WASHINGTON — Asked for his final message to voters two days before the midterm elections, President Donald Trump gave an answer that was not about a single race or a single policy: he pointed to poverty. In a video interview with New York Post columnist Miranda Devine, previewed on Sunday, November 1, 2026, and scheduled to air in full on Monday, Devine asked what his final message was to get voters out. Trump replied that poverty numbers were the single best, meaning they were the best, adding that poverty is a bad thing but that the United States has the best numbers it has ever had. This article examines only that poverty-numbers answer and the official data behind it. It is not about the same interview’s separate remarks on vetoes or on a possible future run for office, which have been reported separately, and it is not a general summary of the president’s wider economic pitch.
The clip spread quickly, and the reaction was sharply divided. Supporters treated the remark as a summary of a genuine statistical milestone: the official poverty rate in 2025 was the lowest since the Census Bureau began tracking it in 1959. Critics treated it as a strange closing message for an election in which many voters say they are worried about the cost of groceries, housing, energy and health care. One commentator sarcastically described it as bragging that poverty numbers are the best, while another asked what kind of final pitch celebrates a poverty statistic at all. The disagreement is not only about tone. It is about which poverty measure counts, what each measure includes, and whether a single annual rate can describe how households actually feel in the final days before an election.
The starting point for a fair check is the Census Bureau report itself. According to estimates released in September 2026, the official poverty rate in the United States was 10.2 percent in 2025. That is the lowest figure on record since tracking began in 1959, and on that specific measure the president’s central claim is correct. The White House, asked about the claim, directed reporters to a Census Bureau release covering its most recent reports, including the poverty report. The official rate compares a household’s cash income against thresholds that vary by family size and composition. It is the long-running headline measure, and it is the one most often quoted in political debate precisely because it allows comparison across decades.
Trump poverty rate claim: the official 10.2% figure behind the closing message
Trump has made the poverty claim repeatedly over the past month, not only in the Devine interview. At a rally in San Antonio on October 7, he said the poverty rate had just reached its lowest level in American history, and added that poverty rates for African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans were all at their lowest levels ever recorded. Fact-checkers who examined that rally claim found a more mixed picture. The official poverty rates for Hispanics and Native Americans did reach record lows in 2025, according to the Census Bureau data. The lowest official rate for African Americans, however, was 17.1 percent in 2022, not in 2025. That distinction matters because it shows how a broadly true headline can still overstate the detail: the national rate set a record, but not every subgroup rate did so at the same time.
It also matters how the 2025 figures should be read. An early version of one fact-check had to be corrected on this point: the 2025 poverty figures reflect the entire 2025 calendar year, not only the first months of the president’s second term. That correction cuts both ways in political argument. Supporters cannot fairly credit a single administration with a full-year result that spans economic conditions inherited from the previous year, and critics cannot fairly dismiss the figure as a three-month snapshot. The honest description is simpler: 2025 was the first full calendar year of the second Trump administration, and its official poverty rate was the lowest on record, for reasons that include longer-term trends in employment, earnings and demographics as well as more recent policy.
The White House has also pointed to the scale of the improvement in its wider economic message. In a statement issued during the closing days of the campaign, a White House spokesman cited more than 82 billion dollars in individual tax relief from measures including no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, an enhanced senior deduction and no tax on car loan interest, alongside record highs for the stock market and new trade deals. Those claims are part of the administration’s broader argument that households are better off, but they are not the same as the poverty claim, and they should not be confused with it. Tax relief and stock market levels measure different things from poverty, and a household can benefit from one while still struggling with everyday prices.
Supplemental poverty measure: why 13.1% tells a different story
The most important caveat to the president’s claim comes from the Census Bureau’s second poverty measure, known as the supplemental poverty measure. Unlike the official rate, which counts only cash income, the supplemental measure also takes account of non-cash benefits such as food assistance and housing support, and subtracts necessary expenses such as taxes, medical costs and work-related spending. Many poverty researchers consider it a more complete picture of a household’s resources, because it reflects help that does not arrive as a pay cheque and costs that a pay cheque must cover.
On that measure, the story is different. The supplemental poverty rate was 13.1 percent in 2025, according to FactCheck.org’s analysis of the Census Bureau data. That is higher than its all-time low of 7.7 percent in 2021, during the pandemic period when expanded government support sharply reduced measured poverty, and higher than its pre-pandemic low of 11.7 percent in 2019. In other words, by the broader measure, poverty in 2025 was not at its lowest ever; it was above both the pandemic-era low and the last pre-pandemic low. That does not make the official-rate record false. It means the word best depends on which ruler is used, and the president’s closing message used only the ruler that gives the most favourable answer.
Steven Durlauf, a professor of public policy at the University of Chicago who studies poverty and inequality, told the Associated Press that what the president said was factually correct but a misleading characterisation of the state of poverty. That judgment captures the fact-check consensus: the 10.2 percent figure is real and record-setting, but presenting it without the supplemental measure leaves out the part of the picture that shows many households still facing high costs for food, housing and health care. A voter who hears only that poverty numbers are the best may reasonably conclude that hardship has fallen to a historic low across the board. The supplemental measure suggests a more cautious conclusion: cash poverty fell to a record low, while a broader measure of resources after benefits and expenses did not.
What poverty numbers can and cannot tell voters before November 3
There is a further reason to treat any single poverty statistic with care in an election campaign. Poverty rates are annual figures, published months after the year they describe. They describe a national average, not the experience of a particular town, a particular family, or a particular week at the grocery store. A national rate can fall while rents rise in one city, while a factory closes in another, or while a household’s medical bills jump. Voters tend to judge the economy by the prices they see and the pay they receive, not by a statistical release, and that gap helps explain why an administration can cite a record rate while many voters still say affordability is their top concern.
Democrats have made that gap central to their closing argument. They have focused on everyday expenses — groceries, energy, health care and housing — and have argued that the administration has dismissed affordability concerns rather than addressing them directly. At rallies over the past month, the president has often responded by citing favourable statistics on wages, employment, investment and poverty, and by warning that Democratic victories would bring economic damage. His supporters argue that the statistics are the reality and that pessimism about prices is overstated or politically driven. His critics argue that the statistics, even when accurate, do not answer the question voters are actually asking, which is whether life has become more affordable in the past year.
The poverty clip also illustrates a wider pattern in the final days of the campaign. Short excerpts from interviews, rallies and social media posts now travel faster than the full remarks they come from, and they are often judged as standalone messages rather than as parts of a longer argument. The Devine interview, when it airs in full, may place the poverty answer alongside answers on vetoes, on future elections and on other topics. But the excerpt that circulated on November 1 was judged on its own, as a closing message, and many viewers found it jarring precisely because it framed an election about the cost of living in terms of a poverty rate. Whether that reaction helps or hurts Republicans will only be known after votes are counted on November 3, when all 435 House seats and 35 Senate seats are on the ballot.
For now, the fairest summary is a narrow one. The president is right that the official poverty rate in 2025, at 10.2 percent, was the lowest since 1959. He is not right if the claim is read as saying that poverty, by every official measure, is at its lowest ever, because the supplemental measure stood at 13.1 percent, above its lows in 2021 and 2019. And he is not right in the fuller version of the claim that every major racial group’s poverty rate is at a record low, because the lowest rate for African Americans was recorded in 2022. Voters heading to the polls on Tuesday will have to decide how much weight to give a record on one measure, a less favourable result on another, and their own experience of prices in between.
Sources
USN reviewed reporting from multiple outlets for this story. Read more from DNYUZ, FactCheck.org and Bastille Post.