100,000 Voters Delivered a Verdict on Trump's Economy. Here's What It Said

Two-thirds of midterm voters said President Donald Trump's own policies fueled inflation, according to The AP Voter Poll, a survey of roughly 100,000 voters conducted by SSRS for The Associated Press, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, FOX News Media, NBC News and Versant. That verdict translated directly into losses: rising prices helped deliver blistering defeats for Republicans in House, Senate and gubernatorial races on Tuesday.

The contrast with the last midterm is stark. Only about half of 2022 midterm voters said the same about Joe Biden's policies, according to AP VoteCast. Trump's message that the fault lay with his predecessor didn't land with an electorate that watched prices climb after his chaotic rash of tariffs last year and energy costs spike after he launched a war with Iran in February.

Voters in states from California to Mississippi broadly agreed that Trump's taxes on foreign imports have done more harm than good. The results matched what voters had been telling pollsters for months — but Trump campaigned with a decidedly deaf ear.

"I've done a great job," Trump said at one of his final midterm rallies in Iowa. "Prices are coming way down."

What do the numbers say about prices?

Consumer prices are up 3.7% over the past 12 months, versus an inflation rate of 3% when Trump began his second term. Put differently, inflation has accelerated by more than two-thirds of a percentage point under his watch — the opposite direction of his campaign pledge.

The president conceded a point on Wednesday, telling reporters the Iran war "drove the gasoline up a little bit short-term," but said the fight was worth it because of Iran's push for nuclear weapons. "If I had to do it again, I'd have to do it again," he said.

About 9 in 10 voters said the cost of living was a "crucial" or "major" factor in their vote for Congress. Roughly 6 in 10 of that group backed Democratic candidates in their local House races.

There's no guarantee a Democratic-majority House and Senate can fix an economy still pestered by uncomfortably high inflation. Trump and Congress would likely need to work on a bipartisan basis, or simply keep the economy stable enough for the Federal Reserve to ratchet inflation down through interest rates. But voters did prefer Democrats to a president governing with little to no congressional pushback from his own party.

Is the economy actually weak — or is it a perception problem?

Here's the tension for practitioners to parse: the underlying economy is stronger than many Americans think. The S&P 500 is up more than 10% so far this year, the unemployment rate sits at a healthy 4.2%, and investors greeted the Democratic wins positively, with stocks up on Wednesday.

But the major driver of that growth has been the buildout of artificial intelligence — a boom Trump has actively stoked by refusing to codify more aggressive federal oversight and by renaming the technology "super intelligence" in federal documents. Voters don't share his optimism. About 6 in 10 said AI will do more to hurt society than help it, whether through job displacement or a financial bubble that could wreak havoc on retirement savings if it pops. Despite the anxiety, only about one-quarter of voters called AI a "crucial" factor in their vote.

Why isn't growth reaching the middle class?

Tech billionaires — Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia's Jensen Huang and Elon Musk — have become frequent guests of Trump, attending state dinners or jetting abroad with him. That growing concentration of wealth has disconcerted voters. About 7 in 10 nationwide said the economy favors wealthy people, while only about 3 in 10 said it's fair to everyday Americans.

The wealth gap has become so extreme that even a majority of voters in California earning $300,000 or more in 2025 household income felt the economy was tilted toward the rich. Still, a slight majority of voters held a "somewhat" or "very" favorable impression of capitalism, versus about one-third who "strongly" or "somewhat" favor socialism.

On healthcare, about 6 in 10 voters wanted the government to play a "bigger role" in reducing medical expenses, and most said Trump's policies have made healthcare costs worse.

What trap did Trump fall into?

How voters felt about the economy generally depended on the size of their paychecks. For households earning under $50,000 a year, about 6 in 10 said they were worse off now than two years ago, before Trump became president — even as he campaigned on stats suggesting record low poverty.

Higher-income voters felt better about the economy, but that created a second problem. They were more concerned about democracy, and democracy-focused voters overwhelmingly broke for Democrats. About 4 in 10 households earning above $200,000 named democracy their top issue, roughly even with the economy. Lower-income voters clearly prioritized the economy instead.

Trump's unilateral record fueled that divide. Without congressional approval, he laid off thousands of federal workers, altered federal spending and imposed hundreds of billions of dollars in new tariffs that the Supreme Court ruled illegal earlier this year.

Overall, a slim majority of voters called government corruption a crucial factor, while about half said the same about high prices. What most voters took away from 22 months of Trump's presidency: he brokered deals, took government stakes in private companies and put himself at the center of the economy instead of America's workers. About 6 in 10 said his priorities were misplaced, and when asked whether Trump fought for people like them, most said he didn't.

The AP Voter Poll surveyed registered voters in all 50 states from Oct. 19 to Nov. 3 in Alaska and Oct. 22 to Nov. 3 elsewhere, with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 0.6 percentage points. The practical question now is whether a divided Washington can hold the economy stable enough for the Fed to finish the inflation fight — because, as Tuesday showed, voters price that failure directly into the president's party.