Six in 10 families can’t afford the basic cost of living in the battleground districts that will determine which party controls the House, a Washington Post analysis has found.
The political stakes are highest for Republicans, who are defending about three-quarters of the top 46 frontline districts considered critical to control of Congress, according to a ranking Oct. 16 by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.
Incomes have not kept up with rising costs in 42 of the 46 most competitive midterm election districts. But the problem is marginally worse in Republican-held districts, according to Post analysis of family budget data between 2019 and 2024.
As voters decide which party can best rescue their chance at the American Dream, political experts say prolonged economic hardship is the defining feature influencing voters in the midterms.
Two years ago, when Republicans won control of the House and President Donald Trump won the White House, affordability and immigration were consistently voters’ top issues in polling.
But this year, affordability polls in a tier by itself, and voters appear ready to deliver political consequences to Republicans, said David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, who reviewed the findings.
“When you’re in pain, you don’t go back to the person who put you in pain,” Paleologos said.
When presented with the findings, the Republican National Committee said the party hasn’t had enough time to fix the affordability crisis inherited from Democratic leadership.
“The problem will only get worse if the arsonists get the matches back,” said Natalie Baldassarre, press secretary for the RNC.
In the Arizona swing district which includes Scottsdale and Paradise Valley, KatyMae Moore, 29, said no issue matters more to her than affordability.
“My dollar doesn’t stretch as far as it used to,” said Moore, who works at a financial services company. “The valley is just getting more and more expensive to live in.”
This July, she turned off her air conditioner during a 100-plus degree desert day to save money, deciding instead to run fans and learn to be a “little bit more comfortable being hot.”
The share of households that could not cover the basics rose by 2.1 percentage points in Republican-held districts and 1.7 in Democratic-held ones, to about 59 percent overall.
Generally, most households struggled more financially during the period examined, regardless of political representation, as median costs rose by 33 percent, while median incomes rose only 28 percent. But Republicans are incumbents in more of the competitive districts where the share of families priced out of basics edged up.
“It weighs on the collective psyche very heavily. And it’s not a small part of the population. It’s well over the majority who are struggling,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, who reviewed The Post’s findings.
In the battleground districts, 60 percent of households did not earn enough income to cover the full cost of housing, food, transportation, health care, child care and taxes, The Post’s analysis found. A basic family budget — housing, food, transport, health care, child care and taxes — runs about $92,000 a year in these districts, according to The Post’s estimates.
While the full analysis also covers President Joe Biden’s administration, the costs for basics continue to grow during Trump’s return to the White House. In the past three years, for example, rents in Republican-held battlegrounds have risen 9 percent, compared to 4 percent in Democratic-held ones, according to average monthly rents from the real estate company Zillow. More recently, inflation triggered by the Iran war has increased energy and food prices across the country in 2026.
Paychecks aren’t keeping up, either. In September, prices were up 3.7 percent from a year earlier, while average hourly wages rose 3 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“It’s really painful,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist and managing director at the financial firm KPMG. “Inflation burns; it literally does, and it makes it harder making ends meet. But also, you get this sense of injustice, and I think that’s the political side of it.”
Democrats have embraced affordability as a campaign issue, blaming stretched family budgets on Trump’s policies.
Republicans note that inflation spiked under Biden and describe Trump as midway through resolving affordability problems, pointing to tax cuts, cheaper prescription drugs and the investment accounts he started for children as evidence of his efforts to address the issue. The president has touted billions of dollars in federal investment projects as evidence of prosperity and pointed to rising wages in the manufacturing sector as evidence of an economic turnaround. The administration also started mailing $500 rebate checks for those it said had been overcharged user fees under the Affordable Care Act. The checks, packaged with letters touting his record, have been sent to 1 million Americans in 30 states, according to the White House.
“Joe Biden and Congressional Democrats left behind an economic mess, and Republicans have been working to clean it up by delivering historic tax relief, creating jobs, growing our economy, and ensuring working families keep more of what they earn,” Mike Marinella, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, said in a statement.
In one battleground district, Arizona’s 1st Congressional District outside of Phoenix, the cost of living for a family of four increased to $106,800 in 2024, up from $77,000 in 2019. But median household income for that area rose only to $99,800 in 2024 from $75,500 in 2019, according to The Post’s analysis.
