Americans are finding it even harder to afford groceries this year despite President Donald Trump bragging after the election that he had “won on groceries” and would bring food prices “way down.”
According to a new Harris Poll commissioned by Axios, nearly half of respondents, or 47 percent, said it was harder to afford groceries this year compared to last year, while 34 percent said it was about the same.
Just 19 percent thought Trump was delivering on his promise to make it easier to afford food, and fewer than half thought the administration had positively affected the economy this year.
The president boasted during a December 2024 interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker, “I won on the border, and I won on groceries.”
“Very simple word, groceries. Like almost—you know, who uses the word? I started using the word—the groceries,” he said. “When you buy apples, when you buy bacon, when you buy eggs, they would double and triple the price over a short period of time, and I won an election based on that. We’re going to bring those prices way down.”
High food prices disproportionately impact the working-class voters whom Trump’s coalition relied on to win re-election.
“It’s such a visible signal that life is harder today than it was even last year when we were in an election cycle,” said John Gerzema, CEO of The Harris Poll, told Axios.
Respondents “don’t feel like things are changing fast enough. This is going to be a significant issue for the president,” he added.
In a statement to Axios, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt implied former President Joe Biden was to blame for Trump’s inability to bring down prices.
“He inherited the worst inflation crisis in a generation from Joe Biden, and that is why he has tasked his admin with fixing it. Grocery prices are coming down, such as egg prices which have plummeted by nearly 80%, and we recognize there is more work to be done,” she said.
In a statement to the Daily Beast, White House spokesperson Kush Desai also invoked Biden, saying: “With inflation already trending at a 2.3 percent annualized rate, the Trump administration remains focused on implementing supply-side policies to firmly put Joe Biden’s inflation crisis behind us.”
Last month, grocery inflation hit its highest rates since 2022 thanks to Trump’s tariffs.
Overall inflation for food was at 3.2 percent for the 12 month-period that ended in August, according to data from the Labor Department, while key staples such as ground beef, eggs, and coffee are up by even more—beef was at 12.8 percent, eggs at 10.9 percent, and coffee at 20.9 percent.
Those increases were on top of earlier pandemic-era price surges, which slowed in 2023 and 2024 but never reversed, according to Axios. Over the last five years, grocery prices have risen by 30 percent.
At the same time, the job market is weaker and wage increases have slowed, meaning buyers are feeling those increases.
