TRUMP, GOOD ECONOMIC NEWS, AND THE MIDTERM ELECTIONS. Did you know that just-released Census Bureau statistics show the poverty rate in the United States fell to a record low in 2025? That’s an extraordinary development, but it has so far not attracted a lot of media coverage or discussion.
What about a big White House event featuring President Donald Trump touting a welcome decline in poverty and an increase in income? There hasn’t been one. “I dunno, but if I were president and the poverty rate dropped to the LOWEST RATE ON RECORD, I might make a big deal out of it — a lot bigger deal than the Trump White House is making,” commentator Mickey Kaus, who has been covering poverty and social policy for decades, remarked on Wednesday.
One more note — the Census Bureau also announced that real median household income in 2025 was $87,460, an increase of $2,250 from the year before and “the highest on record dating back to 1967.” So Trump could brag about the highest income and the lowest poverty on record.
Obviously, the good news comes amid bad news on prices. The year-over-year rate of inflation today is actually higher than it was when Trump took office in January 2005. That is largely due to energy prices. To use new figures from AAA: Last year, the average price for a gallon of diesel was $3.71. Now, it’s $6.40. Last year, a gallon of regular gas was $3.20. Now, it’s $4.44.
Those are terrible numbers, especially less than two months away from midterm elections. The poverty and household income numbers could be helpful to Trump because they allow him to argue that there are good signs in the economy to go along with the bad.
“The economy is growing, jobs are pretty plentiful, the poverty rate hit its lowest point in modern history, so the economy is doing in many respects quite well; there’s growth, there are the things you want,” Fox News’s Brit Hume said Wednesday. “But this business with prices is just killing this administration and the president’s party.”
So what now? For Trump, the point is not to argue that there are no problems with the economy, or that Americans who are deeply upset about prices are being unreasonable. The point is to argue that a number of important factors in the economy are moving in the right direction, and that the Trump administration is working to fix the others.
Vice President JD Vance almost got there in a podcast interview this week in which he pointed out the administration’s accomplishments, argued that electing Democrats to control Congress would undo that progress, and asked voters for more time to work on the things that are not going well.
“We’ve had an amazing success with the border, with immigration,” Vance said on the All In podcast. “We’ve pursued H-1B reform that prioritizes American workers over foreign nationals. There’s a lot of good that’s been done, but there’s a lot of work left to do. Don’t give power to the people who caused the problems that we’re fixing. Give us another chance, or give us another couple of years, to continue to work on the amazing things that we’ve been doing for the past two years.”
It’s never a great idea for a second-term administration, even with the unusual circumstances of the Trump second term, to ask for “another chance” at election time. Voters are not very charitable about that sort of thing. On the other hand, it is reasonable for an administration to cite its progress and ask for more time to fix remaining problems. There is still a high probability that voters won’t buy that one, either — a number of key indicators look terrible for Republicans — but it’s the best the Trump administration can do. And the new poverty and household income statistics help them make the case.