(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump is taking his message and vision on the economy directly to voters — but he faces an American public that, recent polling shows, feels largely negative toward how the president has handled economic issues.
“Here at home, we’re bringing our economy back from the brink of ruin,” Trump said during a primetime address to the nation on Wednesday night.
Vice President JD Vance also travelled to Allentown, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday to talk about the White House’s economic vision — just one week after Trump paid his own visit to the Keystone State for remarks on the economy.
But a Quinnipiac University poll published on Wednesday found that almost 6 in 10 registered voters disapprove of how Trump has handled the economy, while 65% say the state of the American economy is “not so good” or “poor.”
Quinnipiac University’s poll also found that 57% of registered voters think Trump is more responsible for the economy’s state right now, and 34% of voters think former President Joe Biden is.
Last week, Reuters and Ipsos published a poll that found that only 31% of Americans approve of how Trump has handled the cost of living — up from 26% in their late November polling.
Dan Schnur, a political communications and strategy expert who teaches at the University of Southern California, told ABC News that part of that comes from Republican voters, including working-class young men, feeling the impact of high costs.
“A lot of voters, particularly working-class young men, voted for him last year because they were angry about the inflation under Biden and they believed Trump would make things better,” he said. “That hasn’t happened yet, and so we’re beginning to see their disappointment.”
Ryan Mahoney, a Republican strategist and former communications director for the Georgia Republican Party, told ABC News he thinks this low approval may be because of a “disconnect from the White House to the American people, about the president acknowledging and empathizing with the cost crunch that the American people are feeling.”
Asked on Tuesday if he was worried about recent polling and whether affordability would be a political liability, Vance brushed off concerns — instead shifting blame to Biden.
“When we go out there and we tell our story, that gasoline and energy got way too high under Joe Biden’s administration, but we’ve lowered the cost of energy — the American people will understand that … They know what Joe Biden broke is not going to be fixed in a week,” Vance said.
ABC News has reached out to Biden’s office for comment on Vance’s remarks.
Inflation rose during Biden’s term (while slowing toward its end). At the time, Biden and his White House defended the administration’s performance on the economy by pointing to measures they took to bolster the economy, particularly as it struggled in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Economists have also said rising prices during Biden’s presidency did not occur in a vacuum, but emerged in part from factors such as the supply shortage imposed by the pandemic.
Despite the economic woes during the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. economy significantly outperformed other major industrialized nations as it emerged from the pandemic, according to an October 2024 report by the Brookings Institution.
Schnur said that while discussing Biden could be “part of, potentially, an effective message. The problem is that blaming your predecessor — for any president — has diminishing returns the longer they’ve been in office.”
From a tactical perspective, Mahoney said, “It’s OK to blame what happened for the four years before you got into office, that you’re having to wade through that … I think all of that is fair game,” Mahoney said. “I do think, though, you have to then present what your plan is.”
Trump is set to once again speak about the economy in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, Friday — so will his administration’s focus on the issue and travels help Americans feel better about how they’re handling the economy?
“I love the idea of getting on the road … but at the end of the day, the script, the teleprompter, the remarks to folks, the interviews with press, have to acknowledge the problem and then provide the solutions,” Mahoney said.
Doug Heye, another GOP strategist and a former spokesperson for the Republican National Committee, told ABC News, “In a normal political world, this is what you do, and this helps. But we just saw in Pennsylvania, where Trump was supposed to talk about the economy, and brings up all this other stuff, and all he does is get in the way of himself, and there’s no reason to think that that’s going to change.”
Schnur, meanwhile, cautioned that local visits may help Trump’s standing on the economy with older voters, but may have less impact on younger voters who get their news more through digital platforms — a challenge facing both major political parties.
David McIntosh, the president of the conservative political group Club for Growth, said Republicans should “take their message directly to the people this Christmas and in 2026” and explain that the way to reduce prices is “to have price transparency, reduce regulations, and allow free markets to bring back affordability.”
A White House spokesperson, in response to the recent polling and concerns raised by some in the GOP, pointed to how Trump was elected because of economic concerns and to Thursday’s better-than-expected inflation numbers as a sign of the administration’s success.
“President Trump was resoundingly re-elected one year ago precisely because he, unlike Democrats, understood and acknowledged Joe Biden’s economic disaster,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement to ABC News.
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