Trump and the political class are scamming working families to fight a messaging war. This weekend the Democratic National Committee is deploying thousands of volunteers for a “Weekend of Action” on affordability — knocking on doors, running phone banks, holding more than two hundred community meetings to harness your frustration over the cost of living. Two years ago the party in the White House was the one being accused of ignoring inflation. Now the affordability crisis is the tool the other side is using to flip four Senate seats. But the math at my kitchen table does not care about the electoral college.
I have done the math. My husband David and I bring home $8,800 a month after taxes. We pay $2,400 a month for childcare for two children under five. Our mortgage is at 7 percent because refinancing inquiries have gone nowhere for three years. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this winter that rent for primary residences climbed 5.4 percent in 2024. The Penn Wharton Budget Model has repeatedly shown that working households pay a noticeably heavier inflation rate than wealthy ones. The math is the math. I grew up in Lansdale, the daughter of a USPS supervisor, and the standard of living he gave three kids on a single income is the standard I cannot give two. I bought this 1,400-square-foot rowhouse in Fishtown in 2022 only because David’s grandmother’s estate covered the down payment; without that inherited subsidy the math would not be in the picture at all.
So when DNC Chair Ken Martin — under pressure from inside his own party to deliver a midterm message — announced the “Weekend of Action” and said the party is holding Republicans responsible for rising prices, where was the DNC two years ago? Two years ago the Republicans rode this exact same affordability anger to a presidential victory. The Biden White House was treated as the party that had lost the kitchen table. The DNC did not hold a Weekend of Action then. It sent surrogates on the Sunday shows to call inflation a transitory global phenomenon for a year too long. The DNC did not get the math then. It is getting the math now because it is an election year and the math is a voting issue, not because it is a household issue.
On the other side the Trump White House is running the same con in the other direction. The president has publicly downplayed the impact of lingering inflation. The Republican Congress passed a reconciliation bill last year whose distributional analyses showed costs rising for households in the bottom quintile. The president’s signature affordability talking point is the no-tax-on-tips pitch he has been testing in Las Vegas — a tax credit that delivers a small benefit to a tipped server and does nothing for the daycare bill, the rent, the grocery receipt, the mortgage, the electric bill, or the student loan payment. The two parties have agreed, across two administrations and two Congresses, to perform affordability for the cameras while the kitchen math does not move. It is not a glitch. It is a feature of a political economy that has decided the cost of living is a campaign talking point and not a policy problem.
Annie Lowrey wrote in Give People Money that the issue is not that the United States cannot pull its people above the poverty line but that it does not want to. That sentence was published in 2018. The math has only gotten worse. The Pew Research Center has found that large shares of millennials and Gen Z adults say it is harder for them to feel financially secure than it was for their parents at the same age. The Atlanta Fed’s Sticky-Price CPI — the measure of the things that do not change much, like rent and utilities — has been running around 3 percent year-over-year. Median wage growth has been running close behind. Real wage growth is barely positive on the line items that do not change. The 2021–2024 inflation burst ran cumulative price increases ahead of cumulative wage growth, and the overhang has never closed. The kitchen table is still paying off a debt the indexes have not forgiven.
Take the Urban Institute’s affordability research. Since 2017, average earnings are up roughly 43 percent. Home sale prices are up roughly 81 percent. Rents are up roughly 54 percent. The cheapest ACA Silver plan is up roughly 77 percent. The Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard reports that half of all U.S. renters — 22.4 million households — are cost-burdened. Half. The math is the same for the single mother in Chester working two part-time jobs, for the tipped server in Las Vegas whose tip-tax credit is the only affordability policy either party has delivered this year, for the renter in Houston whose landlord raised the rent by 9 percent in 2024. The kitchen math does not get better when you cross county lines.
The DNC’s more than two hundred events will include canvasses and community meetings and voter registration drives and phone banks. The Republican events will include the same. The people who show up to the canvasses will mean it. The volunteers will work hard. The voter registration will get people on the rolls. None of that is a critique of the volunteers. It is a critique of the parties. The volunteers are doing the work the parties should be doing as policy. In the Catholic working-class tradition I grew up in, the parish did the works of mercy — feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, visit the sick. The works of mercy are not optional. Dorothy Day wrote that the Gospel takes away our right to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor. The point of the works of mercy is that they are not a campaign. They are not staged for a midterm. They are done on Tuesday and on Thursday and on the Sunday after.
I grew up at St. Stanislaus. The women’s sodality organized the funeral lunches. The Knights of Columbus paid the rent when a family lost a job. The parish school kept the tuition low enough that a USPS supervisor could afford to send three kids through it. That is the infrastructure we actually need — not a weekend of canvassing, but a real federal childcare subsidy that closes the gap between what providers must charge and what families can pay, a universal paid leave guarantee that doesn’t require you to stack accrued PTO and unpaid FMLA just to keep your job, a Pell Grant that covers the actual cost of the degree. The proof of wanting would be a bill — a real bill, with a CBO score — that closes the gap between the rent number and the wage number. The DNC has not introduced that bill. The Republicans have not introduced that bill. Neither party will introduce that bill before the 2026 midterms, because the bill would cost more than the parties want to spend, and because the volunteers will work for free anyway, and because the canvassers will knock on the doors anyway, and because the kitchen-table mothers of the cohort I was in, in March of 2022, when I sat down and ran the math and cried for an hour, will be doing the same math again in November.
Taylor Swift wrote a song on Midnights called “You’re On Your Own, Kid,” and the title line is the mission statement of American care infrastructure. It is the moment you realize that the permission and the validation you were promised for doing everything right are not coming, and the only safety net is the lateral one you build with the other mothers in the group text. I am not a neutral observer here. I am a content strategist at a nonprofit health-care advocacy organization. My husband is a software developer. The math on my kitchen table is not the math on a single mother working two part-time jobs in Chester. The math on my kitchen table is not the math on a tipped server in Las Vegas. The DNC’s Weekend of Action and the Republican tip credit are both written for voters like me. We are the median voter. We are not the median household. The math is the math, and the median household is in worse shape than the median voter, and neither party is going to fix it before the midterms.
You cannot canvass your way out of a structural arithmetic failure. The math at the kitchen table does not care about the electoral college, and the political class treats your ruin as their messaging puzzle because it is cheaper than paying the bill.