President-elect Donald J. 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 favor 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 do want change in many of the areas where Mr. 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 Mr. Trump, aren’t always as supportive and often have mixed opinions.
“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 Prof. Tatishe Nteta, the director of the UMass Poll.
That’s not to say that polling suggests all of Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. Trump to deliver on that front than they did Vice President Kamala Harris.
Americans also tended to support one of Mr. 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 of Americans said they supported new tariffs. An overwhelming majority of Trump voters, 83 percent, said they did.
But in that same CBS/YouGov poll, 59 percent 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 Mr. Trump, one-third believed tariffs would raise prices and supported the measures anyway.
Americans were less bullish on Mr. Trump’s more specific campaign proposal to put a 60 percent tariff on goods from China. In a poll from YouGov and The Economist fielded in mid-November, just 37 percent of U.S. adults said they supported that plan, while 42 percent opposed it (and 21 percent answered “not sure”). Even among Trump supporters, 22 percent said they would oppose such a tariff.
Mr. Trump said last week, after that poll was conducted, that he would impose a 10 percent tariff on goods from China and a 25 percent tariff on products from Canada and Mexico.
Professor Nteta noted that a fifth of Americans said they weren’t sure whether they supported or opposed the 60 percent 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.
Mr. 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 earlier this year found that a majority supported cutting individual tax rates, and that a plurality opposed letting Mr. Trump’s 2017 tax cuts expire.
But while Mr. Trump’s plans include lowering the corporate tax rate, a majority of voters in the poll said they’d be in favor of increasing the rate. Polling from Pew Research Center has shown that most Americans think wealthy people and corporations aren’t paying their fair share in taxes.
However, some of Mr. 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, Mr. Trump has promised a mass deportation effort to expel millions of undocumented people from the country. 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 percent 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 percent, said they supported providing a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Unsurprisingly, Trump voters mostly supported deportations, and Harris voters mostly backed pathways to citizenship. But even 20 percent of those who said they favored mass deportation supported citizenship opportunities.
Pew Research Center found similar contrasts in an August survey. When asked about specific circumstances, such as whether undocumented immigrants who are married to U.S. citizens should be allowed to stay in the country, or whether international students who receive a U.S. college degree should be, a majority of voters said they favored these measures. In the case of students, that included a majority of Trump supporters.
This falls in line with longstanding evidence that question wording 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 like “Do you support mass deportation?”
“There is some nuance to how the public sees or is thinking about the issue of immigration,” Dr. 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 Mr. Trump’s picks other than Matt Gaetz (who has since withdrawn from consideration for attorney general) had net positive favorability — meaning that a higher share of Americans had a favorable 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 percent said they hadn’t heard of the Fox News personality Pete Hegseth, Mr. Trump’s pick for defense secretary, and 43 percent said they didn’t know Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, 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, according to Chase Harrison, who teaches survey research at Harvard University.
This uncertainty is in line with polling about Mr. 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,” Dr. 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 Mr. Trump has boasted of, Americans chose the incoming president’s policies in the only poll that really matters — the election.
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