded to a Reuters-Ipsos poll in early December said they approved of the president’s handling of the cost of living, compared with 30 percent of all respondents. Trump’s voter turnout was up 10 percentage points from a lower poll in November.
Still, Republicans fear they are vulnerable on the economy ahead of next year’s election, with independents more skeptical of the president’s economic policies. Trump hit the road this week to promote his cost-cutting efforts to the public, starting with a rally in Pennsylvania on Tuesday.
“I have no higher priority than making America affordable again,” Trump said at the rally, where he took credit for lowering gas and energy costs and the price of eggs. He blamed Biden for high prices on other goods, even though Trump has now been in office for nearly a year.
Government data shows that job growth has slowed during Trump’s second term, unemployment has risen to its highest level in four years and consumer prices remain high. Overall, economic growth has rebounded somewhat after contracting in the early months of the year.
Eight of the voters polled by Reuters reported rising prices at their local restaurants and grocery stores, particularly for meat and coffee, although a handful reported food prices had fallen, and 11 said they had seen gas prices drop in their area.
Several have complained that Trump has done too little to address such problems and that his signature tariffs have been applied inexpertly, unnecessarily raising prices for Americans.
Loretta Torres, 38, a mother of three near Houston, gave Trump an 8, but said holiday shopping was tougher this year because rates doubled or tripled some prices. “I would certainly hope to see these rates go down and improve over time,” she said.
Gerald Dunn, 67, a martial arts instructor from New York’s Hudson Valley, who rated Trump a 6 on prices, agreed. “Don’t throw in tariffs for no reason. That hurts the economy because uncertainty breeds anxiety,” Dunn said.
Other voters, however, said they have not seen any price increase due to the tariffs. Terry Alberta, 64, a pilot from Michigan, noted that American Black Friday shoppers spent a record amount of money online.
“People say they’re hurt, but they don’t seem to be hurt” enough to reduce such spending, Alberta said. “To beat up the administration and say, ‘Oh, these tariffs are horrible’ and everything, it’s like, then why are we still buying stuff?”
CORPORATE GREED
Regardless of how they rated Trump, most voters blamed private companies and macroeconomic factors for driving up the cost of basic goods and services.
While the 20 voters are not a statistically representative portrait of all Trump voters, their ages, educational backgrounds, races/ethnicities, locations, and voting histories roughly match those of the general Trump electorate. They were selected from among 429 respondents to a February 2025 Ipsos poll who said they voted for Trump in November and were willing to talk to a reporter.
Don Jernigan, 75, a retiree from Virginia Beach, gave Trump a 4 on affordability because he didn’t do enough to check oligopolies.
In industries like meatpacking, “you have such large corporations covering such large portions of our product supply chain,” Jernigan said. “The little guys are completely regulated outside the system and I haven’t seen anything happen to change that.”
In Georgia, David Ferguson, 54, said he hoped Trump would use executive orders to impose legislation capping profits in areas such as health insurance, blaming the “feeding frenzy” of dominant companies for high costs.
Lou Nunez, an 83-year-old retired Army veteran from Des Moines, Iowa, also pointed out that premium payments for Obamacare health plans will double if US lawmakers do not extend pandemic-era subsidies by the end of the year.
“That’s something that the president, if he chose, could probably get Congress to approve those subsidies, but I think he’s pretty against it,” said Nunez, who rated Trump a 2 on affordability.
“I don’t think it’s done very much (to improve) prices on anything,” Nunez added.
“Drill Baby Drill”
A common refrain, especially among voters who gave Trump high marks overall, was that the president doesn’t have the power to cut costs immediately.
Kate Mottl, 62, of suburban Chicago, and Rich Somora, 62, of Charlotte, North Carolina, who rated the president an 8 and a 6, respectively, echoed one of Trump’s campaign slogans, “drill, baby, drill,” suggesting that opening up more of the U.S. territory to oil and gas extraction would help lower the cost of living.
Both also pointed out that Trump was limited in his ability to cut prices directly. Mottl said she would like to see prices come down on food and utilities, but was “very optimistic” about Trump’s economic leadership. “There’s only so much he can do in the almost one year he’s been in office,” she said.
“A lot of it is changing policy, and a lot of it has to go through Congress,” Somora said.
Will Brown, 20, a student from Madison, Wis., blamed current inflation on the Biden administration’s federal spending initiatives that pumped cash into the US money supply.
Although Brown said meat prices are “enormous” and housing costs are out of reach for many Americans, he gave the president a 7 for affordability.
Fixing inflation and the high cost of living is “easy to say, but hard to do,” Brown said.
(Reporting by Julia Harte in New York; Editing by Paul Thomasch and Claudia Parsons)