About 56% of respondents who identified as members of the Maga coalition said they were either having trouble meeting their debt payments or worried they would be struggling soon, according to the most recent survey by Harris for the Guardian. The same share reported similar troubles meeting housing payments, while 57% said the same about affording healthcare costs, 58% about utility bills, 61% about groceries, and 63% about paying for gas.
Economic Stress Among Core Supporters
Many of these stressors stem from Trump's policy preferences. Trump's decision to end government subsidies is largely at fault for rising health insurance costs. The rise in energy costs and rebound of inflation since March are direct consequences of Iran's throttling of the Strait of Hormuz. Resurgent inflation interrupted the Federal Reserve's campaign to ease monetary policy and halted the gradual decline in mortgage rates. Manufacturers have culled nearly 100,000 jobs since Trump took office, in part due to his tariffs. Farmers have been hit by higher costs of energy, fertilizer, and machinery.
Rural Americans voted for Trump by a margin of 40 percentage points in November 2024. According to the Harris poll, 49% of them now say their personal financial security is getting worse, up from 42% in April 2024, a few weeks after Trump imposed tariffs on everybody and sent financial markets into a tailspin. Similarly, 45% of Americans with less than a four-year college degree reported a worsening financial situation, up from 42% in April 2025.
Growing Blame on Government
These constituencies are at the core of the Maga movement, and they are losing patience with justifications for Trump's destructive policies. 54% of Maga faithful think the government is most responsible for rising prices of goods and services. Contrary to repeated claims from the White House, 41% of them believe economists' observation that American consumers bear most of the costs of Trump's tariffs. Only 31% buy Trump's argument that foreigners pick up the tab.
Maga voters have not abandoned the president. By recent counts, 62% of rank-and-file Republicans identify as Maga, up from only 38% in September 2022. 57% trust that the government considers the affordability crisis a top priority, and 69% believe the government is capable of fixing it. Still, misgivings are creeping in: just over a third of Maga faithful think the government has made it worse.
Broader Discontent Beyond Maga
What should most worry the president is the brewing discontent outside his base, which is still a minority of the overall electorate. The share of Republicans – Maga or not – who believe the economy is getting worse hit 38% in the latest Harris poll, up from 33% in April 2024. The share who think the economy is getting better declined from 31% to 27%. Among independent voters, 44% think their financial security is deteriorating, almost three times the share who believe it is getting better.
In July, just four months before the midterm elections, these signs of voter discontent all the way through to Trump's core partisans might presage a devastating Blue Wave to dramatically reconfigure the political profile of Congress. Yet, Americans are not quite convinced that Democrats would do any better. Among Americans stressed by an affordability crisis, only 26% think Democrats can fix it, just a tad more than the 25% who think Republicans can. 36% think neither is up to the task.
Americans may have lost patience with Trump's destructive politics, but Democrats have not made an attractive counteroffer, hobbled by the memory of economic mismanagement when inflation rebounded during the Biden administration. This leaves American politics in an ambiguous place – shaped by voters losing patience with Trump's whimsical policy grab bag yet unwilling to give Democrats the benefit of the doubt. This suggests Democrats have an enormous opportunity to put forth an economic strategy that might undo some of the pain caused by the current administration.
