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Now about those polls…

In public remarks and private briefings with concerned Republicans, the White House has been
promising that the bulk of Donald Trump’s State of the Union address this evening will be devoted to the economy and the cost-of-living issues that are still bedeviling Americans. Or as Karoline Leavitt told reporters this morning, “The president will lay out the case for why he and Republicans are better suited to continue tackling the affordability crisis that was created by the Biden administration and Democrats on Capitol Hill.” She
promised that an era of Trump 2.0 “prosperity” is just over the horizon, pointing to lower mortgage rates, slowing inflation, and those tax cuts included in the Big Beautiful Bill.

We’ll see if Trump can stick to the plan. His address to a joint session of Congress last year was a rambling and tedious affair, a post-election victory lap running almost 100 minutes, making it the longest such speech in modern history. Trump talked about everything from Sesame Street to transgender
rodents to the Panama Canal. As for tonight’s affair? “It’s going to be a long speech because we have so much to talk about,” Trump declared on Monday. (The Team USA gold medal men’s hockey team, which is reportedly attending the State of the Union, had better strap in and caffeinate—the boys were spotted clubbing at E11EVEN in Miami until 3 a.m. last night.)

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Despite Leavitt’s rosy spin, anxious Republicans on the ballot this November will be watching the speech
closely. Inflation may be cooling and gas prices may be down, but consumer prices still rose by 2.4 percent over the last year, and by even more for food. Interest rates remain stubbornly high. Tariff confusion continues to rattle business owners. Consumer confidence ticked up slightly this month, but it’s still below where it was after Trump’s victory in
2024.

So while Biden is gone, the vibecession lingers—and polls show demonstratively that voters have lost faith in the current president’s ability to manage the economy. Trump’s approval rating has fallen precipitously since he took office last year, currently hovering slightly over 40 percent in the RCP average. Just this week, a CNN poll
found that only 26 percent of independents approve of Trump’s handling of the presidency, while a Washington Post-ABC-Ipsos poll found that 57 percent disapprove of the way Trump is
managing the economy, and 65 percent disapprove of his handling of inflation. You don’t have to be Nate Silver to know those are textbook “Throw the bums out” numbers.

What’s confounding for Republicans is that several pieces of Trump’s agenda should be popular on
their own: ending taxes on tips, efforts to lower prescription drug prices, federally backed family savings accounts for newborns. But news of these achievements is either not reaching voters or just falling on deaf ears. This highlights an endemic communications problem for Trump, even in this supposedly more methodical second term: He often gets credit for attentional superpowers as he tramples his political opponents in the media and online, but his addiction to sensationalism and high-volume
blabbermouthing continues to drown out news that his team ostensibly wants to talk about.

Puck has exclusive new polling—out this afternoon and fresh in your inbox as we wait for the State of the Union—highlighting the White House’s economic conundrum. We had Echelon Insights test a handful of Trump’s recent economic achievements to see
how much voters are hearing about them compared to other high-wattage Trump-centric stories that have saturated the news in recent months.

Here’s the baseline: Echelon found that 88 percent of voters have seen, read, or heard a lot or some about
ICE raids and the protests that consumed Minnesota last month. And 76 percent have heard a lot or some about Trump’s attempts to acquire Greenland. Meanwhile, a majority of voters (55 percent) have heard about Trump’s attempts to “build new monuments or renovate existing ones,” like tearing down the East Wing of the White House to erect his ballroom. All of these stories have dominated headlines for months, clearly breaking through to voters of all stripes. (Even majorities of those notoriously
hard-to-reach young voters had heard about all of these stories.)

By contrast, majorities of voters have not heard about several of Trump’s key economic accomplishments, including some that were promoted with high-profile events at the White House or press conferences featuring the president and allies. For instance, only 45 percent of voters have heard or read about the launch of Trump Accounts, the Michael Dell–backed federal investment accounts designed to
build long-term wealth for young children. A full 27 percent of voters said they had heard “nothing” about the accounts, including 30 percent of independents.

Only 42 percent of voters had heard something about the launch of TrumpRX, the administration’s new platform to help customers find and purchase low-cost prescription drugs under most-favored nation drug pricing. Under the hood in the crosstabs, a flashing-red warning sign for the White House: A majority of seniors (51
percent) said they had either heard nothing or only a little about TrumpRX and its purpose. Leavitt has already promised that Trump will talk about the initiative tonight.

Another worrying data point for Trump: Most voters aren’t aware of the details of the tax cuts that were included in the behemoth Big Beautiful Bill that Congress passed last year. The White House, of course, wanted to cram every conceivable domestic spending priority into the legislation, which meant that voters were
inevitably going to miss certain details—including tax cuts that would normally be a calling card for the G.O.P. For instance, Echelon tested awareness of the BBB’s permanent extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for working Americans earning between $30,000 and $80,000 a year. Remarkably, only a third of voters (34 percent) had heard about them. Even the intended recipients hadn’t: Only 29 percent of voters making under $50,000/year had heard of the tax cuts, and only 34 percent of those making
under $75,000 had.

One economic initiative that has resonated relative to others is Trump’s elimination of taxes on tips, another BBB program that Trump plans to highlight on Tuesday night by shouting out hourly workers invited to the State of the Union as guests. A healthy majority of voters (60 percent) have heard a lot or some about eliminating taxes on tips. But as with the tax cut, awareness of no-tax-on-tips was lower among the very people the policy is supposed to help:
Respondents without college degrees and people making less than $50,000/year knew less about it than voters with college degrees and voters with higher yearly incomes.

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