If trips to the grocery store now make you anxious, you are hardly alone, per results of a new American Greatness poll of 600 likely voters in the battleground state of North Carolina.
That poll shows Donald Trump with a commanding +12-point lead in the presidential race there, in a multi-candidate field. The survey, conducted by North Star Opinion Research, also shows Trump up +8 points in a head-to-head matchup vs. Biden. This kind of lead compares to a 2020 victory for Trump there by just 1.4 points.
Two important takeaways jump out from this poll. First, the poll straddled the guilty verdict for Trump in his New York trial, questioning voters both before and after the decision, roughly half and half. According to the pollster, there was no discernible difference in the pre-verdict vs. post-verdict trends. Second, Trump’s lead and his most important value proposition for these voters is still clearly the economy.
Overall, by a 53-36% margin, likely voters in the Tar Heel state report that they were better off under Trump. When asked about “Bidenomics” only 14% report it works “very well,” and a whopping 45% say it works “not at all.”
Drilling down to specific items, fully 68% of North Carolina voters blame Biden for soaring food prices. According to data from Biden’s own Department of Agriculture, the monthly cost for groceries for a family of four on a “thrifty USDA plan” has soared from $675 per month when Biden took office to $975 per month now. That massive 40% increase has voters in a very bad mood and longing for the days of Trump’s economy.
There is an important lesson here. Far too many so-called experts have tried to condescend to the American people, and lecture them that they are somehow actually doing well economically – that they’re just too dense to understand their own kitchen table reality.
But regular citizens are not dumb, and they are not wrong about key aspects of their lives becoming unaffordable. As Christopher Jacobs of Juniper Research explained well in an analysis of grocery prices for The Federalist: “Whether ordinary citizens know the specifics of whether grocery prices have gone up by 10 percent, 110 percent, or 1,000 percent, they recognize that prices have gone up by more than they can afford.”