The Poll: A Six-Point Drop in Two Months
Bloomberg News commissioned the Brazilian firm AtlasIntel to survey 3,535 Mexican adults between June 26 and June 30, a sample carrying a margin of error near two points. The result: Sheinbaum's approval landed at 49%, down from 53% in May and a steep fall from the 66% approval she posted in April 2025, according to the Bloomberg-AtlasIntel LatAm Pulse survey. It's the first time in her presidency that her rating has slipped under a majority.
Why Prices, Not Just Crime, Are Driving the Mood
Corruption still tops the list of what worries Mexicans, cited by 52% of those surveyed. But the second-place concern has changed hands for the first time in nearly a year: worry over high prices has overtaken crime, now named by 37% of respondents. That single concern has jumped 26 percentage points since February — a spike that traces back to the oil-market shock triggered by U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran earlier this year, which rattled energy prices worldwide.
The Twist: Inflation Is Actually Cooling
Here's what makes the polling drop counterintuitive — the inflation data has been getting better, not worse. INEGI's mid-month reading for the first half of June put annual inflation at 3.55%, the softest print of 2026 and a figure that beat every forecast in a Reuters poll of economists, according to Mexico News Daily's coverage of the release. Falling produce prices did most of the work, with tomatoes alone down close to 24%.
Dig past the headline number, though, and the picture gets stickier. Core inflation — which strips out volatile items like fresh food and fuel — is still running at 4.12%, comfortably above the central bank's tolerance range. And with Mexico co-hosting the 2026 World Cup, tourism-linked prices are moving the other way: airfares and hotel rates have both jumped sharply as visiting crowds bid up travel costs, per Rio Times' rate-decision coverage. Against that backdrop, Banxico's board voted unanimously to hold its benchmark rate at 6.50%, a signal that its long stretch of rate cuts has likely run its course even with growth still soft.
The Remittance Squeeze Behind the Border
Layered on top of domestic prices is a separate, harder-to-see drain on household budgets: the money Mexican migrants wire home from the United States. A new federal tax on cash-based transfers — cash, money orders, and cashier's checks — took effect January 1, part of the sweeping tax package Donald Trump signed roughly a year ago, on July 4, 2025, per the AEI's rundown of the law's remittance provisions.
That tax has a messier backstory than it might appear. It started life as a 5% levy aimed at non-citizen senders — the version Sheinbaum branded "an injustice, which is discriminatory" back in May 2025, according to Border Report. Congressional negotiators knocked it down to 3.5% in the House-passed bill, then to the final 1% rate in the Senate — a reduction Sheinbaum credited to a letter-writing campaign by Mexican nationals in the U.S., saying "that achievement is of our compatriots," as reported by Mexico News Daily. Her government has since rolled out a debit card, Finabien, designed to let migrants route money through an account rather than cash, sidestepping the tax entirely — since bank- and card-funded transfers are exempt under the law's final text.
The tax is only part of the pressure, though. A stronger peso means every dollar wired south converts into fewer pesos than it used to, and combined with domestic inflation, that erosion cut the real purchasing power of remittance income by nearly 19% in February alone — even as the dollar total receieved that month ticked up slightly, according to Mexico Business News' reporting on Banxico data.
Dollar inflows have since recovered some ground: May brought in $5.6 billion, the strongest month of 2026 so far, per Mexico Business News. That rebound follows a rough 2025, when full-year remittances fell 4.6% to $61.8 billion — the sharpest annual drop in roughly a decade and a half, breaking an eleven-year growth streak, according to BBVA Research's analysis. Looking further out, BBVA's economists estimate that if current habits hold, Mexican migrants could collectively pay close to $3 billion in remittance-tax costs between 2026 and 2034, based on the bank's own projections.
A Trade Deal in Limbo, With Mexicans Unconvinced They'll Win
The same survey touched on the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade pact, and the timing was pointed: just days after the poll closed, Washington announced it would not renew USMCA for a full 16-year term, choosing instead to subject the deal to rolling annual reviews — a move confirmed by U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and detailed in CNBC's coverage of the July 1 decision. The agreement stays in force regardless, but the annual-review structure keeps businesses on all sides guessing.
Mexicans remain broadly supportive of the deal itself — 61% told AtlasIntel they'd like to see it extended for the long haul. But confidence that Mexico comes out ahead is thin: only 16% of respondents think their country stands to benefit most from however the review process shakes out, a sign that support for the trade relationship doesn't translate into optimism about who wins from it.
