How Americans Feel About Tariffs
Trump loves tariffs. Do Americans?
It depends how pollsters ask the question.
25% of
respondents in
favor of tariffs
35
45
55
In these two polls,
just 29% expressed
support for tariffs ...
... while in another poll, 56% did
Americans express very different views on tariffs depending upon how the question is asked, a challenge for pollsters trying to measure public support for a complex and poorly understood issue.
Share of Americans in favor of tariffs
Each bar in this chart represents a poll finding about how many Americans support tariffs, from a sampling of this year’s surveys.
When a survey question defines tariffs as taxes on imports, for example, fewer people say they support them.
When a survey question calls out specific countries, more are in favor of tariffs on China than on other countries.
Citing the potential upsides or downsides of tariffs in the question can also dramatically alter support.
How you define a complicated subject can sway the results.
Tariffs are a wonky subject, the details of which are unfamiliar to many, maybe even most, Americans. As evidence: In the days after Mr. Trump took office, there were more Google searches for “tariffs” than searches for “Taylor Swift.”
Some pollsters try to increase comprehension by describing tariffs in the question wording, typically by defining tariffs as “a tax on imports.” That may not seem controversial — tariffs are a tax on imports, after all — but putting the word “tax” in the question may lead fewer people to say they support them.
That means the results of the poll may not accurately reflect Americans’ opinions, since some respondents may be making up their minds in real time during the poll. That can be counter to the goal of a poll, which is to measure an existing attitude, not shape a new one.
When polls mention potential upsides or parrot Mr. Trump’s talking points about tariffs, more Americans say they are in favor of them. A survey by co/efficient, a right-leaning firm, found that nearly half of Americans approved when asked about “President Trump’s plan to impose tariffs to bring back American jobs and ensure fair international trade.”
The inverse is true when respondents are prompted with the downsides. A YouGov survey from late January asked respondents who had said that tariffs should be increased whether they would support increasing them “even if that leads to higher prices for American consumers.” Nearly half of those who previously had said they supported increasing tariffs said that they either wouldn’t support increasing tariffs or were not sure.
Even those who favor tariffs feel they could be harmful.
When asked if they think tariffs will help or hurt the economy, Americans are more likely to say they expect tariffs to hurt the economy. This finding is consistent across multiple surveys.
This is true even of Americans who support tariffs. In a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, 37 percent of those who support tariffs said they thought tariffs would be good for them personally. Nearly a third said tariffs would not help them personally, even though they supported the measures; another 33 percent were not sure.
Including an “unsure” option dramatically alters support.
Sometimes public opinion on an issue can be relatively stable. On the issue of abortion, for example, attitudes are generally unchanged by small differences in question wording. About 60 percent of Americans support abortion being at least mostly legal, for example, and the results don’t differ much between different ways of asking.
But on more complex issues, like tariffs, public opinion is not as settled. As a result, small differences in how the question is asked can lead to large differences in the results.
In addition, when polls allow people to say they are “unsure,” fewer respondents will express a position on tariffs. This is true any time pollsters offer respondents an explicit option to say they are unsure, but it is particularly pronounced on sensitive or complex questions.
Most polls reviewed by The Times offered only two answers — variations on favor or oppose — or the option to skip the question entirely (which only a small percentage did).
Do you favor or oppose tariffs?
Each bar represents a survey response
Favor
Oppose
50%
Did not respond
A few surveys, however, explicitly gave respondents the option to answer with “unsure” or “neither favor nor oppose.” On average, over a quarter of respondents chose that option — yet another factor that lowers support.
Including “unsure” or “neither” as an option lowers both support and opposition.
Favor
Oppose
50%
There are also a number of elements beyond the question wording that make measuring support for tariffs difficult. As Mr. Trump continues to change his plans for tariffs, it is hard for the public to keep up. So depending on when the questions were asked, the public may have a fundamentally different understanding of what is happening.
How the survey was conducted can also come into play. Some surveys are of all Americans, while some are just of registered voters, two groups that have slightly different political leanings. And surveys taken over the phone with an interviewer compared with surveys taken on the web may also yield slightly different results.
Public opinion may become clearer over time, as policy becomes more settled and people begin to see real-world impact. But for the time being, tariffs are an issue on which true public opinion is difficult to truly know.
Sources
Selected polls conducted in 2025 that asked about attitudes toward tariffs:
Washington Post/Ipsos poll of 2,601 U.S. adults conducted Feb. 13-18, 2025. Reuters/Ipsos poll of 4,125 U.S. adults conducted Feb. 13-18, 2025. CBS/YouGov poll of 2,175 U.S. adults conducted Feb. 5-7, 2025. co/efficient poll of 1,570 likely voters conducted Jan. 25-28, 2025. Ipsos poll of 1,034 U.S. adults conducted Jan. 24-26, 2025. YouGov poll of 1,140 U.S. adults conducted Jan. 21-23, 2025. AtlasIntel poll of 1,882 U.S. adults conducted Jan 21-23, 2025. Reuters/Ipsos poll of 1,077 U.S. adults conducted Jan 20-21, 2025. CBS/YouGov poll of 2,174 U.S. adults conducted Jan. 15-17, 2025. HarrisX/The Harris poll of 2,650 registered voters conducted Jan. 15-16, 2025. GBAO/Wall Street Journal/Fabrizio Lee poll of 1,500 registered voters conducted January 9-14, 2025. AP/NORC poll of 1.147 U.S. adults conducted Jan. 9-13, 2025. New York Times/Ipsos poll of 2,128 U.S. adults conducted Jan. 2-10, 2025.