Americans Still Favor Trump on the Economy
On the eve of the presidential election, Americans still have a dour assessment of the economy and are far more likely to say they trust Donald Trump to manage it than Kamala Harris.
The latest polling from the New York Times and Siena College found that just two percent of the registered voters rated the economy as “excellent.“ That’s almost unchanged from a year ago, when a New York Times/Siena poll of voters in battleground states found that two percent of registered voters rated the economy excellent. Similarly, in the summer of 2023, the Times/Siena poll of registered voters found that two percent of registered voters rated the economy excellent.
And it is down from a brief blip of optimism at the start of the year. In February, the poll of registered voters found seven percent rated the economy as excellent.
There has been some brightening of the mood of the country about the economy. A year ago, the battleground poll found that 16 percent of the public said the economy was “good.” Combined with the excellent-ists, this brought the positive assessment up to 18 percent. The nationwide registered polling from this October found 19 percent rated the economy as good, bringing the positive assessment up to 21 percent.
And back in the summer of 2022, when inflation was reaching its peak and recession fears were riding high, just one percent of registered voters said the economy was excellent, and nine percent rated it good. That’s a total of 10 percent seeing the economy in a positive light.
(Annoyingly, the released polling from the Times/Siena is not consistent over time. The results of the most recent battleground polls do not reveal the assessment of the economy and neither do the year-ago nationwide polls. So, we have to jump around between battlegrounds, likely voters, and registered voters. Fortunately, there’s little evidence to suggest that these groups have very different opinions about the economy.)
In other words, voters have responded to progress on bringing down inflation and continued economic growth. They no longer have as dire a view of the economy as they did in the summer of 2022, and their assessment is significantly more positive than it was a year ago. But it’s still very negative.
Still an Overwhelmingly Negative View
In the summer of 2022, 29 percent of registered voters said the economy was “only fair,” and 58 percent rated it “poor.” By the following summer, that improved at the extreme end, with just 49 percent rating the economy poor and the same 29 percent rating it “only fair.” Since then, however, there’s been little progress. Through most of this year, the polls of registered voters have found that 50 percent or so think economic conditions are poor. The most recent poll, from late September and early October, found that 49 percent rated the economy poor.
And the latest numbers are little changed among the “likely electorate.“ Three percent say the economy is excellent, 21 percent say it is good, 28 percent say it is only fair, and 47 percent say it is poor, according to the Times/Siena poll from October.
The Democrats had hoped to benefit from what they predicted would be improving public opinion about the economy. That improvement, however, has been far slighter than they anticipated. A public whose household finances are still burdened by high prices has been unwilling to see the economy in the same light as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris even though the rate of inflation has come down.
And so, on the issue of the economy—which has been rated as the number one issue in almost every poll throughout the election cycle—Trump still enjoys a substantial lead. In the latest Times/Siena poll of likely voters, 52 percent say they favor Trump on the economy, and 45 percent say they favor Harris. That’s a big improvement for the Democrats from November of last year, when 59 percent of registered voters in battleground states said they favored Trump, and 37 percent said they favored Biden. But it is less than what Democrats had hoped for.
The question that we will find out sometime after the polls close tomorrow is whether Harris’s gains were enough to overcome Trump’s persistent lead.