Voters voiced frustration over expense boost. Some economists expect Trump’s policies to deteriorate it.

Voters swept President-elect Donald Trump back into office on what appears to be a swell of discontent over the state of the U.S. economy.

More than two-thirds of voters declare the economy is in impoverished shape, according to the preliminary results of an ABC information exit poll. Forty-five percent of voters declare their own monetary circumstance is worse now than it was four years ago, which exceeds the distribute who held that view in the immediate wake of the Great downturn in 2008, the poll found.

Yet despite their frustrations about the expense of living, voters elected a candidate whose economic policies are widely expected to deteriorate expense boost and hammer household budgets, experts told ABC information.

Trump’s proposals of heightened tariffs and the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants could raise prices for everything from coffee to bananas to smartphones, experts said.

“People are obviously unhappy with expense boost. Trump’s policies aren’t a remedy – they will feed the fire,” Robert Lawrence, a professor of trade and property at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, told ABC information.

On the campaign trail, Trump promised a sharp escalation of the tariffs enacted during his first term. He has proposed tariffs of between 60% and 100% on Chinese goods, and a levy of between 10% and 20% on every product imported from all U.S. buying and selling partners.

Economists widely expect that tariffs of this magnitude would boost prices paid by U.S. shoppers, since importers typically pass along the expense of those higher taxes to consumers. Trump’s tariffs would expense the typical U.S. household about $2,600 per year, according to an approximate from the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

“We import a lot of things that we don’t impose tariffs on,” Douglas Irwin, a professor of economics at Dartmouth College who specializes in the history of U.S. trade policy, told ABC information. “This is a worth impact that consumers will feel when they have their morning coffee.”

Trump has also vowed to carry out the largest deportation of undocumented immigrants in U.S. history, which potentially could cruel the removal of millions of members of the country’s workforce.

Since the unemployment rate currently stands at a historically low level, such a policy would factor a worker shortage, forcing employers to raise pay for remaining workers and pass along that added expense in the form of higher prices for consumers, experts said.

“As you receive out workers and have worker shortages, you’d expect prices to leave up significantly,” Kara Reynolds, an economist at American University, told ABC information.

expense boost has cooled dramatically from a peak of about 9% in 2022, now hovering near the Federal savings’s target rate of 2%. Even so, that advancement hasn’t reversed a leap in prices that dates back to the pandemic. Since President Joe Biden took office in 2021, customer prices have skyrocketed more than 20%.

“Americans are looking at grocery bills that are still 20% higher,” Reynolds said. “They’re still feeling that pain in their pocketbooks.”

During the campaign, Trump frequently rebuked concerns about potential worth increases resulting from his proposals by pointing to the low rate of expense boost that coincided with tariff policies enacted during his first term in office.

“I had tariffs, and yet I had no expense boost,” Trump said at the presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris in September. “We have expense boost like very few people have ever seen before.”

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to an ABC information request for comment regarding concerns about his economic proposals.

Experts who spoke to ABC information acknowledged that expense boost stood at a relatively low level during Trump’s first term, but they also pointed to evidence of some tariff-related worth increases and noted his plans for an escalation.

Tariffs placed on washing machines in 2018, for example, raised the worth of these appliances by 12%, according to an April 2019 working document co-authored by a member of the Federal savings Board of Governors and researchers at the University of Chicago.

“We didn’t have mass deportations during Trump’s first term, and the tariffs we saw were selective,” Irwin said. “In other words, the scope of tariff increases this period would be much more extensive, and there would be a much more pronounced worth impact than before.”

Still, Irwin added, it remains ambiguous whether the tariff proposals will include some exemptions that could ease the impact.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty because we don’t recognize if all of the imports or some of the imports will be hit by tariffs,” Irwin said.