According to research is a weekly series where we round up the most important polling trends and data points you need to know, as well as take a look at the mood of the trends driving politics and culture.
Video games are getting more expensive, and two vilified entities are largely responsible: President Donald Trump and the artificial intelligence industry. And for the Republican Party ahead of this year’s midterm elections, this kind of inflation is nothing but bad news.
All three major gaming console companies have seen significant price increases over the past 15 months, starting shortly after President Trump announced sweeping “Emancipation Day” tariffs on April 2, 2025.
Starting this August, Microsoft’s Xbox Series X with 1TB of storage will cost $300 more than when the console launched in November 2020 for $499.99. This is the fourth price increase for game consoles, which have been in a slump for a while. The first round came about a month after President Trump announced the tariffs, with Microsoft citing “market conditions” as the reason.
In the days leading up to President Trump’s so-called “Emancipation Day,” the Entertainment Software Association, a trade group for the video game industry, released a statement condemning the administration’s plan.
“Tariffs on video game equipment and related products will negatively impact hundreds of millions of Americans and negatively impact the industry’s significant contributions to the U.S. economy,” the statement said.
Over the past 15 months, Sony’s PlayStation 5 and Nintendo’s Switch 2 have suffered similar price increases. A standard PS5 with a disk drive now costs $150 more than it did at launch, and the Switch 2, which launched just about a year ago, will jump $50 in September. President Trump’s tariffs have made Switch 2 controllers and other accessories more expensive, as have certain Xbox accessories and games.
Even Nintendo’s original Switch saw its price increase by $40 last August, more than eight years after its release. The Japanese gaming giant explained that, as you might expect, “market conditions” were to blame.
Historically, gaming consoles have gotten cheaper over time. For example, in less than three years after its release in 2006, the PlayStation 3’s price dropped by $200 and its storage capacity doubled. In other words, gamers were able to get a better product at a lower price.
Now you can get fairly similar products for even more money.
“The Trump administration’s 2025 tariffs triggered the first wave of video game console price hikes,” Wirecutter, a product review site run by the New York Times, recently explained. “While many electronics manufacturers… secured exceptions for their products, video game hardware manufacturers did not receive a similar reprieve, and countries such as China and Taiwan, where game consoles are typically manufactured, were subject to particularly high tariffs.”
But Trump himself is not to blame. Just as the Supreme Court canceled many of his tariffs, the AI boom sparked a “RAMageddon.” AI data centers are located in neighborhoods across the country, gobbling up memory chips known as RAM. And as supply dwindled, prices soared.
The shortage began in earnest last fall. According to price monitoring website PCPartPicker, the average price for two 16 GB sticks of DDR5-4800 RAM last September was about $100. However, by January of this year, it had exceeded $400.
The crisis has led to soaring prices for consumer electronics. For example, Apple is raising the prices of computers and iPhones by hundreds of dollars.
Data centers have been widely criticized, as have the AI technologies they support. Gallup reported in May that 71% of Americans oppose building data centers in their area. And just 32% of Americans think AI will have a primarily positive impact on society, according to a new YouGov poll.
But not only are these price increases part of a larger inflation crisis under the Trump administration that is weighing on approval ratings heading into this year’s midterm elections, but the increases are especially felt among young men, a voter base that Trump successfully courted in 2024. Trump lost men ages 18 to 29 by 10 points in the 2020 election, but won by 1 point four years later, according to the Pew Research Center.
Many of the young people currently voting for Trump are not happy because they feel the pain of inflation is taking a toll on their best hobbies. A December 2025 poll by HIT Strategies and the centrist group Third Way found that only 32% of young male voters ages 18 to 29 approved of the job Trump was doing as president.
The soaring cost of gaming will become even more evident in the run-up to the midterm elections. Expected to be one of the biggest entertainment releases of all time, Grand Theft Auto VI will be released on November 19th for $80 standard, $10 more than a typical new game. The “Ultimate Edition,” which includes exclusive in-game shop and other perks, costs $100. To make matters worse, if you buy GTA VI in a store, you won’t have the disc in your case. All you’ll find is a code for a digital download. (Unfortunately, all new PlayStation games will be like this after 2028.)
Regardless of whether Trump is still the main reason for raising video game prices, there’s a good chance he and his Republican Party will face voter ire over it. As Trump himself said in an awkward “Apprentice”-style skit at the 2004 Electronic Entertainment Expo, they might just tell Republicans, “You’re all fired. Look, too bad. It’s over. Get out.”
Do you have any updates?
- Despite President Trump’s failure to give America a proper 250th birthday celebration, most Americans are still happy that their country is not a monarchy like it was before the American Revolution. A new YouGov poll found that 65% of Americans think it was a bad thing for the US to have its own monarchy for the past 250 years. Not as expensive as expected. Despite claims of patriotism, Republicans (59%) are less likely than Democrats (75%) to say it was bad.
- Minnesota is a blue state, progressive state? That idea could be put to the test in this year’s Democratic Senate primary, pitting progressive Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan against moderate U.S. Rep. Angie Craig. Polling these days is truly a choose-your-own-adventure. A new poll from Public Policy Polling and Flanagan’s advocacy group, the Democratic Lieutenant Governors Association, of which she is president, has her ahead of Craig by seven points, while another recent poll from Survey USA and local media groups has Craig ahead by five points. One issue on which Craig and Flanagan disagree is health care. Flanagan supports Medicare for All, while Craig favors a public option.
- A year after President Trump and Republicans abolished Medicaid, a majority of Americans want the government to go full single-payer. The latest Economist/YouGov poll found that 52% of Americans support creating a “national health care plan in which all Americans would receive health insurance from the federal government and private health insurance companies would be excluded,” which is a particularly straightforward question wording that only emphasizes the appeal of plans like Medicare for All. What’s even more impressive is that not only 73% of Democrats and 54% of independents support such policies, but so do 30% of Republicans.
- After 1,592 days of trying to repel Russia’s invasion of their homeland, Ukrainians are tired of dealing with President Trump. According to Gallup, only 7% of Ukrainians support the current leadership of the United States. This is a 59 point drop from the 66% approval rating in 2022, when Joe Biden was president.
Vibe check
Americans are divided on who is the greatest American of the past 250 years, but not so much on who is the greatest American. worst teeth.
YouGov asked Americans to vote for the best and worst Americans since the founding of the country, and created a list of names from open-ended questions included in previous surveys.
18% said Abraham Lincoln was the greatest American, followed closely by George Washington (13%) and Martin Luther King Jr. (12%).
However, when it comes to the worst American of the past 250, 34% of Americans chose Trump. Second worst was suspected sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, at a relatively low 14%.
Beyond simple recency bias, Americans also have first-hand experience with figures like Trump and Epstein compared to Lincoln’s assassin John Wilkes Booth. Similarly, other more modern figures such as cult leader Charles Manson and serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer have had a much smaller personal impact on America than Trump.
Who do you think is the greatest American since the founding of the country? Who is the worst?
