Trump doubles down on tariff plan that voters hate

A majority of voters are less likely to support a candidate who promotes universal tariffs, according to NBC News polling released Sunday, marring a cornerstone economic proposal 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 supporting a tariff as high as 20% on imports across the board. Meanwhile, 35% said they would be more likely to support someone with that tariff proposal, while 19% said it made no difference.

The poll surveyed 1,000 registered voters from Oct. 4 to Oct. 8 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

Despite the unpopularity of universal tariffs among voters, Trump has dug in on the hardline proposal.

“The higher the tariff, the more likely it is that the company will come into the United States and build a factory in the United States, so it doesn’t have to pay the tariff,” Trump said in an interview with Bloomberg Editor in Chief John Micklethwait at the Economic Club of Chicago last Tuesday.

“The tariff you make it so high, so horrible, so obnoxious, that they’ll come right away,” the Republican presidential nominee added.

Trump has floated imposing a 20% tariff on all goods from all countries, with a specifically high 60% rate on Chinese imports.

The former president frames this tariff approach as a long-term strategy to onshore industries like manufacturing, create more domestic jobs and generate revenue from other countries to pay for his other proposals.

But some economists criticize across-the-board tariffs, noting that U.S. importers are the ones who bear the burden of import taxes — costs that likely get passed on to consumers. As a result, economists claim such a hardline tariff policy could reheat inflation just as it has begun to cool.

The Trump tariffs have also faced heat from within the GOP.

“I’m not a fan of tariffs,” Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said in late September. “They raise prices for American consumers.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s Democratic opponent, has capitalized on the backlash, branding his tariff proposal the “Trump sales tax.”

The Biden-Harris administration, for its part, has taken its own hawkish approach to trade policy, especially with China, and has 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.

But the administration maintains that its targeted tariff approach is distinct from Trump’s sweeping proposals.

“We’ve put in place a narrow, carefully targeted set of tariffs in sectors that are strategic, that we’ve made a conscious decision to promote in the United States,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in an MSNBC interview on Friday.

“Broad based tariffs, a group of economists recently weighed in that they overwhelmingly thought that this would harm economic growth.”