Trump claims ‘historic’ mandate but Americans have mixed feelings

Washington: US President-elect Donald Trump and his allies have declared that his incoming administration has an “unprecedented” and “historic” mandate. While he won the popular vote by only a small margin, it’s true that voters shifted in his favour across the country and sent him back to the White House. But does that equate to a full-throated endorsement of his policy proposals?

Broadly speaking, polls show most Americans want change in many of the areas where Trump has promised sweeping reform, including the economy and immigration. But when asked about specific policies and the effects on their daily lives, Americans, including many who voted for Trump, aren’t always as supportive and often have mixed opinions.

President-elect Donald Trump takes the stage before receiving the Fox Nation Patriot of the Year award, in Greenvale, NY, on Thursday.Credit: AP

“You go down the line of all these policies, and you find high levels of opposition, and it reflects that, for many Americans, they weren’t voting on specific policies,” said Tatishe Nteta, director of the UMass Poll.

That’s not to say that polling suggests all of Trump’s plans are unpopular – but they aren’t all broadly popular, either. Instead, polling reveals that many Americans hold nuanced views on some of the issues Trump plans to tackle or are unsure how they feel about them.

The economy and tariffs

Voters consistently cited the economy as their top issue in polling this year, and more voters said they trusted Trump to deliver on that front than they did Vice President Kamala Harris.

Americans also tended to support one of Trump’s signature economic plans: imposing stiff tariffs on goods produced overseas. In September, a New York Times/Siena College poll of likely voters in three Midwest states found that just over half supported expanding tariffs on products made outside the country. After the election, a CBS News/YouGov poll in late November also found that 52 per cent of Americans said they supported new tariffs. An overwhelming majority of Trump voters, 83 per cent, said they did.

Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2019. Trump has threatened to introduce tariffs of up to 60 per cent on Chinese imports.Credit: AP

But in that same CBS/YouGov poll, 59 per cent said they believed tariffs would raise the cost of the things they buy, a possibility that has been highlighted by experts critical of the plans. Among those who voted for Trump, a third believed tariffs would raise prices and supported the measures anyway.

Americans were less bullish on Trump’s more specific campaign proposal to put a 60 per cent tariff on goods from China. In a poll from YouGov and The Economist fielded in mid-November, just 37 per cent of US adults said they supported that plan, while 42 per cent opposed it (and 21 per cent answered “not sure”). Even among Trump supporters, 22 per cent said they would oppose such a tariff.

Trump said last week, after that poll was conducted, that he would impose a 10 per cent tariff on goods from China and a 25 per cent tariff on products from Canada and Mexico.

UMass Poll director Nteta noted that a fifth of Americans said they weren’t sure whether they supported or opposed the 60 per cent tariff on Chinese goods. “This somewhat even distribution of support, opposition and a lack of clarity is a reflection of the fact that many Americans don’t really understand what they entail,” he said.

Trump and congressional Republicans also want to extend and expand tax cuts implemented during his first term in office. There is limited polling on the specifics of these proposals, but a poll of swing state voters from Bloomberg and Morning Consult this year found a majority supported cutting individual tax rates, and a plurality opposed letting Trump’s 2017 tax cuts expire.

But while Trump’s plans include lowering the corporate tax rate, a majority of voters in the poll said they’d be in favour of increasing the rate. Polling from Pew Research Centre has shown that most Americans think wealthy people and corporations aren’t paying their fair share in taxes.

However, some of Trump’s tax proposals are slam dunks. Eliminating taxes on tips, for example? A hit.

Immigration and mass deportation

As part of his efforts to crack down on immigration, Trump has promised a mass deportation effort to expel millions of people who are in the US without legal permission. When asked simply if they approve of such plans, a majority of Americans across multiple polls have said they do. In an October Times/Siena poll, 57 per cent of likely voters said they supported “deporting immigrants living in the United States illegally back to their home countries”.

But in that same poll, another majority, also 57 per cent, said they supported providing a pathway to citizenship for immigrants who are in the US illegally. Unsurprisingly, Trump voters mostly supported deportations, and Harris voters mostly backed pathways to citizenship. But even 20 per cent of those who said they favoured mass deportation supported citizenship opportunities.

Pew Research Centre found similar contrasts in an August survey. When asked about specific circumstances, such as whether immigrants who are married to US citizens should be allowed to stay in the country, or whether international students who receive a US college degree should be, a majority of voters said they favoured these measures. In the case of students, that included a majority of Trump supporters.

This falls in line with long-standing evidence that the wording of a question and specific scenarios around policy proposals can elicit different responses from Americans. Mark Hugo Lopez, director of race and ethnicity research at Pew, said people often hold multifarious views about complex issues that can’t be easily captured by a blunt question such as “Do you support mass deportation?”

“There is some nuance to how the public sees or is thinking about the issue of immigration,” Lopez said. “These are rather sophisticated and very detailed policies that can be a challenge to encompass in a single research or survey question.”

Cabinet picks

The Trump transition team last month pointed to a Puck/Echelon Insights poll that it said showed “strong support” for the president-elect’s cabinet picks. It’s true that, in that poll, all of Trump’s picks other than former congressman Matt Gaetz (who has since withdrawn from consideration for attorney-general) had net positive favorability – meaning that a higher share of Americans had a favourable view of them than had a negative one.

But the poll also showed that a sizable share of Americans had never heard of many of the picks: Forty-four per cent said they hadn’t heard of former Fox News personality Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick for defence secretary, and 43 per cent said they didn’t know New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik, his choice for ambassador to the United Nations. Other polls have captured a similar dynamic.

While this isn’t a decisive stamp of approval, it’s also not a condemnation. It’s more like a shoulder shrug, and that’s not particularly unusual, said Chase Harrison, who teaches survey research at Harvard University.

This uncertainty is in line with polling about Trump’s other policies, which often showed a double-digit share of Americans saying they weren’t sure how they felt about a given issue.

“I don’t know that the idea of mass deportation is exactly something that people want to be bothered with thinking through,” Harrison said. “That’s why they elected a chief executive who’s going to appoint people and is going to manage administrators.”

While polls don’t suggest the “unprecedented” mandate Trump has boasted of, Americans chose the incoming president’s policies in the only poll that really matters – the election.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.