The Affordability Issue Belongs to Democrats

Trump has the same problem Joe Biden did in 2023, but he's even less persuasive.

The American cornucopia, ever a source of pride and despair (Photo by Franki Chamaki on Unsplash)

For once, the conventional wisdom about why the latest election turned out the way it did is basically correct. Whether it was a moderate like Abigail Spanberger or a socialist like Zohran Mamdani, Democrats running all over the country won this Tuesday after campaigning relentlessly on affordability. Voter displeasure is somewhat more complicated than just the cost of living (I got into that in my latest MSNBC column), but it’s a central component of their anger. And you can tell, because President Trump is reacting as we might expect:

For the record, Walmart’s Thanksgiving dinner pack is cheaper this year because they reduced the number of items it includes and substituted some generic items for name brands. Which is something the people who buy it might or might not have noticed before, but they probably will now.

“I think you’ll see the president talk a lot about cost of living as we turn the year and into the new year,” said one of Trump’s top political advisers in an interview Wednesday, and though I have my doubts about the president’s ability to stay focused, that’s certainly what Republicans will want him to do. Unfortunately for him, he can’t do it in a way that will be effective — if there even is a way.

There is something satisfying in seeing Trump and Republicans ensnared by the same trap that caught Joe Biden and Democrats in the latter half of his presidency, especially since Trump is actually doing what Biden was unfairly accused of doing.

If you cast your mind back to 2023 and 2024, you might remember a whole lot of reporters and pundits chastising Biden for being insensitive to the plight of an economically wounded country. Though inflation had come down from its 2022 heights, the news media didn’t even try to contain its contempt for Biden for allegedly dismissing people’s genuine suffering and trying to tell them to ignore the reality right before their eyes. How dare he tell people that the economy was doing well, when their grocery bills told them otherwise!

In fact, the rhetoric coming from the White House and Biden himself was unfailingly apologetic, with every assertion about the economy prefaced with a statement of sympathy and concern. I know times have been hard, they’d say, but our policies are helping and things are getting better. It became such a reflexive tic that Biden kept saying it even after he didn’t need to anymore; when he addressed the country after Kamala Harris lost in 2024 he said, “we’re leaving behind the strongest economy in the world. I know people are still hurting. But things are changing rapidly.”

So what exactly did the finger-waggers want him to say? That he was a failure, everything was awful, and people should blame him? If the instruction was that the president has to show he understands what people are going through, well, that was what he did. And it didn’t work.

Trump, however, isn’t built that way. He can’t express sympathy, because that would mean acknowledging that anything is less than perfect under his watch. So he says that everything is awesome, gas is two bucks a gallon, and when you go to the supermarket it’s almost like they pay you to fill up your cart.

All you have to do is look at Trump’s approval ratings on the economy — which are very, very bad — to see how persuasive that is.

Affordability isn’t going away

The result of one election usually doesn’t tell you much about the next one, because circumstances change. But the affordability issue is different, because it’s pretty much guaranteed that when we get to 2026 — and 2028 — people are still going to be struggling to feel financially secure. Inflation may or may not be lower then than it is now, but prices generally don’t come down when they’ve gone up; at best they stop going up, but people will still remember what they were and know how much more they’re paying than they used to.

Then there’s housing (unaffordable), health insurance (going up), education (still expensive), job security (not good), and even the possibility for a real-live recession. Since they’re out of power, Democrats can just say “This is bad! It shouldn’t be this way!” and it will put them on the side of voters who are angry and want to throw the bums out.

And what are Trump and the Republicans going to say in response? Trump will say “No it isn’t, you’re actually doing great,” which no one will believe. Other Republicans will say exactly what Biden said: “We feel your pain, but things are getting better.” We’ve seen how that is received.

When they have power again, Democrats may struggle once again as Biden did, finding it hard to turn their economic policies into immediate political dividends. The kinds of policies that could actually affect the cost of living can take a long time to have their effects, no matter how well-designed they are. But at least they have policies they can argue might make life more affordable if they came to pass, like increasing the minimum wage, making union organizing easier, expanding health coverage, improving public transportation, and granting student loan relief. Republicans, on the other hand, have almost nothing real to offer on that score.

So for now, the affordability issue belongs to Democrats. Everything the administration is doing on the economy not only won’t make things better, it’s already unpopular. Tax cuts for the wealthy, tariffs, cutting off benefits to low-income people — they can say it’s going to improve the average person’s life, but that average person isn’t going to buy it.

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