Affordability voters favor Democrats over Republicans for 2026 House midterms
Voters who say the economy or inflation are their #1 issue are D+12 in the generic ballot, and give Trump a net job approval rating of -20
President Trump spent Tuesday night, Dec. 9, in a Pennsylvania casino ballroom launching what the White House billed as an “affordability tour.” But instead of a president finally leveling with voters about prices and wages, the audience got something closer to a greatest hits album. Trump’s speech was filled with digressions about immigrants from “shithole countries,” praise for his own tariffs, and riffs about Americans buying too many pencils and dolls. At one point, Trump openly mocked “affordability” as the latest Democratic “hoax,” then partly walked it back and insisted that prices are already “coming down tremendously” under his watch.
Then, on Thursday, Dec. 11, the Senate rejected both a Democratic bill to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies and a Republican alternative built around health savings accounts, effectively guaranteeing that enhanced ACA tax credits (passed under Biden) will expire at the end of the year. That decision sets millions of people up for steep premium increases starting in January. For some families, prices will more than double.
This is all happening as voters are telling pollsters they are at their affordability breaking point. In a new poll from the Associated Press and NORC released this week, Trump earned his lowest approval rating on the economy ever in any AP-NORC survey. This new poll comes after others have shown a nearly all-time low in the University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment, the president falling with independents, and even losing inflation-conscious Republicans.
So the basic backdrop going into the 2026 election year looks like this: We have a president who says “affordability” is a partisan gimmick, a political system that has allowed costs for most goods for most Americans to rise outside their comfort level — and just allowed health costs to spike even further — and an electorate that is screaming for change.
If the midterms are an affordability election, Trump and the Republicans will likely do very poorly. But how poorly is an important question. In today’s Chart of the Week, I run some fresh crosstabs of our recent Strength In Numbers/Verasight polls to answer two questions:
Do voters who say the economy or prices are America’s top issue (I’ll call them “affordability voters”) disapprove of Trump more than voters focused on other issues?
And how do these groups differ in terms of their voting intention for the 2026 House generic ballot?
The answers to these questions will tell us a lot about how affordability is impacting President Trump and the Republican Party heading into the 2026 midterms. Let’s check out the numbers.
P.S., I’m making all the data for this post available to the public for free. Do whatever you want with it (but I’m not liable for anything you use it for).
Affordability voters, by the numbers
The 2025 elections already gave us a preview of what an affordability midterm might look like. In the races for governor in New Jersey and Virginia, for example, roughly half of voters said the economy was the most important issue facing the country, according to the exit poll. Those voters backed Democratic candidates for governor over their Republican challengers by 30 percentage points — a 90-point swing relative to the 2024 election.
My polling data affirms these exit polls. Voters who say the top issue facing the country today is either the economy or inflation (my group of “affordability voters”) give Trump a lower approval rating than the average voter, and also give Democrats a higher margin in the House generic ballot.
According to this data, voters who say inflation or the economy is their top issue favor Democrats over Republicans for the 2026 midterm election in their local House district by a 12 percentage point margin. It’s not proof that the data above are perfect, but note that a 12-point margin is exactly what you’d get if you shifted the 2024 national environment (R+1.5) to the left based on the 13.3-point pro-Democratic swing we’ve been seeing in special elections this cycle.
Put a little more concretely: if the 2026 electorate ended up looking like the voters who say affordability is their top concern, we’d be looking at a huge blue wave, with a swing 50% larger than in 2018. And this is not some tiny, niche group in the electorate: in our October Strength In Numbers poll, 30 percent of adults name prices or inflation as the most important problem facing the country today, and another 18 percent say “jobs and the economy” are the most important. That puts nearly half the country into my bucket of affordability voters.
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Here’s the upshot. Voters are very anxious about prices, rent, energy bills, and health care costs — and they overwhelmingly say affordability is the country’s most important problem. They also blame Republicans, and Trump in particular, for those problems. Americans who are most focused on the economy and inflation give Trump below-average grades and say they prefer Democrats for Congress by a solid double-digit margin.
That does not guarantee Democrats a good midterm. This is just one set of crosstabs from one national poll a year before the contest, and both economic conditions and political blame can change quickly. If inflation flares up again or a recession hits, the Senate may be in play for the Democrats. Conversely, if growth in real wages turns around and Trump stops his inflation-inducing tariffs, that would soften the blow for the GOP in 2026.
Yet defying midterm gravity will be hard, especially with these numbers.
What we can definitely say is that campaigning on the message “affordability is a hoax” is unlikely to register with the midterm electorate. Right now, “affordability voters” are not buying what Trump is selling, and unless something changes, that is a fatal problem for Republicans heading into 2026.
This is all so puzzling, because the Trump track record in business and politics was notable for its rich, generous and effective record of championing the common man and getting chickens into their pots.
I'm certain it's Joe Biden's fault...
It's a lose-lose situation for Republicans. They can keep putting the guy with zero impulse control in front of people. Or they can try and hide him from the public and make it look like he's in Biden-esque decline.
My hope is that more Republicans outside the core of sycophants surrounding Trump will try and distance themselves from him. Credit where it's due here: many Indiana Republicans did an eminently brave and moral thing yesterday.