When I travelled across the key swing state of Pennsylvania shortly before the last presidential election, I kept hearing voters talk about the soaring price of eggs. “You go to the grocery store to buy a dozen eggs and it’s crazy,” said one social worker, a former Democrat voter who complained about “inflation and the cost of everything” before saying she was backing Donald Trump. Never mind that egg prices largely rose due to avian flu – they came to symbolise the economic struggles facing many Americans.
So Trump earlier this year boasted about bringing their price down 60 per cent in his State of the Union address, before adding that energy prices would fall so fast it would feel like a tax cut. “Our country is winning again,” he proclaimed.
Four days later, Trump joined Israel in launching an ill-conceived war against Iran that drags on today – and Americans, like people across the world, pay the cost of his foolishness with rising energy prices that impact on every firm and family. The cost of filling up a diesel vehicle has surged two-thirds. Talking to voters and party workers in Texas – a crucial battleground in Tuesday’s hugely-consequential midterm elections – fuel prices and inflation came up repeatedly across the political spectrum. “The expectation was that Trump would take us back to the economic strength of his first term but tariffs and the war undercut his ability to deliver what he was elected to do,” admitted a Republican strategist. “We’ve lost the middle ground.”
It is, as ever, all about the economy – and even this political huckster cannot shake off responsibility for the cost of living crisis. Trump clearly “owns” it due to his war and tariffs, said a Democratic candidate rightly. His White House restoration was rooted in concerns over paying bills and job security – now these same issues threaten to shackle his final two years in office if the polls are correct, with predictions his party could lose control of both congressional houses. One tech worker, on maternity leave after the birth of her first child, told me all her friends were infuriated by rising food and housing costs. “It’s crazy that a dual income household can’t support their living expenses,” she said.
Indications from early voting underline the impression I gained in both Texas and California: Republican voters are downbeat going into these elections that revolve often around electoral turnout while Democrats seem determined to strike a blow against a despised President. With 53 million votes cast, data shows higher rates than usual for midterms driven by an apparent Democratic surge along with black and Hispanic voters, two groups seemingly shifting away from Republicans. Certainly in Texas – where Hispanics are now the largest ethnic group – I found many people in this pivotal swing group infuriated by the brutality of Trump’s immigration crackdown. And they spend more than the average American on their cars, trucks and fuel.
It takes a brave commentator to predict election results in this populist age. Yet it is telling to see where Trump has gone for his most recent rallies: states that he won easily in 2024 with double digit leads such as Iowa, Ohio and Texas that now seem in tight Senate races with Republicans trying frantically to get their supporters to the polls. The President went to South Carolina, which he won by 18 points two years ago but his party is now tied in the polls, and to Mississippi, which he won by 23 points. He even went to Kansas, a traditional rural stronghold that has not elected a Democratic senator for almost a century, where the pastor of the country’s largest Methodist church has a narrow lead over an unpopular Republican incumbent.
Trump’s desperation to get his shrinking fan base out to cast votes explains why his party spends so much money on commercials attacking transgender rights when the issue is inconsequential to most citizens. Polls suggest that while the economy, cost of living and fuel prices top concerns of US voters, trans issues are of least priority. Yet the Republicans have reportedly blown $183m on advertisements themed on this subject, which have been shown 217,000 times. “This is far from the number one thing on people’s minds so why is it their number one issue,” asked Ryan, 27, a deeply-religious Republican voter whom I met in the heart of cowboy country.
About one third of this cash has been spent in Texas. Often the commercials push falsehoods – such as a digital spot showing a “mum of five” saying the Democratic Senate candidate in Texas, James Talarico, wants to imprison parents who will not let children surgically transition. Just like Trump’s bogus claims about states “where your child goes off to school as Tim and comes back as Tammy three or four days later”, these echo some of the drivel screened in Russia about the West. “It’s just not resonating,” said Dade Phelan, former speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, last month. “What Republicans are talking about is just not what the swing voter is really interested in… We’re not paying attention to the issues that matter.”
So will this core vote strategy pursued by Trump as his personal ratings slide into historically-bad terrain be sufficient to save his dreadful presidency from electoral humiliation? He has, after all, called affordability a “hoax” while bragging about the gilded ballroom he is building at the White House. But if the polls are right and the Republicans lose control of both houses of Congress, how badly will this vengeful man react to such a slap in the face from his own people? And will the party that appeased him for so long finally be prodded into standing up for decency and democracy? I fear the worst, sadly. Yet Trump is right about one thing: this vote is all about him and his abject reign, for better or worse.
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