Associated Press polling found economy pessimists favored Democrats 67% to 29%
Voters delivered control of the House and Senate to Democrats in Tuesday’s elections. Associated Press polling reported by The Wall Street Journal found that nearly 90% of polled voters called the cost of living a crucial or major factor, while those who rated the economy as not so good or poor backed Democratic candidates 67% to 29%. Voters favored Democrats over Republicans to handle the economy, inflation and tariffs, and nearly two-thirds said Trump’s tariff policies hurt the national economy.
Voters delivered that control after two years of rising prices, rising housing costs and higher fuel bills. Among voters polled by the Associated Press, roughly 39% said the economy was the country’s single most important issue, and nearly 90% called the cost of living a crucial or major factor in their vote. Nearly 80% said inflation had caused their family hardship during the past year.
The partisan split followed voters’ economic assessments. Three-quarters described the economy as not so good or poor, and those voters backed Democratic candidates 67% to 29%. The Associated Press found that rising food, fuel and health-care costs were major concerns for voters across the country. Voters placed the blame for the country’s economic woes on President Trump, whose decision to go to war in Iran drove up fuel prices. Nearly two-thirds said Trump’s tariff policies had hurt the national economy, and the same share said he had made economic conditions worse.
Voters now favored congressional Democrats over Republicans to handle the economy by 3 percentage points, after Republicans had held a 12-point advantage. On inflation, the Republicans’ 10-point lead became a 5-point Democratic advantage. On tariffs, a 7-point Republican advantage became a 7-point Democratic edge.
Democratic state Rep. Josh Turek won an open Senate seat in Iowa, marking the sixth Democratic Senate pickup and clinching control of the chamber in the next Congress. Rob Sand won Iowa’s race for governor, becoming the first Democrat elected to the state’s top post in two decades.
The cost-of-living pressure extended beyond Iowa. The Associated Press reported that it was a factor in flipping Senate seats in North and South Carolina, states once considered affordable but where housing costs had surged since the pandemic. Anger over the Iran war helped sweep Democrats to victory in Senate races deep in Republican turf in Iowa and Kansas, agricultural states where rising gasoline and diesel prices sting particularly hard because per-capita consumption is higher. More than two-thirds of Maine voters said Trump’s tariff policies had hurt the state’s economy. Trump’s tariff dispute with Canada had added to the economic pressure on Maine, a state with close ties to its northern neighbor.
The result followed an election in which Trump had won support partly because voters expected him to control prices. In 2024, millions of Americans, including young people and Black and Hispanic voters who did not typically vote Republican, backed him in part because they hoped he would bring prices under control. Trump had promised, “Starting the day I take the oath of office, I will rapidly drive prices down, and we will make America affordable again.” He also promised a new “golden age” of American prosperity. The nationwide results were a rebuke to a party and a president elected two years earlier by Americans who believed Trump was their best hope for fixing the economy and taming inflation.
The economy by Tuesday nevertheless had measurable strengths. Economic growth surged to an annual rate of 3.4% over the summer, fueled by investment in artificial intelligence and steady consumer spending. The stock market reached record highs, and the wealth of the richest residents increased. Last year’s tax cuts—a key Trump campaign promise—boosted household finances and expanded investment incentives for businesses. Unemployment remained low, and the country was adding manufacturing jobs after years of declining factory payrolls.
Those gains did not end voters’ concerns about prices. The Wall Street Journal reported that many Americans were now gloomier about the state of the economy than they were two years earlier. Prices had not come down the way Trump had promised. Inflation reached 3.7% in September, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, compared with a 2.9% annual rate during the last months of former President Joe Biden’s term. Real wages, meaning pay with inflation factored in, had been falling for six months. Tariffs raised the cost of goods including toys and furniture, while Trump’s decision to attack Iran lifted gasoline prices and contributed to a sharp rise in inflation. The Wall Street Journal said price declines were unrealistic to begin with because they would typically require a “punishing recession.” Critics argued that much of the increase was self-inflicted through the war and tariffs and compounded by a boom in data-center construction.
The pain was particularly severe for lower-income households, many of which were also affected by cuts to food stamps. The raw FRED University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment index stood at 48.1 as of Nov. 4. The Wall Street Journal described October’s reading as the second-lowest on record since 1952, behind May.
Fuel prices supplied another visible economic shock. Gasoline prices were up nearly 50% since the Iran war began in February. Diesel prices increased by nearly two-thirds, reaching their highest point on record in September. The effect was particularly severe in a handful of swing states, and the prices posted on giant signs were among the most visible in the economy. Calculations by Brown University’s Climate Solutions Lab found that a typical household in Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire and Texas spent more than $600 extra on gasoline this year through mid-October because of the Iran war, compared with less than $400 extra in Indiana, Oregon, New York and Washington.
