By Julia Harte
December 13 – When Ron goes to eat at the deli, he is shocked to see the prices on the menu.
“Breakfast is $20, no matter how you slice it,” said Daley, 63, who will vote for President Donald Trump in November 2024.
Daley, a Denver-area resident who works for a human resources outsourcing solutions firm, thinks the “back and forth of fees” has sown market uncertainty, driving up some costs.
But he’s seen other prices drop — he recently paid $1.74 a gallon for gas. Overall, he rates Trump an 8 out of 10 on cost-of-living management.
“There’s nothing on the president’s magic wand,” said Daley, who believes the president’s tariffs and deregulatory agenda will eventually lower most everyday costs.
Affordability is front and center on voters’ minds as both parties prepare for next year’s congressional midterm elections, with Republicans especially concerned that continuing high prices could hurt their chances of retaining control of Congress.
After campaigning last year on a promise to rein in inflation, Trump has in recent weeks dismissed the affordability problems as a hoax, blaming them on President Joe Biden and vowing that his economic policies will benefit Americans next year.
In the interview, a group of 20 Trump voters across the country whom Reuters has spoken to monthly since February revealed how high costs are affecting 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 out of 20 voters gave it a score of 5 or less, and only one rated it higher than an 8.
But a majority of voters strongly supported the president, predicting that his policies would improve their purchasing power in the long term or that he would have less control over everyday costs. Many of them blamed larger structural problems in the American economy — oligopolies, corporate greed, an excessive money supply — for the rising cost of living.
Fertility anxiety
Their views are roughly in line with recent election results. Nearly three-quarters of Trump voters responding to a Reuters-Ipsos poll in early December said they approved of the president’s handling of the cost of living, compared with 30% of all respondents. The number of Trump voters was a 10 percentage point jump from a smaller poll in November.
Still, while Republicans fear they are vulnerable to the economy ahead of next year’s election, independents are more skeptical of the president’s economic policies. Trump hit the road this week to tell audiences about his cost-cutting efforts, 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 gasoline and energy costs and lowering egg prices. He blamed Biden for the high prices on other goods, even though Trump has now been in office for almost a year.
Government data shows job growth has slowed in Trump’s second term, unemployment has hit its highest level in four years and consumer prices are high. Overall, economic growth has rebounded somewhat after contracting in the first few months of the year.
Eight voters interviewed by Reuters reported higher prices at their local restaurants and grocery stores, particularly for meat and coffee, although a handful of food items saw lower prices and 11 said they had seen gasoline prices drop in their area.
Many complained that Trump had done too little to address such issues and that his signature tariffs had been deployed casually, unnecessarily raising prices for Americans.
Loretta Torres, 38, a mother of three near Houston, gave Trump an 8 but said it has been difficult to shop separately this year because fees have doubled or tripled. “I certainly expect those charges to continue to decline and improve over time,” she said.
Gerald Dunn, 67, a martial arts instructor in New York’s Hudson Valley who rated Trump a 6 on affordability, agreed. “Don’t just throw out tariffs for no reason. That hurts the economy because uncertainty increases anxiety,” Dunn said.
But other voters said they saw no price increase due to the fee. Terry Alberta, 64, a pilot from Michigan, noted that American shoppers spent record amounts online on Black Friday.
“People saying they’re hurt, but apparently they’re not hurt” is enough to prevent such spending, Alberta said. “To hit the administration and say, ‘Oh, these tariffs are terrible’ and everything, it’s like, so why are we still buying things?”
Caps on corporate greed
Regardless of how they rated Trump, most voters blamed private companies and macroeconomic factors for rising prices of basic goods and services.
While the 20 voters are not a statistically representative picture of all Trump voters, their age, educational background, race/ethnicity, locations and voting history are roughly similar to Trump’s overall electorate. They were selected from a February 2025 Ipsos poll of 429 respondents who said they voted for Trump in November and were willing to talk to reporters.
Don Jernigan, 75, a Virginia Beach retiree, rated Trump a 4 on affordability for not doing enough to check oligopolies.
In industries like meatpacking, “you have large corporations covering such large parts of the supply chain of our products,” Jernigan said. “The little guys are completely regulated by the system, and I don’t see anything happening to change that.”
In Georgia, David Ferguson, 54, said he hoped Trump would use executive orders to push through profit-capping laws in areas such as health insurance, blaming a “frenzy search” by major companies for high costs.
Lou Nunez, an 83-year-old retired Army veteran in Des Moines, Iowa, pointed to the fact that premium payments for Obamacare health plans will double if U.S. lawmakers do not extend pandemic-era subsidies by the end of the year.
“It’s something that, of course, if the president chooses, he can get Congress to pass those subsidies, but I think he’s pretty set against it,” said Nunez, who gives Trump a 2 rating on affordability.
“I don’t think he’s done much to improve the value of anything,” Nunez added.
‘Drill, Baby, Drill’
A common argument, especially among voters who gave Trump high marks overall, was that the president doesn’t have the power to cut costs immediately.
Kate Mottel, 62, of suburban Chicago, and Rich Somora, 62, of Charlotte, North Carolina, who rated the president 8 and 6, respectively, echoed one of Trump’s campaign slogans, “drill, baby, drill,” suggesting that opening up more U.S. territory to oil and gas extraction would help reduce living standards.
Both also emphasized that Trump was limited in his ability to cut prices directly. Motl said she would like to see prices on groceries and utilities drop, but was “very optimistic” about Trump’s economic leadership. “There’s a lot he can do in about a year in office,” she said.
“It’s a lot of policy change, and a lot of that has to go through Congress,” Somora said.
Will Brown, 20, a student from Madison, Wisconsin, blamed current inflation on the Biden administration’s federal spending initiatives that pumped cash into the U.S. money supply.
Although Brown said meat prices are “horrendous” and housing costs are beyond the reach of many Americans, he gave the president a 7 on 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 Thomas and Claudia Parsons)
