Democrats Have Found a One-Word Answer to Their Political Woes: ‘Affordability’

Animated by their first glimmer of electoral hope in a year, Democrats across the political spectrum are roundly championing “affordability” as the answer to their political troubles.

“I think the story of this moment is affordability,” Sen. Raphael Warnock said.

“Affordability is definitively the decisive issue,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters.

“The Democrats who won all made affordability a central part of their campaign,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren told NOTUS.

Democrats went into major elections in New Jersey, Virginia and New York City looking for signs about what types of candidates and messages might lead them out of their current political wilderness. After a politically diverse bench of candidates — from democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani to former moderate Blue Dog Coalition member Abigail Spanberger — won by considerable margins, Democrats weren’t convinced that they had identified a singular winning ideology before 2026.

But they have landed on singular word.

“Certainly the message about affordability and the fact that Trump’s doing nothing to help people lower costs, that’s the kind of direct connection to the people that I think was really strong yesterday,” Sen. Andy Kim told NOTUS.

Democrats are projecting confidence that the elections are a harbinger of future success if they continue campaigning on affordability as they hold out against negotiating with Republicans on the government shutdown and feel they are on the right side of the top political issue ahead of a high-stakes 2026 midterm fight.

Ironically, the Republicans’ 2024 playbook centered Biden-era inflation and helped buoy GOP campaigns around the country. As costs have continued to rise under President Donald Trump, “affordability” gives Democrats a rare opportunity to attack much of the Republican trifecta’s record — tariffs, layoffs, foreign bailouts, and a reconciliation bill that slashed Medicaid — in a single buzzword.

And in a rare moment of bipartisan agreement, many Republicans made a similar argument Wednesday for why their party struggled at the polls.

“Even if we have a downward trend on inflation next year,” Sen. Thom Tillis told reporters, “we’ve still got to do the apples to apples comparison of how much you paid for a product this year and how much you’re paying next year. And that’s the thing that we really need to work on.”

Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who is closely aligned with Trumpworld, identified the same top reason, as he put it, that Republicans “got our asses handed to us.”

“Number one: Our side needs to focus on affordability,” he said on Instagram. “Make the American dream affordable. Bring down costs.”

Speaker Mike Johnson downplayed Republican concerns Wednesday morning, telling reporters “What happened last night was blue states and blue cities voted blue. We all saw that coming. And no one should read too much into last night’s election results. Off-year elections are not indicative of what’s to come. That’s what history teaches us.”

Despite nearly all of Washington crediting Democrats with winning the affordability argument, the party was less aligned on the type of candidates that should make that case. If anything, the election wins proved to be a Rorschach test in which each Democrat perceived precisely the results that they hoped to perceive.

For moderates in swing states, like Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, Spanberger’s win in Virginia and Mikie Sherrill’s victory in New Jersey lend proof to a theory that the party should seek to elevate centrists.

“So they have a new mayor,” he said of Mamdani’s win in New York. “That’s not a surprise. It doesn’t change my life,” Fetterman said. “And it’s certainly not going to be the party.”

The future, according to Fetterman, clad in his daily uniform of sweatshirt and shorts, is “real, regular Democrats. That’s going to continue.”

“More so than anything,” Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego said, “you look at Spanberger and you look at Sherrill, they overperformed.”

“Our success in most of the areas where we need to win are going to be more like Spanberger and Sherrill,” he added.

Rep. Gil Cisneros, a member of the center-left New Democrat Coalition, told NOTUS over text that “the fact that we had two candidates who won two statewide governor elections that were both New Dems and moderates says a lot. People want elected officials that are going to focus on the issues and work to get things done.”

Though, ultimately, he acknowledged that lowering costs is key: “No matter if you are a progressive or a moderate the issue they all focused on was affordability.”

But the leader of the progressive movement, independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, told reporters he thought Tuesday’s results showed that Democrats should be focused on promoting left candidates — especially if they center the cost-of-living issue.

“I think that any candidate who stands for the working class of this country, with 60% of people living paycheck to paycheck, and is prepared to take on the oligarchs with the richest people doing phenomenally well, the candidates who run on that message would be quite successful,” he said Wednesday. “We should be focused on that objective.”

Of course, Democrats are not on a glide path to retaking Congress in 2026 with only a single word. The party is still reckoning with how it reaches voters on social media, how seriously it should pursue generational change and how to recruit quality candidates.

“Some pundits and operatives will tell you ‘look at New York, let’s run more socialists!!’ and others will say ‘look at VA and NJ, let’s run more moderates!!!,’” Amanda Litman, president and co-founder of Run for Something, a group dedicated to helping young progressives run for office, wrote on Substack.

“We’re saying yes, and. We need to run the right candidate for the right district (because remember, people vote for people!) and empower them to run strong modern campaigns,” Litman continued.

The considerations for how to run those campaigns are not just ideological; they are also rhetorical as Democrats wade through questions of how to balance prosecuting a negative case against Trump’s record with presenting an affirmative argument that excites voters.

Sen. Chris Murphy, one of Trump’s top Democratic critics in the Senate, claimed that pushing back on White House should still be a centerpiece of the party’s campaign strategy.

“Last night was obviously a referendum on the president’s corruption, but it also was not coincidental to a moment when Democrats are fighting for what we believe in,” Murphy said.

“I think we look powerful and unified right now,” he continued, “and I do think that part of the good response yesterday was due to the fact that we’re finally standing up for what we believe in.”