Survey Saysis a weekly series rounding up the most important polling trends or data points you need to know about, plus a vibe check on a trend that’s driving politics or culture
Video gaming is getting more expensive, and two reviled entities hold much of the blame: President Donald Trump and the artificial intelligence industry. And such inflation is only bad news for the Republican Party ahead of this year’s midterms
All three major game consoles have seen their prices increase drastically over the past 15 months, starting shortly after Trump announced his wide-ranging “Liberation Day” tariffs on April 2, 2025
Starting this August, Microsoft’s Xbox Series X with 1 TB of storage will be $300 more expensive than it was when the console launched at $499.99 in November 2020. It will be the floundering console’s fourth price hike in that time. The first time arrived about a month after Trump’s tariff announcement, with Microsoft citing “market conditions.”
In the days leading up to Trump’s so-called Liberation Day, the Entertainment Software Association—the video game industry’s trade association—published a statement decrying the administration’s plans
“Tariffs on video game devices and related products would negatively impact hundreds of millions of Americans and would harm the industry’s significant contributions to the U.S. economy,” the statement read
Over the past 15 months, similar price hikes have hit Sony’s PlayStation 5 and Nintendo’s Switch 2 as well. The price of a standard PS5 with a disc drive is now $150 higher than at launch, and the cost of the Switch 2, which was released only about a year ago, will jump by $50 in September. Switch 2 controllers and other accessories also got more expensive due to Trump’s tariffs, as did certain Xbox accessories and games
Even Nintendo’s original Switch saw its price increase by $40 last August, more than eight years after its launch. The Japanese gaming giant chalked it up to—you guessed it—“market conditions.”
Historically, game consoles get cheaper with time. For instance, less than three years after its 2006 debut, the PlayStation 3 cost $200 less—and had double the storage space. In other words, gamers got a better product for less
Now they’re getting a pretty similar product for much more
“The Trump administration’s 2025 tariffs sparked the first wave of price increases on video game consoles,” Wirecutter, a product-review website run by The New York Times, recently explained. “Whereas many electronics manufacturers … secured exceptions for their products, the makers of video game hardware didn’t receive the same reprieve—and the countries where consoles are typically manufactured, including China and Taiwan, were subject to particularly high tariff rates.”
But Trump doesn’t hold the blame by himself. Just as the Supreme Court struck down many of his tariffs, the AI boom has caused “RAM-ageddon.” AI data centers are getting dropped in neighborhoods across the nation, a buildout that is gobbling up memory chips, known as RAM. And as the supply shrinks, the prices have skyrocketed
The shortage began in earnest this past fall. The average price of two 16 GB sticks of DDR5-4800 RAM was around $100 last September, according to price-monitoring website PCPartPicker. But by this January, it was over $400
The crisis is spiking prices across consumer electronics. For instance, Apple is raising the cost of its computers and iPhones by hundreds of dollars
Data centers, as with the AI technology they support, are widely reviled. Seventy-one percent of Americans oppose a data center being built in their area And only 32% of Americans think AI will have a primarily positive effect on society, per a new YouGov poll
But not only are these price hikes part of a larger inflation crisis under Trump, which is hobbling his approval rating ahead of this year’s midterm elections, the increases are particularly felt among young men, a voting bloc Trump successfully courted in 2024. In the 2020 election, he lost men ages 18 to 29 by 10 percentage points, but four years later, he won them by 1 point, according to the Pew Research Center.
Now, many of those Trump-voting young men are feeling the sting of inflation hit a top hobby, and they aren’t happy. Just 32% of young male voters ages 18 to 29 approved of the job Trump was doing as president, per a survey fielded in December 2025 by HIT Strategies and the centrist group Third Way
The inflated cost of gaming will be highlighted further in the days leading up to the midterms. Grand Theft Auto VI, expected to be one of the largest entertainment releases in history, will debut on Nov. 19, at $80 in its standard edition, $10 higher than is typical for new games. An “ultimate edition,” featuring extras like exclusive in-game shops, will come in at $100. Adding insult to injury, if you buy a copy of GTA VI in stores, the case won’t contain a disc. All you’ll find is a code for a digital download. (Unfortunately, this is how all new PlayStation games will be, starting in 2028.)
Regardless of whether Trump is still the main reason for increasing prices in video gaming, he and his Republican Party could very well face voters’ wrath over it. They might just tell the GOP, as Trump himself put it in a cringey “Apprentice”-style skit that played at the 2004 Electronic Entertainment Expo, “You’re all fired. Look, I’m sorry, it’s over. Get out.”
Any updates?
- Despite Trump’s failure to give America a proper 250th birthday, most Americans remain happy their nation isn’t a monarchy, like the one it was part of before the American Revolution. A new YouGov poll finds that 65% of Americans think it would’ve been a bad thing for the U.S. to have its own monarchy for the past 250 years. Not as high as you might expect. Despite their alleged patriotism, Republicans (59%) are less likely than Democrats (75%) to say it would have been a bad thing.
- Minnesota is a blue state, but is it a progressive state? This year’s Democratic Senate primary may test that idea, as progressive Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan and moderate Rep. Angie Craig square off. Recent polls are very much a choose-your-own-adventure. A new one from Public Policy Polling and a pro-Flanagan group—the Democratic Lt. Gov. Association, which she chairs—finds her up 7 points over Craig, while another recent poll from SurveyUSA and a group of local media outlets finds Craig up 5 points. One of the dividing issues between Craig and Flanagan has been healthcare: Flanagan supports Medicare for All, while Craig prefers a public option.
- One year after Trump and the GOP gutted Medicaid, a majority of Americans want the government to go full single-payer. In the latest Economist/YouGov poll, 52% of Americans support the creation of “a national health plan in which all Americans get their health insurance from the federal government and private health insurance companies are eliminated”—a particularly blunt question wording that only highlights the appeal of a plan like Medicare for All. Even more impressive: Not only do 73% of Democrats and 54% of independents support such a policy, so do 30% of Republicans.
- After 1,592 days of trying to repel Russia’s invasion of their homeland, Ukrainians are sick of dealing with Trump. Just 7% of Ukrainians approve of the current leadership in the U.S., according to Gallup. That marks a 59-point slide from its high of 66% approval in 2022, when Joe Biden was president.
Vibe check
Americans are divided over who is the greatest American of the past 250 years—but less so over who the worst is
YouGov asked Americans to vote on the best and worst Americans since the nation’s founding, devising the list of names from an open-ended question included in a previous survey
Eighteen percent named Abraham Lincoln as the best American, with George Washington (13%) and Martin Luther King Jr. (12%) close behind
But when it comes to the worst American of the past 250, 34% of Americans picked Trump. The second-worst, with a comparably low 14%, was accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein
Beyond simple recency bias, Americans also have more immediate experience with figures like Trump and Epstein, compared with Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth. Similarly, other more contemporary figures, like cult leader Charles Manson and serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, had far smaller individual impacts on America than Trump
Who do you think is the greatest American since the nation’s founding? Who’s the worst?
