Donald Trump’s image as a businessman eager to supercharge America’s economy propelled him to victory with independents and Republican votes in 2024, while his opponent Kamala Harris was hamstrung by the sad collapse of her former running mate’s campaign.
Now, as the next election cycle approaches it increasingly looks as if Democrats have recaptured the narrative around economic issues and cost of living — to the detriment of Trump and his MAGA allies in Congress, many of whom are up for re-election in a year.
Winning Democratic campaigns of all political stripes, from Democratic Socialists of America-aligned Zohram Mamdani in New York to center-left Abigail Spanberger in Virginia, made high prices the main focus of their appeals to voters.
As famed Democratic political consultant James Carville once said: “It's the economy, stupid”
Tuesday’s results made it very clear: voters are desperate for relief from high prices caused by inflation and an economy that is transitioning faster and faster towards unstable “gig” work and equally downwardly-mobile professions that fail to provide the economic security enjoyed by previous generations. Every year, Americans tell pollsters that the American Dream is increasingly disappearing as voters see little hope of improving their economic prospects over time. Fewer younger Americans than ever have hopes of owning a home, and the birth rate continues to drop, partially related to the staggering cost of childcare in many cities.
So what happens next? After Tuesday, Republicans in Washington, D.C., are firmly on notice regarding the danger their party faces in next year’s midterms. Trump himself told a lunch meeting of Senate Republicans that the GOP was being “killed” by the ongoing federal government shutdown, while other MAGA allies like Vivek Ramaswamy were able to put the blame squarely on the Trump administration’s failure to bring down prices over 2025.
But there’s zero evidence (so far) of any real course corrections being made by the White House. In one revealing headline published by Politico on Wednesday, a White House deputy chief of staff claimed that Trump was going to address the affordability crisis “next year,” an assertion immediately jumped on by Democrats.
“Trump demolished part of the White House to build a ballroom in FOUR DAYS, but he won't focus on affordability until NEXT YEAR. Trump promised to lower costs on DAY ONE,” remarked Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
James Blair, the White House aide, insisted to Politico’s Dasha Burns: “The president is very keyed into what’s going on, and he recognizes, like anybody, that it takes time to do an economic turnaround, but all the fundamentals are there, and I think you’ll see him be very, very focused on prices and cost of living.”
The problem for the GOP is simple, however, Trump has already put a good amount of his focus on cost of living and inflation. Or, more accurately, he’s put his focus on convincing Americans that the economy is doing quite well. While taking a much blunter approach than Joe Biden did promoting his Covid recovery from 2021-2024, Trump’s strategy echoes the same false assertions that ultimately failed to convince voters to give Biden’s running mate, Kamala Harris, a chance at the top job.
At an event on Tuesday, Trump insisted that gas prices were down to “the lowest [point] in two decades”. Kayleigh McEnany, his former press secretary, declared on Fox News that her ex-boss had brought prices down, on average, by $3.00 a gallon. This, too, is a lie. The highest-ever average gas price calculated by AAA, one of the nation’s leading auto insurance companies, was $5.016 per gallon, a staggering figure taken at the heart of the Covid supply chain crisis in 2022, driven by high demand.
But that figure began dropping over the remainder of 2022, and now sits at $3.084 — a drop of less than $2.00 per gallon.
But it’s food prices where Trump faces his real problems. The president who once patted himself on the back for knowing what “groceries” are has shown no ability or interest so far in bringing those costs down. The average price of a pound of ground beef, tracked by the Federal Reserve, hit its highest point in more than 10 years (and possibly ever) in August, the most recent month for which data was available.
Egg prices spiked massively in the spring, fueled by a wave of bird flu on poultry farms; those prices have dropped, but are still higher than any point before the Covid pandemic. Americans would be hard-pressed to find food products that haven’t recovered from Covid-era price increases. Other products such as sugar and vegetable oil remain roughly twice as pricy as they were pre-pandemic.
And so far, Donald Trump’s only response has been to tell Americans: Don’t believe your lying eyes!
During an interview with CBS’s Norah O’Donnell over the weekend, Trump pushed back against assertions that any grocery prices were higher than they were before his term began.
“No, you're wrong,” Trump said when asked about the high prices.
“They went up under Biden. Right now they're going down,” he claimed, then added: “Other than beef, which we're working on, which we can solve very quickly.”
“But with that, the beef price went up a little bit. We're gonna get the beef price down very quickly. It'll be very nice, just like eggs. When I first took over, eggs were double, triple, quadruple what they were. This was because of Biden,” Trump went on. “All of these problems were caused by Biden.”
The blame-Biden game only works for so long, and on egg prices the fact remains that Americans, before the Covid pandemic, never paid prices as high as $3.50 for a dozen. And Trump’s own allies aren’t giving him cover on this anymore, so why should independents?
“We got our a**** handed to us,” declared Ramaswamy, the MAGA-aligned candidate for governor in Ohio. “Our side needs to focus on affordability.”
And another ally of the White House told Politico, matter-of-factly: “People aren’t feeling the promises kept. You won on lowering costs, putting more money back into people’s pockets. And people don’t feel that right now.”
After Tuesday’s results, D.C. race-watchers were wondering if the dynamics were emerging for a massive blue wave in 2026 — one strong enough to not only help Democrats retake the House, but the Senate, too.
With one chamber of Congress, Democrats can halt any conservative legislation introduced over the remainder of Donald Trump’s time in office. With two, they could begin the impeachment proceedings Speaker Mike Johnson warned was on the table if his party continued to fumble the ball while in possession of unified congressional majorities and the White House.
“President Trump is on the ballot next fall,” he warned on Wednesday. “If we lose the majority...they will try to end the Trump administration. He won’t have four years, he’ll have only two.”
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