The Cost of Living Is About to Become the Most Important Political Issue

You may be mostly mad about authoritarianism, but normie Americans are going to start getting madder, too.

One economic growth sector: stock photos of models looking worriedly at household bills.

To be perfectly clear, you do not have to hand it to Marjorie Taylor Greene. She remains one of the most unfortunate members of the House of Representatives, still a creature of the rightwing online fever swamps where extremism reigns and conspiracy theories multiply. But she’s clearly smelling something happening out there, so much so that even her MAGA supporters are feeling unsettled:

“I can’t see into the future, but I see Republicans losing the House if Americans are continuing to go paycheck-to-paycheck,” the Georgia Republican told Semafor in an interview, pointing to new signs that US credit card debt is at an all-time high. “They’ll definitely be going into the midterms looking through the lens of their bank account.”

It’s only the latest criticism Greene has leveled against her own party’s leadership. As the conservative Georgia lawmaker goes after the GOP for refusing to negotiate a bipartisan deal on health care costs until Democrats agree to its government funding bill, she’s also spoken out against Republicans’ refusal to release all of the Jeffrey Epstein files; their decision to funnel billions of dollars to Argentina; and their inertia after a judge issued a restraining order against Rep. Cory Mills, R-Fla.

Greene herself is not particularly important, as colorful a character as she may be; what matters is the crack in the GOP facade. I’m guessing that nearly all of her Republican colleagues agree with her, but for whatever reason, she’s almost alone in being willing to raise this alarm publicly.

They all knew that much of what they and the Trump administration were trying to do was going to be unpopular. They passed a gigantic tax cut for the wealthy on the theory that even if it didn’t have much support, before long the voting public would largely forget about it, which has happened with their previous tax cuts. The destruction of the federal government wasn’t going to go over so well, but maybe the average voter wouldn’t notice most of it. The mass deportations might not be popular with everyone, but it would keep the base happy.

The idea was always that all of those fights would be just political sideshows if the economy did well. Just sprinkle some of that Trump business-guy magic on the country, and Republicans would be fine, mitigating the standard midterm losses in 2026 and heading into 2028 in a strong position. It’s always the economy that matters most, right?

Well let’s take a look around:

• According to the AP, “Americans are growing increasingly concerned about their ability to find a good job under President Donald Trump, an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll finds, in what is a potential warning sign for Republicans as a promised economic boom has given way to hiring freezes and elevated inflation.” 36% of respondents said electricity prices were a “major source” of stress in their life, and 54% said the price of groceries were a major source of stress.

• “More Americans are struggling to make their monthly car-loan payments, a sign that lower-income consumers are under growing financial pressure,” reports the New York Times.

• The Department of Labor is looking to lower wages for agricultural guest workers, admitting in a document spotted by the American Prospect that the immigration crackdown has caused “significant disruptions to production costs and threatening the stability of domestic food production and prices for U.S consumers.”

• According to Wired, “Like most Americans this month, your most recent power bill may have given you a shock. Residential electricity rates have risen fast across the US—more than 30 percent on average since 2020 and almost double the rate of inflation in the past year—with no end in sight.”

• Health insurance rates are about to spike, and not just the huge increases for those on the Obamacare exchanges. Even those on employer-sponsored plans will see a jump in their 2026 rates.

Critically, nothing the administration is doing will make any of this better, whether it’s his assault on renewable energy or the ongoing catastrophe of his tariffs. But that’s exactly what Trump promised on the campaign trail, knowing what an albatross inflation was around the candidacy of Kamala Harris. “I will immediately bring prices down, starting on Day 1,” he said at a 2024 press conference that featured a table stacked with groceries whose prices had increased. “We’re gonna bring prices way down and we get it done, get it done fast.”

So he didn’t just promise to lower inflation; he essentially promised deflation. The problem is, that almost never happens; while there may be some goods that go up and down significantly in price (e.g. eggs), for the most part, prices may stop going up, but they don’t go down again.

Eventually people acclimate to the new prices, but it can take quite a while. Inflation has come down significantly since it topped 9% in the summer of 2022, but I’ll bet that some time recently you were in a supermarket and said, “Geez, I remember when that cost $2.99, and now it’s $4.50!” We still remember the prices from the before times, and it still weighs on us.

Combine that with increased costs for insurance and electricity, and the cost of living could dominate the midterm election. And Republicans have nothing to say about it, other than “Just you wait, Trump’s policies are going to work. Any day now.” At least Democrats have a few things to offer, like increasing energy production and getting rid of the tariffs. Or they can just pound away: Trump said he’d bring prices down, and the price of coffee is up 26% since he took office!

This is not, I should stress, a plea for Democrats to focus solely on “kitchen table issues” and ignore everything else. People can be mad about Trump destroying democracy and also mad about the cost of living; the two can reinforce each other. But even if the AI bubble doesn’t burst and plunge us into a recession, there’s going to be an awful lot of focus on the cost of living in the coming days. And Trump is not going to convince anyone that he made everybody rich.

Thank you for reading The Cross Section. This site has no paywall, so I depend on the generosity of readers to sustain the work I present here. If you find what you read valuable and would like it to continue, consider becoming a paid subscriber.