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Two-thirds of Republican voters say they trust Donald Trump more than any other GOP presidential candidate to manage the US economy, according to an FT-Michigan Ross survey that underscores his dominance on bread-and-butter issues a week before primary season gets under way.
The findings are particularly problematic for Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who has surged in the polls to become the biggest threat to the former president.
Only 8 per cent of Republican voters said she would be their choice to handle the US economy, while 67 per cent picked Trump. Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor whose floundering campaign has been overtaken by Haley in some early voting states, was the choice of 9 per cent of respondents.
The Iowa caucuses on January 15 will fire the starting gun on the primary process in which Republican voters will select their party’s nominee for the White House in 2024. New Hampshire’s primary will follow a week later.
The Financial Times’s polling on the economy reflects Trump’s commanding lead among Republicans in early primary race states, where he enjoys the support of about half of Iowa’s caucus-goers and 44 per cent of GOP voters in New Hampshire. DeSantis is polling in second in Iowa with 18.4 per cent, while Haley is second in New Hampshire on 25.7 per cent.
On the campaign trail, Trump has touted the strength of the US economy when he was in the White House and insisted that the “next economic boom” would start the “instant” he is elected as president in November.
Haley, a former ambassador to the UN who has leaned heavily on her foreign policy credentials, has sold herself as a fiscal conservative and blamed inflation on billions of dollars in federal spending by the Trump and Biden administrations. DeSantis has vowed to slash taxes if elected and proposed a single flat federal income tax for all Americans.
But their pitches appear to be falling short given Trump’s overwhelming lead in the polls.
Haley has focused much of her campaigning efforts in New Hampshire, where independent voters make up a significant share of the Republican primary electorate.
But more than a third of independents surveyed in the FT-Michigan poll said they trusted Trump the most to handle the economy, followed by Haley with just 10 per cent. Roughly a quarter of independents said they did not trust any of the Republican contenders on the economy.
Erik Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, said the findings partly reflected respondents’ greater familiarity with Trump’s economic policies than those of Haley or DeSantis.
“Many Republicans and more than a few Democrats remember the economy as being better under Trump than it is now, whether or not it really was,” he added.
Trump has also been buoyed in recent weeks by several national polls that show him beating President Joe Biden in a hypothetical head-to-head race.
Biden has staked his re-election bid in part on “Bidenomics”, an agenda rooted in billions of dollars of public investments, a focus on middle-income workers and an effort to rejuvenate parts of the rustbelt and spur investment in new manufacturing capacity.
The White House has touted record numbers of jobs created under Biden, and on Friday hailed a bumper labour market report for December, saying it “confirms that 2023 was a great year for American workers”.
But the president has battled persistently low approval ratings and an electorate that remains downbeat on his handling of the economy.
The latest FT-Michigan Ross survey found just 38 per cent of voters said they approved of Biden’s handling of the economy compared with 60 per cent who disapproved.
Eighty-five per cent of respondents named price increases as among their biggest sources of stress, followed by just over half who cited their income level, while about a quarter pointed to either rent or credit card costs.
Trump has criticised Bidenomics in his stump speeches and recently blamed his likely general election opponent for an “inflation catastrophe” that was “demolishing your savings and ravaging your dreams”.
“Just ask yourself, were you better off five years ago? Or are you better off today with the inflation with bacon that costs you four times higher than you would have had to pay a little while ago?” Trump asked at a recent campaign rally in Waterloo, Iowa. “Nobody has ever seen anything like it.”
Inflation has more than halved in the past year, to about 3.1 per cent in November 2023, although more than 50 per cent of survey respondents thought prices had increased by more than that rate, based on their own experience.
The FT-Michigan Ross poll was conducted online by Democratic strategists Global Strategy Group and Republican polling firm North Star Opinion Research between December 28, 2023 and January 2, 2024. It reflects the opinions of 1,000 registered voters nationwide and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
