Who Voters Think is to Blame for Inflation in July

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Six months into Donald Trump’s second time in office, the president is seen as the chief reason for economic inflation in a majority of different kinds of communities in the United States, according to an analysis from the American Communities Project and PharosGraph, a behavioral-science and artificial intelligence firm.

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The latest PharosGraph data from July also suggest there may be a split in the Trump base: one where voters seem more concerned about the state of economy and another one primarily driven by cultural beliefs and divides.

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A few months ago in May, the 15 community types in the ACP saw a wide range of people and institutions as the primary cause of inflation. But over the last few analyses, more communities have settled on one primary blame target: the Trump Administration. And that comes as survey data show inflation and the cost of living are still the top concerns for voters, as they were in the 2024 election.

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The National Picture

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Looking at the July PharosGraph data compared to previous months reveals a few big trends. First, the Trump administration has been the top blame target among Americans as a whole for the entire time and has solidified its position there, even as there are shifts in blame among the other potential targets.

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For instance, since May, the Federal Reserve blame score has fallen each month.Meanwhile, Corporate Greed climbed in June to be very close to the Trump administration,before falling back down again in July. And there was a small increase in the people blaming the Biden administration for inflation in July, but that bump seems to be largely due to the attitudes in a few ACP community types (more on that later in this post).

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Meanwhile, the Trump administration has not only maintained the top blame position in the PharosGraph data, the distance between it and the next closest blame target has widened. The trend suggests a hardening in the opinion that this is Trump’s economy now and whatever happens to it will be seen as his responsibility.

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You can see that even more clearly in the blame scores among the ACP’s 15 community types.

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The work behind the PharosGraph data involves analyzing hundreds of thousands of stories from tens of thousands of U.S.-based news outlets. The firm then used a large language model (LLM) to estimate how likely people with different socio-demographic characteristics and political preferences are to blame each target for inflation.

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That approach married with the demographic data that exist behind the ACP’s typology can produce blame targets for each of the Project’s 15 community types.

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At the Community Level

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The biggest change since June at the community type level is the number of communities that now assign Trump the most blame for inflation.

In June, there were five types that blamed Trump the most: the African American South, Big Cities, College Towns, Middle Suburbs, and Military Posts. In July, those five were joined by the Exurbs, Graying America, Hispanic Centers, and Urban Suburbs, in citing Trump as the top reason for inflation.

That is nine of the 15 ACP types, representing about three-quarters of the nation’s population.

And when you look at those places through the 2024 political lens(which presidential candidate did they support last November), the data get more interesting.

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Overall, only four ACP community types voted for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris in 2024: the African American South, Big Cities, College Towns, and Urban Suburbs. It’s not a surprise that those communities would blame Trump for inflation.

But the other five types that assigned the Trump administration the most blame for inflation in July, all voted for the president in 2024 and some by large margins. That data point suggests that those communities may be seeing some softening in their support Trump — at least around inflation and the economy, which has become a problem for the president.

Those communities are very different kinds of places. The Exurbs, for instance, tend to be well-educated and have higher incomes. The Middle Suburbs are more blue-collar with a large reliance on manufacturing jobs. Graying America tends to be full of older people living on fixed incomes — people who tend to be hurt by inflation.

The fact that all three of those types place more blame on the Trump Administration for inflation suggests the issue may be bigger and more salient than it appears in the larger economic data.

But other communities that supported Trump have not followed suit, at least not yet. In fact, the Evangelical Hubs, Native American Lands, and Working Class Country all went in the opposite direction and cited the Biden administration as their top cause of inflation in July.

That data point could suggest a deeper tie to the current administration based on more than just economic concerns. Those communities tend to be more rural and more culturally conservative than others, and they were more likely to blame the Biden administration for inflation in July than they were in June.

The Aging Farmlands and Rural Middle America stood out for citing China as the No. 1 cause for inflation in July. And the LDS Enclaves were alone in naming the Federal Reserve as their top blame target.

These numbers all bear watching as government data suggest that inflation has been rising over the summer and could be ready for a sharper increase in the months ahead as the impact of tariffs becomes a bigger part of the nation’s economic story in the fall.

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