Democrats face limited tools to ease cost-of-living anger, analysis argues

Election upheaval likely to deliver Democrats biggest swing since Watergate, Porter writes

Voters handed Democrats control of Congress on Tuesday, and an analysis published in The Guardian on Nov. 7 argued that their acute concerns over the rising cost of living fuelled a political upheaval likely to deliver the biggest swing toward Democrats since Watergate — granting the party its largest House majority in nearly four decades and its biggest edge in the Senate since 2008. Eduardo Porter, a journalist focused on economics and politics who writes the Being There newsletter on Substack, observed that Donald Trump largely ignored the economy during the campaign. There is not much, Porter argued, that the new Democratic majority can do over the next couple of years to alleviate angry voters’ stress over pricey gas and groceries, exorbitant mortgages and unaffordable healthcare.

“First, Americans want Washington to bring down the cost of living,” said Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader-in-waiting. Likely House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries said Democrats have “promised to fight for an affordable America, and that’s exactly what we will do.” Porter argued the incoming leadership will soon discover the limits of its power to undo what he called Trump’s economic blunders in an economy driven largely by forces outside Congress’s control. He noted the affordability strains resemble those that delivered Trump the presidency two years ago — and they could quickly become the new majority’s enemy.

Porter called gas prices the single most powerful motivation for voters’ rebellion against the Republicans who enabled Trump’s policy choices. Bringing them down, he wrote, would require an understanding with Iran that reopens the Strait of Hormuz. Schumer thinks Democrats can achieve that, Porter noted: “We are going to end the war,” Schumer said. Trump may disagree. Porter observed that Congress is legally entitled to end wars — it is the only branch of government entitled to start one — but that it is unclear what those legal powers mean in practice. Trump waged the war without asking approval from Congress, which Republicans controlled from the day it began, and Democrats now lack the 60 Senate votes needed to break a filibuster against cutting war funding.

The trade war presents similar obstacles. The Supreme Court struck down Trump’s “national security” tariffs for exceeding presidential authority, Porter noted, but the administration reimposed many of them under a different statute and a rationale he called spurious. Nor is there much Democrats can do to stop what Porter described as Trump’s war on immigration: the effort is fully funded and can carry on unimpeded, further disrupting construction and other industries that rely on immigrant workers.

Even the “low-hanging fruit hangs rather high,” Porter wrote. Reinstating federal subsidies for Affordable Care Act health insurance programs, or undoing or postponing cuts to Medicaid and food stamps in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, would be hard to fund with the budget deficit already running at 6% of gross domestic product.

Preventing further damage will be a fight of its own, Porter argued. Democrats will be able to block Trump’s new legislative proposals, but they do not have the votes to overcome his vetoes. He warned that a lame-duck Trump who no longer needs to please voters is likely to give “free rein to his most destructive urges.”

Porter acknowledged that optimists may believe Tuesday’s result will convince enough Republicans in Congress to defy the president. But most of those who survived come from “the most faithful Maga districts and states,” he wrote, and are the least likely to abandon their leader.

The economy itself is unlikely to come to the new majority’s aid. Porter described it as driven almost exclusively by a frenzied artificial-intelligence investment boom. Wall Street is already doubting that the massive investments to build data-processing centers for training powerful AI models will pay off in time to justify the money, he wrote, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq index has fallen more than 10% in the past month.

Goldman Sachs estimates that the large AI hyperscalers have raised almost $200 billion in bond markets so far this year, almost twice as much as in all of 2025, the bank added. Altogether, AI-related firms have raised nearly $500 billion in debt so far in 2026. If the bubble pops and the funding stops, Porter wrote, the downturn would likely be worse than the Great Recession sparked by the 2008 housing bubble — and a government hamstrung by $40 trillion in debt, with interest rates near 20-year highs, would have little fiscal space to soften the blow.

Justin Wolfers, a University of Michigan economist who runs Platypus Economics, observes that neither the unemployment rate nor inflation is bad enough to justify Americans’ extreme pessimism about the economy, Porter noted. The sour mood reflects, in Wolfers’s view, a collapse in confidence in economic leadership. One of the indicators Wolfers pointed to, the unemployment rate, stood at 4.1% as of Nov. 7 in the St. Louis Fed’s Federal Reserve Economic Data series.

Tuesday’s results might on their own improve Americans’ spirits, Porter wrote, and a Democratic Congress will at least offer some resistance to Trump’s impulses. But the economy will likely pose a greater challenge for the new Democratic majority than it has for the Republicans now in charge, he argued. In two years, Democrats may be facing voter anger over an economy that has gotten palpably worse — and may come to embrace the limits of their power, hoping voters blame the president rather than Congress for their economic unhappiness.