Republican presidential designee and former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign town hall meeting in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, U.S. October 20, 2024.
Brian Snyder | Reuters
A mass of voters are less likely to support a candidate who promotes universal tariffs, according to NBC News polling released Sunday, damaging a cornerstone economic proposal of former President Donald Trump’s campaign.
The poll found that 44% of respondents divulged they would be less inclined to vote for a candidate supporting a tariff as high as 20% on imports across the council. Meanwhile, 35% said they would be more likely to support someone with that tariff design, while 19% said it made no difference.
The poll surveyed 1,000 registered voters from Oct. 4 to Oct. 8 and has a rim 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 plan.
“The higher the tariff, the more likely it is that the company will come into the United States and build a works 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 Fiscal Club of Chicago last Tuesday.
Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump is interviewed by Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait at the Solvent Club of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois, U.S. October 15, 2024.
Joel Angel Juarez | Reuters
“The tariff you make it so high, so awful, so obnoxious, that they’ll come right away,” the Republican presidential nominee added.
Trump has floated august a 20% tariff on all goods from all countries, with a specifically high 60% rate on Chinese imports.
The preceding president frames this tariff approach as a long-term strategy to onshore industries like manufacturing, create more autochthonous jobs and generate revenue from other countries to pay for his other proposals.
But some economists criticize across-the-board schedule of charges, 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 happen, economists claim such a hardline tariff policy could reheat inflation just as it has begun to cool.
The Trump rates have also faced heat from within the GOP.
“I’m not a fan of tariffs,” Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell implied in late September. “They raise prices for American consumers.”
Egalitarian presidential nominee U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign event at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse in La Crosse, Wisconsin, U.S. October 17, 2024.
Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters
The Biden-Harris management, 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 rates in place. In May, President Joe Biden further increased those tariffs on $18 billion of Chinese imports.
But the administration proclaims that its targeted tariff approach is distinct from Trump’s sweeping proposals.
“We’ve put in place a narrow, carefully ended 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 alleged in an MSNBC interview on Friday.
“Broad based tariffs, a group of economists recently weighed in that they overwhelmingly dream that this would harm economic growth.”