John Lettieri is president and CEO of the Economic Innovation Group, a bipartisan public policy organization.
Trump is wrong about what American workers want from him
Survey shows workers don’t fear immigrants taking their jobs. They don’t care about trade policy. They just want lower prices and affordable housing.
August 31, 2025 The Washington Post
By John Lettieri
A new national survey of more than 1,500 U.S. workers (defined as adults employed or looking for work) conducted by the Economic Innovation Group and Echelon Insights reveals a dangerous disconnect between the president’s signature priority and the issues workers care about most.
Far from sharing Trump’s protectionist instincts, American workers said the United States should pursue free trade with other nations by a decisive 51-point margin. Workers were also far more likely to view imports positively (41 percent) or neutrally (27 percent) than as a career threat (22 percent).
This helps explain why, when asked which single issue elected officials should prioritize to help American workers, respondents ranked tariffs dead last. And when asked which issue workers least wanted lawmakers to pursue, they put tariffs at the top of the list by a wide margin. In fact, tariffs were the least popular option across almost every demographic — men and women, White and non-White, college and non-college-educated, old and young, urban and rural.
Workers also gave the president poor grades on his handling of trade and tariffs: Just 32 percent rated Trump’s performance as “excellent” or “good,” compared with 63 percent who deemed it “fair” or “poor.” Indeed, tariffs are deeply unpopular even though consumers have probably not yet felt their full economic impact at the checkout counter. If tariff-driven costs continue rippling through supply chains and showing up in grocery stores and retail outlets, these already grim numbers could get even worse.
So what do workers want from their country’s leaders? Simply put: to make America affordable again.
For American workers, the central economic problem of 2025 is the same as it was in 2022: The cost of everything is just too high. More than two-thirds of workers said that reducing the costs of everyday goods or housing would be the best way to make life better for the country’s labor force.
And at a time when the country feels divided on nearly everything, worries about the cost of living transcend partisan, class, income, educational and racial boundaries.
Here again, the numbers spell trouble for the president’s agenda.
Among the eight facets of Trump’s job performance we surveyed, his handling of inflation and the cost of living received the lowest approval from workers — worse than for immigration, the economy, the stock market, taxes, jobs and other key issues. Fifty-four percent overall — and more than two-thirds of independents — said that Trump’s handling of their top concern has been “poor.” Only 27 percent gave him positive marks.
Nor do workers think tariffs will help. Only 31 percent said they believe tariffs will keep costs down, and more than half said tariffs will hurt access to the goods and services Americans need. Even among the small share who said they oppose free trade, support for tariffs was contingent on not driving higher costs or fewer choices for consumers — a condition that simply cannot be met.
The survey also reveals just how precarious many workers feel — only 49 percent said they are able to save, invest or afford nonessentials, and 51 percent said it would be difficult for them to find a high-quality job with good pay in today’s labor market. That fragility is why affordability dominates their priorities.
In defending the administration’s tariff agenda, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that “access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American Dream.” But after years of sticker shock, cheap goods are precisely what workers are demanding.
The top two sources of workers’ financial stress — ahead of challenges such as inadequate pay or saving for retirement — are the costs of products and services and the cost of housing.
These concerns should come as no surprise: The singular lesson of Joe Biden’s presidency was that the cost of living outweighed every other factor — including a strong job market — in shaping public sentiment on the economy. Biden never recovered from the perception that he let costs spiral out of control. Trump risks repeating that mistake.
What can he do to regain workers’ trust?
Though Trump won’t abandon tariffs altogether, he should take meaningful steps to minimize the pain they will inflict on workers already struggling to cover the basics. It makes especially little sense, for example, to slap heavy tariffs on everyday goods such as coffee and bananas that cannot be produced domestically at scale.
More important, he should seize the opportunity to tackle the country’s chronic housing shortage, which economists agree is a key driver of runaway costs.
Workers are unequivocal in their frustration over housing. More than 9 in 10 said it has become too expensive, and a large majority said the federal government should “use all the tools at its disposal to make it cheaper and easier to build housing where it is needed most.”
The housing crisis is also an area of rare bipartisan potential. Just weeks ago, the Senate Banking Committee unanimously advanced an ambitious housing reform bill forged by Chairman Tim Scott (R-South Carolina) and ranking Democrat Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts). That unlikely partnership underscores Trump’s opportunity to work with Congress to show that he is listening to workers.
But time is of the essence.
The lesson from our survey could not be clearer: American workers are desperate for the ability to afford a decent life. If the president truly wants to be their champion, he’ll need to put affordability — not tariffs — at the center of his agenda.