“Affordability” is the political word of the moment.
The prices of everyday essentials, such as housing and health care, are at the top of Americans’ concerns. And “affordability” has become many politicians’ favorite term to refer to the issue, rather than older buzzwords such as “cost of living,” the more basic “prices” or specific economic measures such as “inflation.”
“Affordability” rocketed up in Google Trends in November, when Democrats Abigail Spanberger, Mikie Sherrill and Zohran Mamdani all won elections (as governor of Virginia, governor of New Jersey and mayor of New York City, respectively) in part on the strength of campaigns that centered on the word. The New York Times noted that email newsletters from members of Congress almost never used the word before Joe Biden’s presidency and used it fewer than 10 times a month before President Donald Trump’s second term. In November and December, they mentioned it 70 times a month.
Why this word, and why now? The term speaks to an uncomfortable gap between certain key costs, such as housing, and people’s incomes. With inflation much cooler than its sky-high 2022 peak of 9 percent — on Friday, the latest report showed annual inflation at 2.4 percent — “affordability” speaks to people’s ongoing complaints about costs without referencing economic benchmarks.
Trump won the presidency in part because of surging prices during the Biden administration, and promised to bring down prices. But he has downplayed discussions about affordability, pointing to stock market gains that have boosted 401(k)s and other positive economic signs.
Of course, concerns about high prices have shaped politics before, but the term “affordability” is particularly buzzy now. While the verb “afford” dates back to Old English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and the adjective “affordable” appeared in 1647, “affordability” is a relatively new term, possibly coined in 1910 in an article in the Indianapolis Star.
“Affordability” was scarcely used until the 1950s, according to the dictionary. Google’s Ngram Viewer shows that the term started appearing more and more often in books from the mid-’70s to the mid-’90s.
Before the “affordability” moment, the word “affordable” took on political connotations through its associations with state-subsidized “affordable housing” and then the 2010 “Affordable Care Act” that reshaped health care policy under President Barack Obama.
Just before the coronavirus pandemic, journalist Annie Lowrey wrote a piece headlined “The Great Affordability Crisis Breaking America.” She argued that positive numbers about the economy — unemployment down, wages up — masked the hardship caused by rising prices.
A year later, pollster Geoff Garin pushed Democrats to talk about affordability, arguing that Biden’s habit of talking about jobs created wasn’t resonating with voters, who would rather hear about how the government could bring down prices. Whether they were employed or not, voters worried about the cost of health care, child care and more, Garin argued.
Garin looks back now at a presentation he gave to Senate Democrats’ campaign committee in 2021 that had the word “affordability” in bold at the top of a slide. “The word’s important, because it speaks to the real-world challenge that Americans feel — it’s hard for them to afford the things that they consider essential to a middle-class standard of living,” he said. Garin credits the activist group Groundwork with pushing the shift from Biden’s emphasis on new jobs to Democrats’ current focus on bringing down costs.
Congress passed legislation early in Biden’s term that flooded the economy with money, a move that helped the U.S. rebound quickly from the pandemic but many economists said contributed to higher inflation. Trump beat Democrat Kamala Harris in 2024 with a message focused on the problem of high prices and a vow to reduce the cost of groceries “on day one.”
By October of last year, economic thought leaders were working to reclaim the term: The left-leaning Economic Security Project published its “Affordability Framework,” and the Urban Institute launched an “American Affordability Tracker.”
In November, after the election victories by Democrats who ran on affordability, Groundwork published an “Affordability for All” agenda of 10 policy ideas. The affordability agendas keep coming — just this month, the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus and the New Democrat Coalition in Congress launched them too.
The new democratic socialist mayor of New York, who promised to freeze some tenants’ rent and make bus rides and day care for 2-year-olds free, is perhaps the most prominent “affordability” politician. But even he didn’t use the word much before the summer.
