US Politics
Trump continues to downplay cost of living concerns. But polling shows affordability remains a top issue for many Americans
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The cost of living remains Americans’ number one concern, new polling has found — despite President Donald Trump’s repeated insistence that we’ve never had it so good.
Asked to choose one thing they would tell the president to focus on to make life better if they had the chance, 32 percent of respondents cited economic or cost of living concerns in a recent poll conducted by SSRS for CNN.
That number rose to roughly 40 percent among Republican voters and Republican-leaning independents, CNN reports.
For comparison, only 5 percent of all respondents chose immigration and border enforcement, while 1 percent chose crime and public safety.
It comes after consumer confidence in the U.S. economy decreased for the fifth consecutive month in December, according to one widely-watched measure.
In speeches and Truth Social posts, Trump has vehemently claimed that we are already in a “golden age” and that America is “doing better than we’ve ever done as a country”.
“While my great work on the Economy has not yet been fully appreciated, it will be!” he declared last month. “The word affordability is a Democrat scam,” he added in December.
But the evidence suggests that appreciation is still in scant supply. Respondents in the CNN poll cited numerous specific economic issues as their top concern, such as “help [the] middle class”, “health care costs”, “protect social security”, “housing costs”, and “food prices”.
Altogether, wrote pollsters SSRS in a press release, that amounted to 32 percent of all respondents. A whopping 16 percent said they would tell Trump to resign, while 8 percent gave “general positive comments”.
On Tuesday, the Conference Board — a business research nonprofit — said its consumer confidence index had dropped from 92.9 in October to 89.1 in November, while respondents’ assessment of current business conditions turned negative for the first time since September 2024.
Another similar survey by the University of Michigan showed different results, with consumers’ mood mildly improving in December compared to October.
Former MAGA loyalist turned Trump critic Marjorie Taylor Greene pointed to recent data suggesting that healthcare costs accounted for much of the increase in consumer spending during the third quarter of this year.
“I’ve warned for months now of the financial crisis for Americans regarding healthcare and here it is,” she said on X. “Republican failure to fix this is going to cost them big time in midterms. Republicans can’t blame Democrats when they do nothing to fix it.”
Not that voters seem to believe it will be fixed any time soon. Asked in the CNN poll whether they believed Trump cared what they had to say, 51 percent answered: “Not at all.” Around 38 percent believe the same is true for Democratic leaders.
