"Affordability Issues": Did Democrats Land on a Good Strategy for a Bad Reason?

By now, everyone who pays attention to US politics has heard some version of the immediate conventional wisdom explaining the Democrats' across-the-board romps in Tuesday's elections.  The magic formula, we have already been told a zillion times, is that Democrats wisely focused on economic issues this time.

That view has not been entirely unanimous, however, even among headline writers (who are usually the laziest trend-followers one can imagine).  For example, covering the governor's race in Virginia, the US version of The Guardian offered this headline confirming the insta-consensus: "Historic first for Spanberger after considered campaign against Trump: Democrat becomes first female governor in Virginia’s history and placed focus on living costs and public service."  On the other hand, The New York Times went with this: "Spanberger Wins Virginia Governor’s Race With Forceful Anti-Trump Campaign."

So which was it, a "focus on living costs and public service" (note: even that headline broadens the explanation beyond the supposed kitchen-table issues) or a "forceful anti-Trump campaign"?  Even so, the "affordability issues" explanation is now fully implanted into the hive mind of US political analysis, especially among non-Republicans.  Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, for example, famously emphasized the (very real, as I discuss below) affordability crisis in New York City and coasted to an easy victory, even in the face of ugly and bigoted attacks from the Cuomo side and from seemingly every major Republican politician.

[Two quick asides about Mamdani: (1) I was invited to write a guest op-ed this week for RevDem: The Review of Democracy, which is the online journal of the CEU Democracy Institute (the non-university part of Central European University, which Hungarian dictator Viktor Orban drove out of Budapest several years ago).  My piece there, "Mayor Mamdani: An Inspirational Leader Facing Relentless Political Attacks," distilled my three recent columns here on Dorf on Law about Mamdani and filled in important details of my argument that the anti-Mamdani people will now try to turn every crime in NYC with a Jewish victim into "proof" that Mamdani is an antisemitic monster.  (2) Apparently, the anti-Mamdani people are now furious with Curtis Sliwa for not dropping out.  Given that Mamdani won with 50.4 percent of the vote, the logic of this is a mystery.  Even if every Sliwa voter had gone for Cuomo (which is not guaranteed, especially since sitting at home was an option), Cuomo still would have lost.  But hey, angry people often have trouble making sense.]

In any case, is it true that economic issues won it for Democrats this time?  If so, what does that do to my argument here this past Tuesday: "It Matters That the Extremely Close 2024 US Election Results Were Not Due to 'the Economy.'"  I could have been wrong in one of two ways (though there possibly could be more, I suppose): (1) the results in 2024 were about the economy, or (2) the results in 2024 were not about the economy, but it does not matter that Democrats think they were.  As I will explain below, I was not wrong on either count.

Before turning to that full argument, I want to do something unusual for me, which is to comment on a social media comment.  That is unusual because I do not participate in social media at all (neither reading nor commenting), which in turn is because I know that social media kills people's souls.  As it happens, however, a not-very-friendly friend passed along this flame-out from one of the social media cesspools (addressed both to Professor Dorf as well as to me, apparently because this is Dorf on Law): "Oh please stop. You and Prof Buchanan do neither future women candidates nor future Dem ones, and certainly not the Dem Party, any favors by pushing the Dem Women Candidates For President Lose Cuz Of Misogyny Cuz Women Candidates Are Interchangeable canard. Seriously. Stop."

It is impossible to stop doing something that I have never done, but I can at least promise never to begin "pushing the Dem Women Candidates For President Lose Cuz Of Misogyny Cuz Women Candidates Are Interchangeable canard."  Never did, never will.

What I did say was that the 2024 presidential election results do not line up with the economic explanation, because different demographic groups' voting patterns changed from 2020 to 2024 in ways that defy that explanation.  I will allow an error by Paul Krugman to illustrate my point.  On his substack a few days ago, Krugman wrote this: "Pretty clearly, many Americans now believe that they were lied to. My guess (we’ll know more in a few days) is that this is especially true for Hispanic voters, who swung to Trump believing that he would deliver prosperity and are swinging hard back to Democrats now that he hasn’t."

What?  As I explained in Tuesday's column, exit polls in November 2024 showed that Latino women swung more than mildly for Trump compared to 2020, and Latino men swung very strongly that way.  Meanwhile, there was no such swing among Black voters or pretty much anyone else.  So Krugman is right to notice that Latino voters made the crucial difference to allow Trump to eke out a very narrow win in 2024, which was my point as well.  Krugman, however, is so sold on the idea that that election was all about the economy that he offers the completely unsupported (and almost certainly unsupportable) claim that Latino voters "swung to Trump believing that he would deliver prosperity."

If it were about feeling pinched in the pocketbook, why would it be only Latinos who shifted to Trump while no one else did?  For that matter, why would Latinas not have "believ[ed] that he would deliver prosperity" as strongly as their male counterparts supposedly did?  Is there some unknown social science research showing that Latino men are super-responsive to economic stress, that Latinas are kinda-sorta responsive to economic stress, and no one else cares about economic stress enough to change their votes?

Interestingly, Krugman in his post today inadvertently contradicts his earlier point.  After saying that Latino voters (like everyone else) should by now know that Trump's economic promises were all bs, Krugman writes this: "For Hispanic voters, even worse is the devastating discovery that everything Democrats warned would happen to them under Trump II is happening. Suddenly, America has become a place where it’s not safe to have brown skin or speak Spanish with your family, even if you’re a citizen."

