The Democrats have a new mantra: “affordability.” It played a starring role in Democratic gubernatorial victories in New Jersey and Virginia and in the surprising mayoral victory of democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani in New York City. By all accounts, this was an effective message even controlling for other factors like the light blue to deep blue nature of these states and municipalities, the overrepresentation of Democratic-friendly educated, engaged voters in these elections, and the general unpopularity of President Trump.
Affordability is an area of deep vulnerability for Trump and his party since they promised to fix Biden and the Democrats’ mismanagement of the economy and are not viewed as having done so. According to Silver Bulletin’s polling aggregates, Trump’s handling of the economy is 18 points underwater (approval minus disapproval) and an astonishing 28 points underwater on handling inflation (34 percent approval vs. 62 percent disapproval). Other data show that general views of the economy have not improved since Trump took office, that most believe Trump’s policies are actually making the economy worse and that more see the economy getting worse rather than better in the coming year.
In such a situation, it would be political malpractice not to focus on this vulnerability, neatly encapsulated in the term “affordability.” Everything just costs too damn much! Democrats have taken to this approach delightedly, whether moderate or fire-breathing progressive. It provides a convenient way of changing the subject when other issues, particularly cultural ones, come up where their views are decidedly less popular. Pay no attention to those other issues: we Democrats are affordability people!
Will this work? Well, it did in 2025. Indeed, it worked so well that one Democratic commentator declared it a new “theory of everything” for the Democrats and there has been general euphoria that—finally!—a way has been found to neutralize the toxic image the party has developed over time. In short, Democrats hope to affordability-wash their party brand and be reborn as a party that cares for little beyond making ordinary citizens’ lives easier and better. But can the Democrats really wash away their political sins so easily?
There are reasons to be skeptical that affordability, despite its utility as a campaign trope, has such magical powers. Start with the ongoing struggle between moderates and progressives within the party. Their differences were temporarily suppressed during the 2025 campaigns, where everyone latched onto the affordability message, but in the aftermath these differences are coming to the fore. Mamdani’s victory in New York City has put wind in the sails of the good ship Progressive; now is not the time they say to bow “at the altar of caution.” Such candidates are running hard to the left in many Democratic primaries and Democrats could well find themselves with their own version of Republicans’ Tea Party problem from the early 2010’s where insurgents undermined GOP electoral fortunes.
Case in point: progressive darling Graham Platner is running strong against Janet Mills for the Maine Senate Democratic nomination. In past social media posts, Platner referred to himself as a communist, disparaged the police, and criticized Maine’s rural white people for being “stupid” and “racist.” And then there’s his “Totenkopf” tattoo historically associated with the Nazis. Not ideal; recent polling indicates that with this baggage Republican Susan Collins would easily vanquish him in a general election.
After balanced information about Platner, he trails Collins significantly. After a positive paragraph reflective of Platner’s bio and current campaign messaging, and a negative paragraph summarizing the recent news about him and reflecting likely Republican messaging in a general election, Collins gets above 50 percent and Platner trails her by 9 (42 percent Platner / 51 percent Collins)—the same margin by which Democrats lost the 2020 Maine Senate race.
Without flipping Collins’ seat, Democrats’ chances of taking back the Senate are extremely small. In general, Democrats are in desperate need of moderate candidates who can overcome, rather than reinforce, the negative weight of the party’s image—an image which cannot be magically affordability-washed away in purple-to-red states. This imperative is underscored by this chart from Lakshya Jain on how Democrats would do in Senate contests outside of Maine and North Carolina even if 2026 is a 2018-type blue wave (D+7.3) election.
The starkness of this challenge is underscored by the difficulties of being truly moderate in today’s Democratic Party. As liberal Ezra Klein admitted, apropos of the 2025 results:
If Democrats want power in the Senate in any significant numbers ever again, they’re going to need to be competitive in places where they used to be able to win elections. Places like Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota and Alaska. But they’ve not really been competitive there for some time.
So I don’t know how much I think this was a positive test of that...Abigail Spanberger is a moderate in Virginia and Zohran Mamdani is a democratic socialist in New York City…But also by any historical measure of politics, they’re actually just not that far apart. Abigail Spanberger is a moderate within the current Democratic Party, but she is not a moderate from the perspective of 1998.
The thing about all three of these figures is that none of them challenge Democrats in any significant way, except maybe Mamdani, from the left…I don’t think the question of what you would need to do to win an election in Ohio, Florida and Iowa is answered yet.
