Populist Tariffs Very UNpopular

Writing for the Washington Post, Cato's Scott Lincicome reviews polling data about Donald Trump's favorite economic and foreign policy cure-all, and finds that Americans don't care for tariffs.

These responses show that many voters willing to support tariffs in the abstract oppose them when asked to pay less than they're actually paying today. Republicans are no exception: Their support dropped from 70 percent to just 39 percent when asked to pay $1,000 per year to fund their guy's signature policy.

The Cato survey's results are hardly outliers. In nearly every major poll over the past year, tariffs drew 55 to 65 percent opposition or disapproval. Even more respondents, 70 to 75 percent, believed that tariffs raised prices. State battleground polls showed similar findings. This month, CBS-YouGov found that likely voters preferred a congressional candidate who opposed the president's tariff approach by a 26-point margin. And, per a September Fox News poll, GOP support for tariffs has declined 21 points since "Liberation Day" last year, with only "MAGA Republicans" still saying the measures help the economy. [links omitted, bold added]

It is reassuring to know that most adults have enough on the ball to want to put a stop to this policy, and it sounds like it is affecting congressional races. Lincicome quotes the Democrat in Iowa's toss-up Senate race as promising an "end [of] the chaotic tariffs that are sending farms toward a 1980s-style farm crisis."

Uh-oh.

Lincicome draws three lessons from the polling data, which I summarize as follows:

1. Trump's running on the economy and embracing tariffs was a colossal blunder;
2. Policies that sound good to voters in the abstract get rejected when their negative consequences become so apparent; and
3. The conventional wisdom that tariffs are popular and electorally necessary is wrong.

Lincicome ends with a rhetorical question about when the President and Congress will "catch up."

By the sound of it, the Democrats, of all people will help them do so some time after November.

-- CAV