Midterm voters link Trump policies to inflation as Democrats win majorities

Cost of living shaped votes as AI and wealth inequality drew concern

The Associated Press Voter Poll found that about two-thirds of 2026 midterm voters said Donald Trump’s policies had fueled inflation, while most said the policies had smothered growth and driven costs higher. The findings accompanied Republican losses in House, Senate and gubernatorial races, and the AP reported that the Democratic victories signaled most voters did not believe the economy or Trump was working for them. By contrast, only about half of voters in the 2022 midterms had said Joe Biden’s policies fueled inflation, according to AP VoteCast.

SSRS conducted the survey for The Associated Press, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, FOX News Media, NBC News and Versant. It included more than 100,000 registered voters in all 50 states and blended probability-based and non-probability-based interviews. Researchers conducted the poll from Oct. 19 to Nov. 3 in Alaska and from Oct. 22 to Nov. 3 in every other state. The margin of sampling error for the full sample was plus or minus 0.6 percentage points.

Trump’s message that fault for inflation lay with Biden did not land with voters, the report said. Respondents associated rising prices with the tariffs Trump imposed the previous year, and voters across states from California to Mississippi broadly said his taxes on foreign imports had done more harm than good. The election results matched what voters had been telling pollsters for months. At one of his final midterm rallies in Iowa, Trump said, “I’ve done a great job,” and “Prices are coming way down.”

Consumer prices were up 3.7% over the previous 12 months, compared with an inflation rate of 3% when Trump began his second term. The AP reported that energy costs spiked after Trump launched a war with Iran in February. Trump told reporters on Wednesday that the war “drove the gasoline up a little bit short-term,” but said the choice to fight Iran was worth it because of its push for nuclear weapons. “If I had to do it again, I’d have to do it again,” he said.

About 9 in 10 voters said the cost of living was a crucial or major factor in their congressional vote. About 6 in 10 voters who gave high costs that weight backed Democratic candidates in their local House races. The poll also found that voters preferred Democrats to what the report described as the status quo of a president who could govern with little or no congressional pushback from Republicans.

The AP cautioned that there was no guarantee a House and Senate with a Democratic majority could fix an economy still facing uncomfortably high inflation. It said Trump and Congress would likely need to work on a bipartisan basis, or keep the economy stable enough for the Federal Reserve to reduce inflation through its setting of interest rates.

The report said the underlying economy was stronger than many Americans thought. The S&P 500 was up more than 10% so far that year, and stocks rose Wednesday after news of the Democratic wins. Federal Reserve data accessed through FRED’s raw U-3 series showed unemployment at 4.2% as of 2026-11-05, matching the rate cited by the AP. The raw U-6 series stood at 7.6% on the same date; U-6 also counts discouraged workers and involuntary part-time workers.

The AP described the buildout of artificial intelligence as the major driver of the economy’s growth and said Trump had actively stoked the boom by refusing to codify more aggressive federal oversight. Trump also renamed the technology “super intelligence” in federal documents. Voters did not share that optimism: rather than accepting the arguments that AI would increase productivity and accelerate growth, about 6 in 10 said AI would do more to hurt society, according to the poll. The AP reported that the technology could displace workers as jobs get automated, or become a financial bubble that, if popped, could wreak havoc on retirement savings. Despite the anxiety, only about one-quarter of voters called AI a crucial factor in their vote.

Growing concentration of wealth also disconcerted voters, the report said. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Elon Musk frequently joined Trump at state dinners or traveled aboard the president’s aircraft. Nationwide, about 7 in 10 voters said the economy favored the wealthy, while only about 3 in 10 said it was fair to everyday Americans. The AP said the wealth gap had become so extreme that even a majority of voters with 2025 household incomes of $300,000 or more in the tech-heavy state of California felt the economy was tilted toward the rich. Still, a slight majority of voters across the country had a “somewhat” or “very” favorable impression of capitalism, compared with about one-third who “strongly” or “somewhat” favor socialism.

The election suggested that voters want government to do more to reduce health care costs, according to the report. About 6 in 10 said they wanted the government to play a bigger role in addressing medical expenses, and most said Trump’s policies had made health care costs worse.

Voters’ assessments of the overall economy varied with the size of their paychecks, the report said. While Trump campaigned on statistics suggesting record-low poverty, the working poor saw their own finances as crumbling. Among people earning less than $50,000 a year, about 6 in 10 said they were worse off than they had been two years earlier, before Trump became president. People with higher incomes felt better about the economy, but they also expressed greater concern about the state of American democracy, and voters focused on democracy overwhelmingly backed Democrats.

Without congressional approval, Trump laid off thousands of federal workers, altered federal spending and imposed hundreds of billions of dollars in new tariffs that the Supreme Court had ruled illegal earlier in the year. About 4 in 10 households with 2025 incomes above $200,000 said democracy was their top issue, putting it about even with the economy. Voters in most lower-income categories clearly prioritized the economy.

Overall, a slim majority of voters said government corruption was a crucial factor in their vote, while about half said the same of high prices. Higher-income voters were much less likely than lower-income voters to see high prices as a key factor.

The poll found that most voters took away from the past 22 months of Trump’s presidency that he had brokered deals, taken government stakes in private companies and acted in ways that put him at the center of the economy rather than America’s workers. About 6 in 10 voters said Trump’s priorities were misplaced. When asked whether Trump had fought for people like them, most said he had not.