We all know the cost of living is, as the famed New York political gadfly Jimmy McMillan put it, too damn high. Gas is running well over $4 a gallon, while supermarket and restaurant prices continue tempting your eyeballs to pop out of their sockets. That said, as early midterm voting kicks into high gear, which party is better positioned to lower prices and restore economic equilibrium? We ask because polls indicate more Americans these days, broadly speaking, say they trust the left more than the right when it comes to the economy. How is this possible given recent history?
In the haze of disappointment that Donald Trump has not yet steered the ship of state completely clear of the iceberg towards which it was headed not so long ago, have we forgotten what happened when Democrats held the trifecta just a few short years ago? Have we become so focused on the here and now, to the exclusion even of recent history or the day after tomorrow, that voters will double down on the failures of the Biden era?
Affordability and Credibility
For those who spent the 2020s asleep or in a coma, we just went down the far-left road, and it resulted in economic peril for the country and electoral disaster for the Democrats. As 2020 arrived, the Trump economy was firing on all cylinders, but COVID-19 plunged the country into economic and cultural chaos. Leftists panicked, bent the knee to neo-Marxists, stirred the cauldron of racial animus, then passed a recovery bill that spiked inflation to almost 10%, the highest in decades – after urging the Federal Reserve not to raise interest rates. They flushed countless billions of taxpayer dollars down the rathole of DEI, green energy, and every left-wing initiative imaginable – and some almost unimaginable. They built a binary grievance society of the oppressors and oppressed. That’s no way to run a country, and it is most certainly no way to shape a productive economy.
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When one party holds the trifecta — the presidency and both chambers of Congress, not to mention a friendly Supreme Court — there always exists the understandable temptation to punish the party in power for the high cost of living and reflexively vote for the other party. And that goes double in this case, when candidates on the left are promising to give you everything you need or want. But what, specifically, are the Democrats, including the socialists within their ranks, planning to introduce or enact if they take charge of the House and/or Senate?
The only near-certainty is a third impeachment of this president for whatever “high crime or misdemeanor” they deem to be impeachable – if they could do it for a phone call, they will do it again for whatever. Consistent with the left’s one-step thinking, they propose to fix low-income housing shortages with rent control, which will actually exacerbate the shortfall. They will try to put the brakes on fossil fuel production just like they did during the Biden years, which will increase consumer prices and decrease supply just as the country is becoming energy dominant. And even though none of them have any expertise in the area, leftists running for the House and Senate have made clear that they will try to actively constrain the growth of artificial intelligence (AI) instead of exploiting its boundless potential.
The left cries about the spiraling costs of healthcare, but they were the ones who promised that premiums would go down under Obamacare – that’s why they called it the Affordable Care Act – only to see premiums double since its passage in 2010. Republicans can rightly be blamed for failing to unite on a viable alternative, but they are hardly responsible for the Obamacare runaway train that will require constant infusions of taxpayer dollars to remain viable. And rest assured that is exactly what Democrats will try to do: Throw more good taxpayer money after bad to prop up a failing system. That is, unless they try to enact Medicare For All, a single-payer system that would end private insurance altogether and all but guarantee the type of shortages and delays inherent in socialized medicine, as can be seen in England and Canada.
The Economy Beyond the Headlines
If you look beyond prices for gas and groceries, which should fall once the Middle East is stabilized, the underlying economy would appear to be sound. Median household incomes jumped to an all-time high of $87,500 in 2025, while poverty rates fell to an all-time low, according to the New York Post, which also cites low rates of firings and layoffs in the latest jobs numbers, manufacturing and construction jobs on the rise, and record-low enrollment for unemployment benefits. Domestic oil production is at all-time record levels. 401(k) plans held by more than 100 million Americans are up an average of $25,000 – after losing $24,000, in real terms, under Joe Biden. The stock market continues on a glide path upward with all-time highs every week, it seems. And some $20 trillion in new foreign investment, much of it through trade deals, will be flowing into the country over the coming years.
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Want some more numbers to impress people at the next cocktail party you attend? The consumer price index increased on average 5% a year during the Biden presidency, versus 2% during the first Trump term and 3% so far during Trump 2.0, according to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ). Housing prices rose nearly twice as much under Biden as under Trump (5.3% a year on average vs 3.4%) during Trump’s two terms. As the WSJ calculates it, the inflation-adjusted average of $3.43 a gallon across the second Trump term is still 46 cents lower on average than in the Biden years. And let’s not forget about electricity. The average residential retail electricity rates in deep blue states Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, and New Jersey are about double those of ruby red states Florida, Nebraska, Tennessee, and Utah. There is a reason for the exodus from blue states to red. It’s called the cost of living, and now the left says they will solve the problem they created?
Reason and Emotion
This is not a matter of voting for Democrats because of an emotional issue like abortion or transgender rights. This is the heart of the matter. Lest we beat the phrase to death, a rising tide does indeed lift all boats. But a receding tide can leave them high and dry. The most honest way for leftists to attract voters nervous about restoring them to power is to convince them that they’ve learned the necessary lessons from their past failures and plan to chart a different course this time around. That should be the minimum, the table stakes for winning over skeptical voters. So, have the leaders from that Democrat-dominated era ever admitted that their economic stewardship during the Biden era was, say, less than ideal? Have they even fallen back on the old passive voice, DC-speak, saying something like ‘mistakes were made’? No, not even that. So, absent any indication that they have changed their ways, the presumption is, has to be, that if we put the same policymakers back in charge, they will pursue the same policies – and produce the same results.
