Affordability voters favor Democrats over Republicans for 2026 House midterms

President Trump spent Tuesday night, Dec. 9, in a Pennsylvania casino ballroom launching what the White House billed as an “affordability tour.” But instead of a president finally leveling with voters about prices and wages, the audience got something closer to a greatest hits album. Trump’s speech was filled with digressions about immigrants from “shithole countries,” praise for his own tariffs, and riffs about Americans buying too many pencils and dolls. At one point, Trump openly mocked “affordability” as the latest Democratic “hoax,” then partly walked it back and insisted that prices are already “coming down tremendously” under his watch.

Then, on Thursday, Dec. 11, the Senate rejected both a Democratic bill to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies and a Republican alternative built around health savings accounts, effectively guaranteeing that enhanced ACA tax credits (passed under Biden) will expire at the end of the year. That decision sets millions of people up for steep premium increases starting in January. For some families, prices will more than double.

This is all happening as voters are telling pollsters they are at their affordability breaking point. In a new poll from the Associated Press and NORC released this week, Trump earned his lowest approval rating on the economy ever in any AP-NORC survey. This new poll comes after others have shown a nearly all-time low in the University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment, the president falling with independents, and even losing inflation-conscious Republicans.

So the basic backdrop going into the 2026 election year looks like this: We have a president who says “affordability” is a partisan gimmick, a political system that has allowed costs for most goods for most Americans to rise outside their comfort level — and just allowed health costs to spike even further — and an electorate that is screaming for change.

If the midterms are an affordability election, Trump and the Republicans will likely do very poorly. But how poorly is an important question. In today’s Chart of the Week, I run some fresh crosstabs of our recent Strength In Numbers/Verasight polls to answer two questions:

1. Do voters who say the economy or prices are America’s top issue (I’ll call them “affordability voters”) disapprove of Trump more than voters focused on other issues?

2. And how do these groups differ in terms of their voting intention for the 2026 House generic ballot?

The answers to these questions ...