Published January 24, 2025
President Donald Trump’s new, multiracial, working-class coalition won’t be satisfied with a repeat of the GOP’s typical Romney-Ryan economics. A new poll shows there are a number of things Trump could propose that would help those voters and also be politically popular.
The poll, conducted by Echelon Insights, asked a representative sample of voters about a host of proposed domestic policy items. Four stood out: avoiding tax increases, increasing the child tax credit, expanding access to apprenticeships, and creating a new, targeted, paid family leave program.
Tax hikes are certainly a possibility as the individual income tax components of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts expire at the end of the year. While one might think it would be a no-brainer to extend them, the administration must also contend with a federal budget deficit that is ballooning to unprecedented highs in a noncrisis situation. That fact creates lots of pressure on government to prioritize reducing the deficit over keeping the tax cuts in place.
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Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, studies and provides commentary on American politics. His work focuses on how America’s political order is being upended by populist challenges, from the left and the right. He also studies populism’s impact in other democracies in the developed world.