Policy / January 28, 2026
The gospel of affordability isn’t bold enough to convince voters that Democrats care about them. To build a lasting majority, Democrats must embrace populism.
Shoppers browse the bread aisle at a grocery store on January 23, 2026 in Lenexa, Kansas. Bread prices have increased by more than a third since January 2020.
(Chase Castor/Getty Images) As the 2026 midterm elections approach, Democrats are preaching the gospel of affordability. Leaders across the party – from New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani to centrist Blue Dogs like Abigail Spanberger in Virginia – have embraced affordability. Democratic Representatives Mike Thompson (CA-04) and Richard E. Neal (MA-01) even introduced a bill called the American Affordability Act, which promises to reduce housing, education and child care costs through a variety of tax credits. Congressional campaign professionals have urged candidates from coast to coast to adopt an “affordability agenda.” And for good reason, recent vote shows that the cost of living is at the top of voters’ concerns.
In some ways, this represents a step forward for Democrats. This gives the party a unifying and positive economic message to hammer home against a Republican Party that seems increasingly indifferent to the cost of living crisis. It’s a much better message than the pessimistic talk about democracy that dominated Kamala Harris’ message toward the end of her 2024 campaign. Additionally, the “affordability agenda” allows liberals to admit that there is something wrong with the economy without engaging them in hot rhetoric or egalitarian policies that make donors nervous.
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That said, the politics of “affordability” is trickier than the word might suggest.
First, price washing cannot compensate for bad social and cultural policies. Consider Aftyn Behn, the progressive candidate for Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District. Behn was a strong advocate of the affordability agenda – her slogan was “Feed the Kids, Fix the Roads, Fund the Hospitals.” Not bad. Yet his opponents have linked his campaign to his past calls to “abolish” and “defund” the police. And although she has scaled back her criticism of the police, Behn has refused to change her mind on these issues. This hurt his ability to reach working-class voters outside of wealthy Nashville. The lesson of Behn’s campaign is that maximizing affordability cannot hide bad positions.
Second, making America affordable is much easier said than done. Remember, Trump promised to cut costs in the face of record inflation. He failed. The annual inflation rate is now 3%, exactly where it was a year ago when Trump took office. As a result, the Democrats once again have a bite of the apple. Yet many liberals seem to think that all they need to do to implement the affordability agenda is remove Trump’s tariffs, reduce some regulations, and introduce a few new tax credits. This won’t work. On the one hand, voters’ frustrations over grocery bills, utility prices and the cost of housing have almost nothing to do with Trump’s trade policy: We don’t get our eggs from China, and while tariffs can have a negative effect on housing construction, most of the obstacles to new housing construction are domestic in origin.
Alternatively, abundance democrats will suggest that the key to unlocking affordability is to stimulate economic growth by reducing regulatory burdens. Recent GDP figures should challenge this theory. Economic growth »jumped” in the third quarter of last year. GDP actually grew up at 4.3 percent. This is huge in this day and age of low global growth rates. And yet, we almost didn’t feel it.
For most workers, economic growth no longer means a new car or a nice vacation. A hot stock market doesn’t seem to have any real effect on the lives of the average working family. This is not surprising, since the rich now control a record share actions: More than half of all stock shares belong to the richest 1 percent of families; the richest 1 percent own about $25 trillion in stock market wealth, while the poorest 50 percent of households own less than half a trillion between them. Last year, average salary increases barely kept pace with inflation. And the reality is actually worse, because, according to Bank of America filing records, middle-income families only received a 2.3 percent pay raise, meaning they are underwater in the face of a 2.7 percent inflation rate. Like our “K-shaped“The economy produces more wealth for the rich and less prosperity for the rest, growth alone cannot produce the desired results.