Andrew Epstein, who was Mamdani’s communications director during his primary campaign, personally favored the term “cost of living” over “affordability,” which he says he viewed as “clunky.” When Mamdani announced his candidacy, he said the city was “unlivable for the working class,” calling it “a quiet, grinding crisis.” But he didn’t use the word “affordability” in that speech and rarely used it en route to his win in the Democratic primary.
In Mamdani’s general-election campaign against then-Mayor Eric Adams and former governor Andrew M. Cuomo, however, “affordability” became his catchword. “I lost that argument in the campaign,” Epstein said, laughing. “We feel very gratified that we identified and ran at something which clearly tapped into a broader political hunger in the country.”
Jeffrey Lerner, a longtime Democratic operative who became Mamdani’s communications director for the general election, likes the term.
“We can talk about prices going up and people being paid more … but the truth is, for most Americans, the math doesn’t math. You just can’t make the budget add up week after week. ‘Affordability’ captured that in a way that ‘cost of living’ or ‘inflation’ or ‘wage gains’ doesn’t,” Lerner said. “More and more Americans — not just working poor, not just single parents, not just new immigrants; even middle-class, upper-middle-class people — are getting to a place where they cannot afford what they could five or 10 years ago.”
Today, Republican voters are even more concerned about the problem than Democrats: In YouGov polling this month, 31 percent of Republicans said that inflation or prices are the single most important problem in America right now, compared with 23 percent of Democrats and 21 percent of independents. For every age group, inflation or prices are the top concern.
But while Democrats have embraced the word “affordability,” Trump has called it “a hoax” and “a fake word by Democrats.”
In an email, Republican National Committee spokeswoman Kiersten Pels pointed to Trump’s deals with pharmaceutical companies on drug prices and sweeping tax cuts that reduced taxes for most households.
“Democrats claiming to be the party of affordability is pure gaslighting,” Pels said. “Their policies delivered skyrocketing grocery bills, outrageous gas prices, and the worst inflation in 40 years — crushing working families. President Trump is cleaning up the Biden-era economic wreckage, driving prices down, lowering mortgage rates, and restoring affordability where Democrats failed.”
Tim Hogan, who runs the Democratic National Committee’s “war room,” which pushes out political messages each day, said that a string of election wins since the presidential loss in 2024 has shown Democrats the power of running on bringing down prices, including a state senator who flipped a seat in Iowa in August while talking about child care and housing, and two Georgia candidates who flipped seats in November in a state election that hinged on utility prices.
“Food is more expensive. Mortgage delinquencies are going up. Credit card debt is climbing. This sticker shock coalesced into ‘affordability,’” Hogan said. “Affordability is shorthand for an understanding that things are getting harder. The very real concrete lived experience is people are going to the grocery store, trying to heat their homes, and seeing that their paychecks aren’t keeping up.”
Signe-Mary McKernan, an economist who guided the creation of the Urban Institute’s affordability agenda, said the word works better than many terms because it covers not just prices, but also whether workers’ earnings are high enough to pay costs.
“We’ve had something of an economic conundrum for a while,” McKernan said. “On the one hand, we’ve had consistent GDP growth and stock market increases since 2022. Inflation is down below 3 percent. And yet the overwhelming economic experience for most Americans is this sense of unaffordability or inability to get ahead. … People want what they’re experiencing validated.”
McKernan’s answer to that puzzle is that essential costs have risen faster than inflation, and more quickly than people’s wages. Her tracker shows that wages have risen 38 percent since 2017, but child care costs have gone up 40 percent, health insurance 41 percent, rent 50 percent and home sale prices 80 percent.
Mike Konczal, who co-wrote the Economic Security Project paper, recently charted how four key expenses — groceries, housing, health care and transportation — have eaten up a larger fraction of Americans’ spending in recent years, leaving people feeling squeezed even under supposedly good economic conditions.
“I think ‘affordability’ speaks to that security of life being a little further out of reach,” he said. “It also helps pull together a lot of different things, from people’s access to health care to access to a home — all very different phenomena that have gotten more expensive. There’s a little less left over to enjoy things.”
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