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A pair of new polls on Sunday suggest that Donald Trump and the Republican Party are fumbling their management of the U.S. economy, immigration system, and other issues where the president once held key advantages over Democrats. The surveys come as a federal government shutdown is entering its second month this week, with no end in sight and the House of Representatives still out of session. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill seem little closer to breaking a stalemate over reopening the government, with Democrats refusing to give Republicans votes to do so unless subsidies for health care plans passed under the Biden administration are extended. In the survey, the Republican president is now underwater on two key economic issues: inflation, and tariffs, which Americans blame for persistently high cost-of-living expenses around the country. Six in 10 voters told the ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos pollsters that Trump’s management of inflation and tariffs were doing more harm than good to the American economy. The share of voters who say the economy is better under Trump is lower than both the share that thinks it got worse (52 percent) or has stayed roughly the same (27 percent). Even 20 percent of Republican respondents specifically laid the blame on Trump over Democrats like Joe Biden for the current rate of inflation, indicating that the president’s window for blaming his predecessor for the state of the economy has closed. Separately, an NBC News survey echoed those feelings on the president’s economic performance. In that poll, the values were almost identical: 66 percent of voters say Trump has fallen short on dealing with cost-of-living issues; the GOP now has a one-point lead over Democrats among voters, when asked which party they trusted to handle the economy more. It’s the slimmest this lead has been in NBC’s polling since the early days of the first Trump administration. Meanwhile, Democrats have expanded their lead over Republicans on the issue of which party they trust to fix America’s healthcare system to more than 20 points, their highest lead since the first Obama presidency. Both polls also showed the administration losing ground on other issues, including immigration enforcement, foreign policy and the weaponization of America’s National Guard. The president, over the summer, ordered troops into Washington D.C. to assist federal law enforcement with crime suppression efforts, against the wishes of city leaders. He’s since expanded those efforts to other Democrat-run jurisdictions, which have fought him tooth-and-nail in court over the deployments. More than half of respondents in the NBC poll said that the Trump administration’s “deployment of federal agents and National Guard troops to various cities around the country to fight crime and immigration” were not justified; 44 percent of voters said that the deployments were justified. In ABC’s poll, the administration was underwater here, too: 55 percent of respondents said they disapproved of the president’s methods of battling crime, compared to 44 percent who support them. Finally, Trump seems to be losing ground with voters over the mixed results of his peacemaking efforts, which have so far yielded a shaky ceasefire in Gaza and have failed to resolve the war in Ukraine despite his promise to do so in a single day. In the ABC poll, a slim majority of voters have broken with Trump on Israel-Gaza, with 52 percent unsupportive of his methods; the number is much higher on Ukraine-Russia, where a full 60 percent of voters disapprove of Trump’s performance. Once again, this result is mirrored in NBC’s polling: 48 percent of voters disapproved of his handling of the Israel-Gaza conflict, compared to 47 percent approval. NBC’s polling did not look at views of Trump’s handling of negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, but found that generally speaking voters are unimpressed with his foreign policy efforts: 53 percent of voters say that Trump has not lived up to their expectations in this vein, compared to 44 percent who said the opposite. The two polls were both conducted Oct 24-28, as a government shutdown was in its fourth week. The NBC poll surveyed 1,000 registered voters with a 3.1 percent margin of error, while the ABC poll contacted 2,725 U.S. adults with a margin of error of 2.8 percentage points.
