Ed Gresser, PPI’s Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets, published his trade fact of the week confirming that recent polls show consumers do not like the Trump Administration’s tariffs.
The polls — CNN/SSRS, Fox News, Washington Post/ABC News, New York Times/Siena, Pew Center, NBC News, NPR/Marist, Economist/YouGov — suggest three areas of broad consensus: high awareness of the tariff increases; an overall negative view of them; and alarm about the cost of living. The “crosstabs” and “internals,” meanwhile, suggest convergence among some groups whose views on trade policy have differed in previous 21st-century polls — college and non-college, urban and rural, high- and low-income — and apparently widening opinion gaps by race and ethnicity, and by political affiliation.
Gresser notes that while polling normally finds college-educated Americans to be more “pro-trade” than non-college educated, that gap has disappeared in these recent polls. It has been replaced by widening gaps in views of trade among race and ethnicity – white Americans tend to be the least critical of the Trump Administration on trade. The partisan divide on trade is much wider in these polls than we’ve seen in previous 21st century polls.