How do Americans feel about President Trump’s tariffs? In many cases, it depends how you ask. 

In 2024, polls found support for tariffs ranged anywhere from 29 to 56 percent of people, depending on the exact question. Polls asking about tariffs on China found higher support, while polls that described tariffs as taxes or mentioned higher prices saw lower support. 

Reciprocal tariffs – in other words, placing taxes on goods from countries that tax American goods – are quite popular. A March 2025 Harvard Harris poll found that 60 percent of voters support these tit-for-tat taxes, 10 points higher than support for general tariffs on China, Canada, and Mexico.  

Harvard Harris’s findings also suggest that the middle is frustrated with the status quo but doesn’t see President Trump’s plan as the right solution. Three in five independent voters agreed the U.S. needs to “reset its trade and tariff policies,” even though over half of them believed President Trump’s tariffs “will just worsen the economy and be counterproductive.” 

A March 2025 AP poll found that trade is President Trump’s weakest issue, with just 38 percent of Americans approving of his handling. The economy closely followed as his second-worst issue.  

Considering how much people value the economy – it was voters’ number one concern in the 2024 election, per Gallup – this is not the result President Trump wants to see.  

72 percent of respondents told CBS News they expect tariffs would raise prices in the short term; two-thirds of people in the same survey said they want President Trump to focus more on lowering prices.  

Since President Trump first took office in 2017, the public has been split over tariffs. A 2019 CBS News poll found that just about half of people expected tariffs to have a negative effect on the economy. In 2018, Politico found that registered voters narrowly favored tariffs on steel and aluminum, with a wide gap between Republican and Democratic respondents.  

But it was Republican voters who changed their tune the most. Before Donald Trump ran for president, voters in both parties generally supported free trade. In 2014, Pew Research found that 51 percent of Republicans thought free trade was a good thing for the U.S.; just two years later, once Trump was running on a pro-tariff platform, less than a third of Republicans supported free trade. All the while, Democratic voters barely budged.  

Of course, it’s one thing for voters to say they support or oppose tariffs in the abstract. It will be much more telling once President Trump’s sweeping tariffs take effect and the consequences or benefits are felt across America.