Republican presidential candidate and former US President Donald Trump speaks as he visits a campaign office in Hamtramck, Michigan, US, October 18, 2024.
Brian Snyder | Reuters
A majority of voters are less likely to support a candidate who promotes universal tariffs, according to NBC News poll released Sunday, tarnishing an economic proposal that has been a cornerstone of former President Donald Trump’s campaign.
The poll found that 44% of respondents said they would be less inclined to vote for a candidate who supported tariffs of up to 20% on imports across the board. Meanwhile, 35% said they would be more likely to support someone with this tariff proposal, while 19% said it made no difference.
The poll polled 1,000 registered voters from Oct. 4-8 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
Despite the unpopularity of blanket tariffs among voters, Trump has dug deep into the hard-line proposal.
“The higher the tariff, the more likely the company will come to the United States and build a factory in the United States, so they don’t have to pay the tariffs,” Trump said in an interview with Bloomberg Editor in Chief John Micklethwait at the Economic Club of Chicago last Tuesday.
“The tariff that you’re making so high, so horrible, so obnoxious, that they’re going to come right away,” added the Republican presidential candidate.
Trump has imposed 20% tariffs on all goods from all countries, with a particularly high 60% on Chinese imports.
The former president frames this tariff approach as a long-term strategy for land-based industries such as manufacturing, creating more domestic jobs and generating revenue from other countries to pay for his other proposals.
But some economists criticize the blanket tariffs, noting that US importers bear the brunt of the import taxes — costs that are likely to be passed on to consumers. As a result, economists claim that such hard-line tariff policy could reignite inflation just as it has begun to decline.
The Trump tariffs also faced heat from within the Democratic Party.
“I’m not a fan of tariffs,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said in late September. “They’re raising prices for American consumers.”
Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s Democratic rival, took advantage of the backlash, calling his proposed tariffs a “Trump sales tax.”
The Biden-Harris administration, for its part, has taken its own aggressive approach to trade policy, especially with China, and even kept some of Trump’s first-term tariffs in place. In May, President Joe Biden further increased those tariffs on $18 billion of Chinese imports.
However, the administration maintains that its targeted tariff approach is different from Trump’s sweeping proposals.
“We’ve put in place a narrow, carefully targeted set of tariffs in areas that are strategic that we’ve made a conscious decision to bring forward in the United States,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in an interview with MSNBC on Friday.
“Broad-based tariffs, a group of economists recently weighed in that they overwhelmingly believed it would hurt economic growth.”