President Donald Trump posted a list of 25 claimed achievements to his Truth Social platform on Friday, presenting them as the record of what he called his “term three” ahead of the midterms. Trump’s asserted policy wins range from taxes and employment to immigration, military operations and restrictions on diversity and transgender policies. Among his stated accomplishments were tighter border controls, tax cuts, tariffs to support U.S. manufacturing, increased military spending, lower prescription-drug prices and a series of foreign policy and socially conservative measures.
But recent national polling shows voters judging Washington chiefly through the cost of everyday life, rather than the full range of policies Trump chose to highlight. A Fox News poll conducted September 11 to 14 found 34 percent of registered voters named inflation or the cost of living as the country’s most important issue and 14 percent chose the economy or jobs, while a Marquette Law School Poll conducted September 2 to 9 produced a similar result among U.S. adults, with 37 percent choosing inflation and 16 percent the economy. Households feeling pressure from prices, jobs, health care and retirement costs are therefore more central to the electoral argument than voters motivated principally by cultural disputes or foreign policy.
Newsweek contacted the White House for further comment on Saturday morning outside of regular working hours. The clearest message from both polls is that voters are looking first at their wallets. A September Fox News poll conducted among 1,211 registered voters, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, found roughly three in ten naming the cost of living or inflation as the country’s most important issue.
And roughly one in seven chose the economy or jobs, the second most important issue named in the survey. Immigration followed at eight percent, while crime, taxes, tariffs, foreign policy, national security and Social Security each drew two percent or less. Marquette Law School reached a similar conclusion with a differently worded question and a different population.
Its September 2 to 9 national survey of 1,023 adults, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.3 percentage points, found nearly four in ten selecting inflation and the cost of living. One in six chose the economy, 10 percent cited the war involving Iran, Israel and the United States, and nine percent named Medicare and Social Security. Immigration and border security stood at six percent, with crime at three percent.
Those findings make Trump’s tax, investment, employment, export and prescription-drug assertions the most electorally relevant part of his Truth Social post. That does not establish that voters accept the claims, or that the policies have produced the effects described. It shows only that these subjects overlap most closely with what respondents say matters.
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