Now there is an argument that lines up with the evidence.  Why would Latinos, uniquely among US demographic groups, be turning away from Trump right now?  Because of what he is doing to Latinos!  One would hope that other people would be horrified by seeing Trump's thugs carry out his Supreme Court-blessed campaign of terror based on blatant racial (including linguistic) profiling, but it should hardly be surprising that the most-targeted group -- people who now have every reason to fear going to work or even to the store -- would react more strongly.

In my column on Tuesday, I noted the commentator Juan Williams' alternative explanation of the unique swing among Latinos (especially men) toward Trump in 2024.  I did not endorse that view, because I am unqualified to assess it, but I did point out that no one else has come close to offering an explanation that meets the evidence even halfway.

Nonetheless, people from Bernie Sanders to less left-ish (but at least center-left) people like Krugman and Jamelle Bouie (whom I also quoted in Tuesday's column) have been pushing the economics-based explanation of the 2024 results.  And as I conceded above, this week's results in the off-term elections would seem to boost that claim, particularly because the candidates themselves (especially Mamdani) say that they rode the affordability train to victory.

It is possible, of course, that a swing in one year could be about economic issues, but in an earlier year it could be about some combination of sexism and racism.  This is no "Women Candidates Are Interchangeable canard," in the inimitable words of our social media-drenched reader.  Kamala Harris presented a brand new combination of targets (both individually and combined) that the Trump people shamelessly exploited.  And as I have written many times, Trump offered no reason for even a semi-intelligent person operating in good faith to believe that he could "bring down prices on Day 1," to choose but one silly example.

Even so, did Democrats prove that they can sometimes blunder their way into doing something right?  That is, although the lesson from 2024 was not that Trump won on economic issues, did Democrats win in 2025 by thinking that they needed to do better on economics?  Right outcome, wrong reason?

The problem with that argument is that there are plenty of reasons why people could have swung against Republicans this time.  Krugman pointed out why Latino voters have highly salient non-economic reasons, but it is virtually impossible to imagine anyone except those who have drunk the MAGA Kool-Aid looking at the last nine-plus months and not seeing dozens of reasons to vote against Republicans.  The country is living through a living nightmare.

This is the sequence of assertions that support the idea that this time it truly was about economic issues: 1. the economy is horrible; 2. the Democrats included a lot of things in their campaigns pointing out that the economy is horrible; 3. the Democrats won.  Sorry, but that is not how logic works.

What about Mamdani?  Well, anyone who wanted to win the New York mayoral race in 2025 would be crazy not to talk about affordability issues.  Sometimes, economic issues are the most important issues.  Moreover, Mamdani did not limit himself to saying that Democrats' policy positions have always been (too weak, but still) unmistakably more pro-consumer and pro-worker than Republicans' policies.  He ran on specific policy ideas -- specific not only in the sense of not-general, but specific to New York -- and tapped strongly into the enthusiasm of young voters who are most affected by all of that.  Moreover, he did in fact run on a bunch of non-economic issues that were going to be especially especially popular in his target demographics in New York right now.

To be clear, half of my academic training is in economics.  I care about economic issues, with inequality-based ills leading my list of problems that Democrats need to do a better job addressing politically and tackling substantively.  I have no problem at all with people who want to tell Democrats and independents to care deeply about the economic challenges of struggling Americans.

What I do have a problem with is the idea that Bill Clinton's least interesting advisor (whose best-by date came and went long ago) uttered an unchallengeable truism that "it's the economy, stupid," which is taken to mean that talking about anything else is always a bad strategy.  Consider Senator Tim Kaine, who in an interview just yesterday said this:

Abigail [Spanberger] was very disciplined, and she made her campaign about the economy.  ... And she stuck in that lane, no matter what they tried to throw at her.  And that has been my critique ... of Democrats for a long time, is that the economy is always the issue that matters the most to the most people.   ...  Democrats just talk about other stuff.  We just can't resist chasin' this or that rabbit, talkin' about other stuff, and we don't make the economy front and center.  ... Put the economy front and center.  Many other issues are really important -- talk about 'em too, but put the economy front and center."

Got it.  Talk about other important issues, but never go chasin' rabbits.  Talk about non-economic issues, but put the economy front and center.  And guess what?  When the Democrats win, people like Kaine will say that they won because they but the economy front and center; but when Democrats lose even after talking about the economy extensively, we will be told that the failed by not fronting-and-centering it enough.

This is drivel dressed up as insight.  In a column three years ago, I lauded an op-ed by now-former Washington Post column Perry Bacon Jr., as part of which I pointedly included this quote:

If some pundit or strategist had written in June that Democrats would keep their House majority if they ran 80 percent of their campaign commercials on economic issues and Biden gave a weekly speech on manufacturing, he could write, “Democrats didn’t talk about the economy enough,” with an actual, specific metric that the party didn’t hit. I suspect this person doesn’t exist.

To be clear, I express no opinion here about the proper balance between economic and non-economic issues.  For that matter, I have pointed out again and again that such a binary divide itself makes no sense.  But even if it did, I have no idea how we would assess whether the Democrats in 2025 did the right amount of economics talk.  At the very least, the question is still unanswered.