By Bo Erickson and Jason Lange
WASHINGTON, April 24 (Reuters) - A clear majority of Americans blame President Donald Trump for surging gasoline prices, which is weighing on his Republican Party ahead of November's congressional midterm elections, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll.
Some 77% of registered voters in the poll, which concluded early this week, said Trump bears at least a fair amount of responsibility for the recent rise in gas prices, which was sparked by his decision to launch a war on Iran
along with U.S. ally Israel.
The view was widely shared across the political spectrum, with 55% of Republican voters, 82% of independents and 95% of Democrats pinning blame on the president for the higher costs.
Some 58% of voters, including one in five Republicans and two-thirds of independents, said they would be less likely to support candidates in the November 3 midterms who support Trump's approach to the conflict with Iran.
The U.S. and Israel launched surprise attacks on Iran in February that killed the country's leader and thousands of Iranians. Tehran responded with attacks on U.S. allies in the region, damaging oil export facilities and shutting down roughly a fifth of the global oil trade. U.S. gasoline prices have risen to about $4 a gallon, a dollar more than before the war started.
The war is grinding on household finances and weighing on Republicans ahead of the midterm elections, when Trump's party faces what many see as an uphill battle to keep their U.S. House of Representatives majority. Risks are also rising that they lose control of the Senate.
'PEOPLE ARE UPSET'
"Right now, it’s bad. People are upset," said Sarah Chamberlain, strategist and president of the Republican Main Street Partnership that advocates for conservative lawmakers.
”Republicans are obviously very concerned about maintaining the House, but if we can get through the Iran situation by summertime and gas prices drop back down, or at least go down maybe not to quite the level they were prior to the war, then I think we have a really good shot."
Some 77% of Americans see fuel prices as a very big concern, the Reuters/Ipsos poll showed, and respondents were more than twice as likely to expect an increase in fuel prices over the next year than they were to expect a decrease.
Trump won the 2024 presidential election after pledging to fix the high rates of inflation that bedeviled his Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden. He has repeatedly claimed the U.S. economy is "booming," including in remarks in Las Vegas on April 16. The White House website proclaims to visitors: "WELCOME TO THE GOLDEN AGE!"
INFLATION WORRIES
But 70% of respondents in the Reuters/Ipsos poll disagreed with a statement that the economy was booming. Some 82% said inflation was a big concern.
"Trump has made affordability and bringing down prices a cornerstone of the Make America Great Again movement, and with costs going up in the country, that is a hard circle to square, messaging wise," said Erin Maguire, a Republican strategist.
Maguire said Republican candidates have to be careful how they talk about the war with Iran while highlighting the effort the administration has put into cutting taxes.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll also showed significant erosion in the Republican Party's longstanding advantage on the economy. The latest survey, conducted April 15-20, showed 38% of U.S. voters prefer the Republican approach to the economy compared to 37% who said Democrats are better on the issue. That one-point advantage for Republicans compares to a 14-point advantage the party had immediately after Trump started his second term in January 2025.
The poll gathered responses from 4,557 U.S. adults nationwide, including 3,577 registered voters. It had a margin of error of 2 percentage points.
(Reporting by Jason Lange, Bo Erickson in Washington; Additional reporting by Jacob Bogage; editing by Scott Malone and Deepa Babington)
