President Donald Trump and his dim-witted commerce secretary have said that the goal of the absurd tariffs he's placed on nearly every imported good was to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States so that Americans can toil away on assembly lines for the rest of their days.
But a new poll conducted by Civiqs for Daily Kos finds that while 46% of registered voters say that bringing manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. is more important than keeping prices low, a large majority of voters (66%) don't want to work in factories themselves.
Even more, just 6% of voters said they would leave their jobs to go work in a factory—a number that shows that even if companies built factories in the United States, they would have an incredibly difficult time finding the labor to staff them.
Manufacturing vastly more items in the U.S. would very likely raise the cost of consumer goods. Labor in the U.S. is more costly than in countries like China, which produces a significant portion of the electronics, clothing, shoes, and toys that we purchase.
As of March, there were almost 500,000 vacant manufacturing jobs in the United States, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And if Americans don’t want to work in factories, and if Trump and Republicans block immigrants from coming to the U.S. to fill those jobs, it would lead to the kind of tight labor market that spikes inflation—i.e., the opposite of what Americans seemingly elected Trump to do.
Ultimately, a majority of virtually every demographic polled, save for self-identified Republican voters, says they would not want to work in a factory. That includes 87% of Democrats and 61% of independents.
And yet even a plurality of Republican voters (47%) say they would not want to work in a factory, with another 23% saying they are “unsure”—a sign they might not want to admit that they don’t want to work the factory jobs that Trump and his allies insist Americans to want to work.
"It's time to train people not to do the jobs of the past, but to do the great jobs of the future. This is the new model, where you work in these kinds of plants for the rest of your life and your kids work here and your grandkids work here. We let the auto plants go overseas,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in an interview on CNBC in April as he sought to defend Trump’s tariffs.
At the end of the day, 53% of voters disapprove of Trump’s tariffs—and 48% disapprove “strongly.”
And the reasoning for that is pretty clear.
A majority of voters (56%) think the tariffs have led to higher prices on items they’ve bought recently. A plurality (49%) say they do not think Trump's tariffs will bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S.—which is the stated goal of the policy. And another plurality of voters (36%) say it would be a bad result if the tariffs brought manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. but also led to higher prices for the items they purchase.
The new Civiqs/Daily Kos poll finds Trump’s approval rating underwater, with 52% of voters disapproving of the way he's handling his job—49% of whom disapprove strongly. And that's before Trump's tariffs have really had an impact on Americans.
Companies are only now starting to raise prices, as goods purchased with the higher tariff rate are now hitting shelves. For example, Walmart recently announced it will have to hike prices thanks to the tariff policy.
“We will do our best to keep our prices as low as possible. But given the magnitude of the tariffs, even at the reduced levels announced this week, we aren’t able to absorb all the pressure given the reality of narrow retail margins,” CEO Doug McMillon said last week.
That could hit Trump’s voters the hardest as well. States that Trump carried in the 2024 presidential election have far more Walmart stores than those that backed Democrat Kamala Harris.
Throughout last year’s campaign, Trump said he wanted to raise tariffs. But voters didn’t listen, or they didn’t know what the effects would be. Unfortunately, now we’re all about to find out.
Campaign Action