Bioinformatics scientist Brian Nadon, who lives in the Phoenix-area battleground, said he feels the financial crunch, as affordability is keeping him up at night for the first time in his life.
Nadon, 35, was laid off from a government contractor and couldn’t find full-time work for a year, he said. He exhausted his savings, sold his car and asked his partner to move in with him sooner than planned so she could help cover the mortgage on his Scottsdale home.
By the time he found his current job as a scientist, Nadon said he developed a deeper understanding of why economically stressed voters elected Trump in 2024.
“I think a lot of people in 2024 were hoping to vote in a genie to bring back prices from 2019,” said Nadon, who generally votes for Democrats but now also identifies with the desire to toss out everyone in charge. “I would like to see the people who are immiserating our country punished, because they have gotten away with making our lives worse.”
The battleground district with the biggest affordability gap is New York’s 17th District, in the Hudson Valley. Costs there rose 34 percent between 2019 and 2024; incomes rose only 19 percent.
Kayla Vander Wiele, 39, said her family in Rockland County, a New York City suburb, has shifted into an untenable paycheck-to-paycheck existence over the past year. Despair set in when she had to accumulate credit card debt to buy groceries.
“I don’t know how people are supposed to live,” she said. “We’re really noticing that our money is not going very far.”
The family of four’s combined $115,000 income, slightly above the county median, falls roughly $36,000 short of what The Post estimates a family of four like hers in Rockland County needs for the basics — about $151,000 a year including child care.
“I have, for a long time, felt like I must have done something wrong, because I didn’t think it was this hard for my parents,” she said. “I have a quote-unquote ‘good job,’ and I’m just struggling so much, and I’m like, what did I do that it’s not working out for me? Where did I make a bad decision?”
Vander Wiele has a master’s degree; her husband a bachelor’s. They have minimal debt and both have remote office jobs, she said. She works for a hospital, her husband for an insurance company. They had moved in with her parents for two years to save enough for a first home, and bought early in the pandemic, locking in a cheap mortgage rate before they skyrocketed.
Rather than pay for day care that felt too expensive, they juggled two full-time working parents at home with two kids in tow — a daughter, now 6, and son, now 2.
Her husband started selling his collection of vintage rock band T-shirts online to help make ends meet. She works a second job as a Starbucks barista, picking up evening and weekend shifts to earn an extra $300 a week.
Vander Wiele says she typically votes for Democrats, and for years had been picking her candidates based on who projected a sense of decency.
“The longer I own my home, the longer I’ve been a mother, and the more I’m finding myself struggling financially, affordability has started to play a larger role in driving which way I’m voting,” she said.
Methodology: The Post measured affordability by comparing what a basic family budget costs in each county with what households there earn. The cost figures draw on the Family Budget Calculator developed by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute from federal data on rents, food costs and consumer spending, with The Post’s own health care estimates.
Most of the analysis centers on the budget for a two-parent, two-child family. Health care is what a worker pays toward an employer health plan plus out-of-pocket spending. For 2024, The Post used the employee’s share of employer-plan premiums from the federal Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, as a three-year average (2023 to 2025), for each county’s metro area or the rest of its state for all 10 household types. Out-of-pocket spending comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Expenditure Survey and is the same in every county for each household type. Incomes come from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. A county’s affordability in a given year is the share of households earning less than the local family budget.
To compare years, The Post adjusted each cost back from 2025 using federal price indexes and HUD rents. Taxes were recalculated for each year.
The analysis was restricted to populous, urban counties with at least 40,000 households. To rule out places that only look more affordable because of who moved in or out, The Post compared the incomes of arrivals and leavers with those of established residents, using IRS records of people who changed address between their 2020 and 2021 tax returns, the year of the most intense pandemic migration. Counties where richer arrivals or the departure of lower earners drove the improvement were set aside.
The Post also checked its findings against Zillow rent and home value data, which are published monthly and run to within weeks of publication. This corroborated the trends and showed what has happened since the most recent Census window closed in 2024.
The Post consulted outside experts on these methods, including economists at the Economic Policy Institute, Allison Schrager of the Manhattan Institute, Matthew Rae of KFF, and researchers at the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity.
The post Costs outpaced wages in more GOP-held battlegrounds, Post analysis shows appeared first on Washington Post.
