Republicans are betting their midterm strategy on turning out voters by putting Donald Trump front and center, even though he isn’t on the ballot. But a stack of recent polling suggests that approach may run into a basic problem: voters and the president don’t agree on what matters most.
Surveys throughout the year show Americans are overwhelmingly focused on the cost of living, inflation, the economy and health care. Yet voters perceive Trump as prioritizing immigration, foreign conflicts and election integrity instead. That mismatch shows up repeatedly across independent polling organizations.
A February survey from Wave Polling and Research found 69% of US adults believe the Trump administration is “focusing too much on deportations and not focusing enough on fixing the economy, inflation, and the rising cost of living.” A CNN poll in July found only 27% of Americans think Trump’s priorities are in the right place, while 73% said he hasn’t focused enough on what matters most to them.
In August, Strength In Numbers reported a similar pattern: the more important voters say an issue is right now, the more they dislike how the president is handling it. That same analysis found border security and crime, the issues where Trump and Republicans poll strongest, are rated as the most important problem by the fewest voters.
Where voters place their trust
Navigator Research found voters’ top concerns are the cost of living, inflation, the economy and health care, while their least pressing worries are election integrity, disease prevention and transgender issues. Participants in the survey said they trust Democrats more than Republicans to handle most issues, and viewed Democrats as prioritizing health care, transgender issues and the cost of living, followed by abortion, climate change and the economy.
The same research found that 20% of 2024 Trump voters now say they regret that vote, citing the war in Iran and rising prices as their leading reasons, with health-care cuts close behind. More than a third of those who regret their vote said their view of Trump changed because he was “focusing on the wrong priorities like the White House ballroom.”
The low-propensity voter problem
Much of the GOP’s midterm convention was aimed at energizing the base, particularly low-propensity Republican voters, a strategy that helped deliver two Trump victories. But pollster G. Elliott Morris, after analyzing 11,000 interviews, found that these less-engaged voters are actually more worried about affordability than likely voters, and care more about inflation and the economy while caring less about immigration.
Morris also found a stark approval gap tied to voting intention. “The Republicans who say they are definitely going to vote in November say they approve of Trump at 87%, versus 13% who disapprove,” Morris said. “But among 2024 Trump voters who say they won’t vote in November, POTUS’s approval is just 55%, vs 40% who disapprove.”
In 2024, high inflation under Democratic control drove many low-propensity voters to punish that party at the ballot box. Now, an increasing share of that same group blames Trump for the cost of living, a reversal that complicates the GOP’s plan to simply repeat its winning formula.
With Election Day less than two months away, the polling suggests that reminding voters of Trump, without addressing the affordability concerns driving their frustration, may do little to move swing voters or motivate Republicans who currently plan to sit the midterms out.
