Many Americans are still concerned about facing high prices this holiday season, but less so than during the middle of former President Joe Biden’s sole term, according to an AP-NORC poll released on Friday.
Eighty-seven percent of American adults presently feel like they are paying higher prices for groceries than they usually do, compared to 95% of voters who said the same in December 2022, when Biden was in office, according to the poll.
The poll also found that 69% of U.S. adults felt like they are now paying higher prices than usual for electricity, while 74% said the same in December 2022. Moreover, 63% of respondents said they still think they are paying more than usual for holiday gifts, compared with 69% who felt the same way in December 2022, the poll found.
About two-thirds of U.S. adults think the nation’s economy is “poor,” a proportion that remains unchanged from December 2024, before Trump assumed office for his second term. Fifty-six percent of Republicans and 16% of Democrats conversely viewed the economy as “good” in December 2025 — compared to 51% of Democrats and 16% of Republicans who said the same the year before, when Biden was in office, according to AP-NORC polling.
Of those surveyed, 49% said they feel like they are currently spending more money on gas than normal. In December 2022, 83% of respondents said the same thing, per the AP-NORC poll.
Biden’s office did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
Additionally, about 4 in 10 American adults expect that the U.S. will be worse off economically in 2026, while roughly 3 in 10 said economic conditions will not change much, according to the survey.
Inflation in the U.S. notably rose to record highs during Biden’s time in the White House, hitting a peak of 9.1% in July 2022. Gas prices in the U.S. also surged during a portion of Biden’s sole term.
Still, Biden has defended his economic policies since leaving office, saying in an interview with BBC in May that his administration’s economy was “growing … the stock market was way up … we were expanding our influence around the world.”
Americans’ economic confidence dipped to a 17-month low in November, according to a Gallup survey released on Dec. 4. Some polling released in recent weeks has suggested that many Americans are concerned about affordability issues under Trump’s watch.
On Thursday, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich projected that Americans will likely feel a “Trump boom” in the economy by July 4, 2026.
President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance are both hitting the road in the U.S. in an effort to highlight the administration’s economic policies ahead of the 2026 midterms, the Daily Caller reported on Thursday. Vance wrote in a Wednesday X post that Biden’s “insane” economic policies “left American families unable to afford a decent living in their own country.”
However, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries claimed in a Dec. 10 X post that Republicans are “lying” to Americans about the state of the nation’s economy.
The AP-NORC poll of 1,146 U.S. adults was conducted from Dec. 4 to 8 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel. The poll’s margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 4 percentage points.
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