The Wall Street Journal reported that people in more sparsely populated agricultural states tend to drive bigger cars over longer distances, spending more per capita on fuel and feeling the pain from rising prices more acutely. Those states also have much higher per-capita diesel consumption, and the fuel powers tractors, combines and heavy trucks.
Housing added to the pressure. Mortgage rates were above 7%, slightly higher than just before the 2024 election, putting a home out of reach for many Americans. Pending home sales fell to a record low in September. The Wall Street Journal reported that immigration-enforcement actions had made construction workers harder to find, while tariffs increased material costs and weighed on home building.
Ron Berube, a 64-year-old Lewiston, Maine, resident who backed Sen. Susan Collins in 2020, instead voted for her victorious Democratic challenger, Troy Jackson. “We’re just fed up,” Berube said. “A lot of people are sick of Donald Trump. They can’t afford it. They can’t afford anything.”
James Lacoume, a 54-year-old plastics-plant worker in Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans, voted for Trump in 2016 and third-party candidates in 2020 and 2024. On Tuesday, he voted in the Senate race for Democrat Jamie Davis, who lost to Republican Julia Letlow by a narrower margin than many expected. “I’m just not satisfied with the job they’re doing,” Lacoume said of the Trump administration. “The biggest issue right now for me is the economy,” he said. “Even though I did not vote for Trump, I was expecting more given his talking points, and instead we just went further and further down.”
Elizabeth Bush, a 28-year-old stay-at-home mother of two from the Bettendorf, Iowa, area, had never paid attention to gas prices before last year. She said she now considered filling her tank halfway and weighed buying cheaper groceries. “I never used to think about these things. And this year, it’s something that’s on my mind,” she said. Those issues, along with what she described as growing political divisiveness, weighed on Bush when she went to the polls on Tuesday and voted Democrat across the ballot. The registered Democrat said she was open to Republican ideas but believed Democrats were better positioned to help people in need.
Many reliably Republican voters said they were unhappy about the economy. Darin Gadd, a 59-year-old military retiree from Columbus, Ohio, backed Trump in 2020 and 2024 and voted Republican again. The Iran war forced him to pay $130 to fill his pickup. Gadd worked part time for his brother’s construction company and blamed tariffs for raising material costs. “Two years and he hasn’t done anything except for bad things,” he said. “A sheet of plywood used to be $4.50, now it’s $30-something,” he said. “You can’t build a house on that anymore.”
It was not only the pace of price increases: pay was no longer keeping up. Joseph Lavorgna, chief economist at SMBC Americas who worked on the National Economic Council during Trump’s first administration and served as a counselor to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent during his second term, said voters had been counting on Trump. “The president was there to fix it and he didn’t,” he said. Lavorgna said anxiety about declining real income had reached beyond economic issues. “If your real income is shrinking, you’re going to be anxious about a lot of things,” he said. “That basically gets to the crux of it.”
Ahead of the 2024 election, the Biden administration touted healthy economic growth, while voters focused on inflation and punished Democrats. Pointing to slower price increases or solid GDP figures does not assuage voters’ frustration with higher prices, a lesson that Biden officials learned and one Republicans are struggling with now. Jared Bernstein, who chaired the Council of Economic Advisers under Biden, said his administration had learned that lesson by talking past people with strong GDP reports. “Back when we were in power, yes, we definitely talked past people by saying, ‘Look over here at this strong GDP report,’” Bernstein said. He said the Trump administration had imposed new price shocks through tariffs and the Iran war. Bernstein said, “I recognize the folly of trying to tell people they’re better off than they think they are,” adding that his sympathy was “mitigated by how much inflationary policy they continue to pursue.”
Stephanie Hernandez, a 27-year-old retail manager in the Miami area, voted exclusively for Democrats and said she hoped a Democratic-controlled Congress would reverse what she considered Trump’s most harmful policies, including tariffs and immigration raids. The retailer where she works faced supply problems triggered by tariffs, making some products inaccessible. Hernandez, a registered Democrat, also worried about American companies, including Kentucky bourbon makers, that were suffering because retaliatory tariffs on U.S. products had prompted them to lay off workers. “Look how much money they lost,” she said. “The tariffs would be something that I would like to obviously do away with.”
Democrats’ gains came with continued Republican support: Gadd remained with the party even while faulting Trump for prices and tariffs. Across the Associated Press polling, nearly 90% of voters called the cost of living crucial or major, nearly 80% reported inflation hardship and three-quarters rated the economy as not so good or poor. The same polling recorded Democratic advantages of 3 points on handling the economy, 5 on inflation and 7 on tariffs. The common thread across the states and voter accounts was the price of living, not the economy’s measured output alone.