Voters are angry. They have little patience for the party that presides over their truncated purchasing power.
Americans were already angry about the persistently high and rising cost of basic goods and services when they sent Donald Trump back to the White House. They’re still angry over the price of consumer products today, and for good reasons. Consumer costs have continued to grow during Trump’s second term in office despite his promise to provide Americans with relief.
The voters’ response to their unenviable circumstances and to Trump’s failure to deliver on his campaign-trail promises is perfectly rational. Almost every other manifestation of the public’s anger is, however, harder to characterize as logical.
Poll after poll indicated that, throughout the longest-lived government shutdown in U.S. history, the GOP deserved the most blame for the impasse that cut off some public-facing government services. They told pollsters as much when Democrats insisted they needed to use their “leverage” to secure Republican concessions in exchange for breaking the filibuster they had inaugurated, and they kept saying that even after Democrats secured no concessions and opened the government up again anyway.
As a matter of empirical fact, Democrats shut down the government in the pursuit of tactical objectives, but a majority of voters don’t seem to care. They blamed the GOP anyway.
That’s not all. By a two-to-one margin, a recent Navigator survey showed that voters believe the Republican Party is responsible for the increase in the public’s health insurance premiums. That, too, is a ponderous proposition even if you’ve fallen entirely for the Democratic Party’s improvisational mid-shutdown messaging, in which they settled on the notion that the whole pageant had a purpose beyond communicating Chuck Schumer’s zeal for the progressive cause to his party’s restive activists.
As Democrats themselves maintained, rising health insurance premiums were rising because the Affordable Care Act’s exchange plans’ costs were growing. Preventing additional cost increases in the future would require the GOP to consent to restoring emergency mid-pandemic Obamacare subsidies indefinitely — a proposal to which the GOP objected. Justifiably, too. After all, Republicans have always opposed Obamacare, warned that its costs would balloon, and proposed any number of free-market alternatives to its structure over the last decade. Again, voters didn’t care. They blamed the GOP anyway.
That same Navigator poll showed that voters blame the Republican Party for rising electricity costs. Of course, utility rates vary from state to state, and the rising cost of electricity is driven by many factors beyond the flashiest one on which so many are presently focused: the rise of AI and the power-hungry data centers that fuel it.
Buoyed by their victories in high-cost states like Virginia and New Jersey, Democrats are talking themselves into the notion that they can harness and capitalize on voters’ inchoate anger. “The Democrats that were running on Tuesday did a fantastic job centering energy costs in their messaging,” one party strategist told The Hill.
But while voters on the national level are eager to blame the GOP for everything, New Jersey voters, for example, said utility companies and the state’s Democratic governor were responsible primarily for rising costs (the “federal government,” e.g., Republicans, came in third). New Jerseyans backed Mikie Sherrill for governor despite her party’s record on power generation, not because of it. Still, Democrats are banking on the thesis that voters are angry enough to put rationality aside. They’ll blame the GOP anyway.
Democrats might be right. Voters are angry. They have little patience for the party that presides over their truncated purchasing power. And until the public’s circumstances improve, they’re going to continue to signal their dissatisfaction with the political class in any way they can — even those ways that defy common sense. Irrationality is, after all, the most authentic expression of panic.
Republicans should not dismiss this outlook. These displays of distress are a warning. The party that heeds it will be rewarded. The one that doesn’t will be put out to pasture.