Indeed not. The fact of the matter is that Democrats can’t just sprinkle affordability pixie dust over their candidates—they actually need to move their left-trending party to the right in important ways. As noted in the big New York Times feature on “Moving to the Center Is the Way to Win”:
The success of candidates like [Democrat Marcy Kaptur, who successfully defended her House seat in a district that Trump won easily] demonstrates that America still has a political center. Polls show that most voters prefer capitalism to socialism and worry that the government is too big—and also think that corporations and the wealthy have too much power. Most voters oppose both the cruel immigration enforcement of the Trump administration and the lax Biden policies that led to a record immigration surge. Most favor robust policing to combat crime and recoil at police brutality. Most favor widespread abortion access and some restrictions late in pregnancy. Most oppose race-based affirmative action and support class-based affirmative action. Most support job protections for trans people and believe that trans girls should not play girls’ sports. Most want strong public schools and the flexibility to choose which school their children attend…
[Trump’s] extremism offers an opportunity to the Democratic Party. Mr. Trump is governing in ways that put the Republican Party out of step with public opinion on taxes, health insurance, abortion, immigration, executive power and more. If Democrats were willing to be less ideological—less beholden to views that many liberal activists, intellectuals and donors genuinely hold but that most Americans do not—they would have the opportunity to build the country’s next governing majority.
And without that, they won’t. In many ways, Democrats just don’t realize what time it is. The eras of racial preferences and adjacent DEI policies, of “no human being is illegal,” of gender ideology and treating biological sex as a mere technicality, of tolerance for social disorder in the name of kindness, of climate hawks and net-zero maximalism, of spending that doesn’t produce commensurate results, of shoddy but “progressive” governance—they are all coming to their ends. The Democrats must find their way in this strange new world for which their most ideological supporters—those “liberal activists, intellectuals and donors”—are unprepared. They cannot just affordability-wash their political sins away. Their problems are embedded too deeply and the skepticism of ordinary voters too entrenched for such a superficial fix to work.
The above is excellently researched, as always, but didn't we all learn in high school economics government spending, housing and energy are the basis for the vast majority of all US inflation, or "affordability"?
2020-2024 DC spent trillions on no bid contracts for Covid and Climate theatre. We handed billions to Dem donors to form Green Corps, swimming in billions more, perpetual tax payer subsidies. Many of the these new ventures rendered their Founders and C Suiters instantly wealthy, without a prayer of survival once the DC money spigot turned off.
The waste was near omnipresent. In many schools we replaced perfectly safe ICE school buses with electric ones that were either never delivered after payment, or would not function. Factories spent billions retooling for EVs few Americans desired and even fewer would buy without hundreds of billions in taxpayer subsidies. Now even Bill Gates admits "just kidding".
Dems assured us the 10 million person Army crossing the border under Biden was the labor that would bring down housing costs, Instead housing prices rose by roughly 50%, nearly everywhere in the country. Evidently, not all new arrivals were master carpenters. Instead we now have 10 million extra people looking for housing, in an existing housing shortage.
On Day 1, Biden declared war on fossil fuels. Oil and gas became the new "F" word, unacceptable in polite society. Drilling on federal land was forbidden. Oil leases are worthless without drilling permits, and Dems slowed them ASAP. The oil and gas industry produced under Biden, but not nearly as much as they could have otherwise. The price of oil is in just about everything we utilize or consume, and Dems purposefully limited supply expansion.
The list could fill books. In reality, we had 4 years of widespread mania regarding US spending, energy and immigration. It hasn't yet been a year. If a family member goes crazy and and maxes out every credit card shopping on QVC, it takes far longer to right the ship, than it did to flush the money. Same in DC.
As Ronald Reagan showed in 1981, it takes about a year to reverse course from bad economic policies. He had inflation squeezed out after a year---but did so with a completely supportive Fed. Trump doesn't have that assistance, but inflation is still slowly coming down. I'd caution anyone against running (especially a year out) on "affordability. It can change very quickly, then you're stuck. Housing is a little different, but again, mortgage rates have fallen by more than half a point and are likely to continue to do so. The foundations Trump has built with investment commitments are already beginning to turn shovels. The biggest vulnerability Trump and the Republicans have is Trump's willingness to extend H1B visas---DEEPLY unpopular with working class and youts. But . . . who on the D side is going to come out against visas or Chinese students here? And illegals taking US jobs (whether it's even remotely true that "Americans won't do them"?) This is a total loser for Ds.
The problem is that the only real areas where Rs, and Trump in particular, are vulnerable are the very areas where Ds are even more vulnerable. Meanwhile, as I warned a year ago, the data/energy vs. green civil war is pretty much over, and the green Ds have completely lost on this. There are policies to be used that require Big Data to supply its own power---but that won't be solar or wind. So the D coalition will continue to fracture over this.
In short, as I have been warning for over a year, the only vulnerabilities for Rs is on the RIGHT: less immigration, more nukes, more oil & gas, fewer H1Bs, fewer Chinese students, less man-hate. I see absolutely nothing from any Ds, particularly Zohran, that in any way address the CORE of "affordability." Oh, and it will be so much fun to see billions of dollars flee NYC at the slightest whiff of more taxes and more regulations on capital.