There are reasons Democrats are poised to win another election talking about affordability despite their role in bringing about today’s elevated prices when inflation hit a 41-year high under former President Joe Biden.
The most obvious is that voters elected President Donald Trump to fix the problem and they don’t feel much relief yet despite progress on some affordability fronts. Trump’s job approval rating on inflation is just 27.3%, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average, with 69.3% disapproving.
That’s worse than Trump’s overall approval rating (37.6%) or his job approval on Iran (32.6%).
But there is also a less obvious reason Trump is at a disadvantage here: Voters better understand how tariffs and the Iran war raise prices than the ways in which Democratic spending proposals fuel inflation.
This is especially true of Democrats themselves, who appear to regard the high inflation under Biden as some sort of unfortunate coincidence.
Tariffs directly raise prices on imported goods and contribute to other price hikes. Not all goods are imports and not all prices rise, but enough of them do. Moreover, even when importers eat the tariffs rather than pass them on to consumers, voters may associate any elevated prices with the Trump tariffs anyway.
The Iran war has disrupted the flow of oil from the Strait of Hormuz. This is raising gasoline and diesel prices, making even voters otherwise inclined to support Republican candidates upset.
Trump has acknowledged this himself. “Right after the election, oil prices are going to be tumbling downward,” he told reporters before Republicans gathered in Dallas last month. “I think it’s going to take a little bit longer than the midterm.”
“It’s going to end very soon, and your prices are going to come down,” Trump said on the campaign trail in Nebraska on Tuesday. “All your prices have been tumbling down.”
Trump was campaigning in deep-red Nebraska as Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-NE) finds himself in an unexpectedly close race amid voter economic dissatisfaction.
In his remarks at the Nebraska State Fair, Trump added that prices at the pump were temporary and preferable to Iran taking out a U.S. city with a nuclear weapon.
Inflation is cumulative, and it was always going to be difficult for Trump to satisfy voters who expected him to lower consumer prices to where they were during his first term.
The tariffs and Iran were Trump policy choices, however.
Former Rep. Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee for Senate in the battleground state of Michigan, is among the GOP candidates who have distanced themselves from both the war and the tariffs in recent weeks.
“Here in Michigan, we know that Canada is not our enemy,” Rogers said in a direct-to-camera commercial. “We need to end this tariff war — now. As Michigan’s senator, I’ll bring both parties together to lower your prices. That’s job No. 1.”
Rogers previously said much the same thing about Iran.
“The war with Iran needs to end, and end quickly,” Rogers said in a video posted on social media last month. “Michigan families can’t afford to wait.”
Rogers is running against Abdul el Sayed, one of a handful of socialists Democrats have nominated for Senate this year.
The socialists have run against the high cost of living despite supporting higher levels of federal spending than that which touched off the first big wave of broad-based inflation in decades under Biden.
Two of the biggest disasters of Biden’s presidency, the inflationary post-COVID spending and the border crisis triggered by immigration non-enforcement, were backed by the socialist wing of the party.
The latter was intuitive, the former less so.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani owes his office to a campaign that was mainly about affordability in last year’s elections.
The Democrats elected governors in Virginia and New Jersey weren’t socialists, though they exaggerated their centrism, but also campaigned against high prices.
Mamdani’s New York City was an expensive place to live even before inflation took off under Biden. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), a fellow socialist, won her 2018 Democratic primary in part by campaigning on cost-of-living issues.
These Democrats, like Biden before them, argue the government can spend its way to affordability by subsidizing expensive things. Not all voters see spending as a catalyst for inflation.
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But they do understand why it has become more expensive to fill up the tank, which Trump does not deny, and what happens to goods that are subject to tariffs.
That could help Democrats win the midterm elections with an affordability message while running on inflationary policies.