Achieving an affordable price in the medium term is still possible. Although an economy-wide decline in prices is unheard of outside of a recession, some basic household costs can be contained. Utility prices, which have risen faster than general inflation, could be reduced through regulation and big investments in the power grid. It’s no surprise that Trump and a number of Democratic Party governors, including 2028 presidential candidate Josh Shapiro, have adopted measures aimed at forcing things. tech giants to pay for rising costs. And for the lower end of the job market, Democrats have revived the still-popular idea of a gradual increase in the minimum wage alongside a promise to reduce drug prices.
But even these measures may not be enough to really change the situation. And that brings us to Democrats’ real problem: Affordability just isn’t important enough. Voters think something is seriously wrong with the economy, and they’re right. Bloodless calls for cuts to prescription drugs may not be visceral enough to convince them that Democrats are taking their concerns seriously.
The truth is that talk of affordability too often serves to avoid populism and revert to half-hearted calls for cautious centrism. Governor Spanberger, for example, quoted affordability is one reason she refused to repeal anti-union “right to work” legislation. While Nevada Senator Jacky Rosen affordable pitch centered on his co-sponsorship of the “no taxes on tips” legislation. For many Democrats, affordability means modest tax refunds and expanded credits that won’t ruffle the feathers of corporate donors. But nibbling the edges of the tax code won’t be enough to quell what is shaping up to be a storm of economic anger.
Even many Democrats sounders began to realize this. That’s one reason Clinton campaign veteran and centrist guru James Carville jumped over the affordability agenda to call for the Democratic Party to “run on the most populist economic platform since the Great Depression…a radical, aggressive, unvarnished, unapologetic and utterly unmistakable platform of pure economic rage.”
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American families are under much greater pressure than many macroeconomic indications suggest. Since around 2013, economists have recognized a global “savings glut,” low growth rates, falling wage shares, and an extraordinary acceleration in inequality. One of its main architects is no less an expert on the subject: Larry Summers. He and the rest of America’s financial and business elite have worked hard to break down trade barriers and deregulate the economy in the name of growth.
They got what they wanted, and what followed was this “giant sucking sound” of good jobs flying out of the United States, the continued collapse of the labor movement, the spread of low-wage work, the repetition of mass layoffs, and the deep instability that now characterizes the American economy. For a time, cheap goods from abroad (first Japan, then Korea, and now China) provided a remedy for the downward pressure on wages experienced by workers. No more. A generation of suppressed wages has led to a widespread decline in demand, which, in turn, has led to overcapacity and a shortage of productive investment. These days, Summers, almost unbelievably, complains that workers have too little economic power. Go figure.
Globalism and the domination of bankers have created an economic paradox that has not yet been resolved. The crowding out of American industry has deprived the economy of mass purchasing power – the economic engine of American growth. It also closed productive and profitable outlets for investment. Today’s American aristocracy chooses to save their money or invest it in an imaginary economy (AI, crypto, etc.) because investing in companies that generate large numbers of well-paying jobs is simply not as profitable.
To remedy this problem, the economy must be restructured by driving out the idle rich, rewarding workers with fair wages, and restoring some sense of economic sovereignty. Note that this is a populist story – a story about elites, about globalization, and about big tech and big finance destroying the wages of American workers. It is populism, not affordability, that offers the left the best path out of the wilderness.
To move the economy away from global markets, big finance and central bankers and put control back in the hands of citizens, Democrats must be prepared to take on Wall Street and Silicon Valley, tax their wealth and limit their influence on public policy. The types of policies that would be game-changing for American workers—such as providing free or near-free child care and health care, reshoring manufacturing, big investments in infrastructure, expanding government jobs, and ending mass layoffs—go far beyond the modest goals proposed in the amorphous affordability agenda. And to gain these things, he f would take on some of the richest and most powerful people and industries in the country.
In other words, the only way to truly deliver on the promise of affordability is to go well beyond what its proponents suggest. The only way to achieve affordability is to embrace populism.
Dustin Guastella Dustin Guastella is a research associate at the Center for Working-Class Politics and director of operations for Teamsters Local 623.