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Democrats have a new winning formula. It’s the affordability theory of everything.
Cost of living is too high.
Blame Trump.
Here my idea
The ATOE has some subtle advantages. It’s a big tent strategy. Shifting their messaging from cultural issues to economic issues allows Democrats to be thematically aligned at the national level and substantively diverse at the local level: You can run a socialist in NYC and a moderate in Ohio with different policy answers to the same equation. What’s more I think material politics is easier to compromise on within a coalition than identity politics.
The downside: Let a thousand flowers bloom on affordability politics, and you’re gonna get some bad, or dumb, or just unworkable … uh, flowers. (Sorry metaphor broke down.) Politicians who make falsifiable promises can easily find their promises falsified. Trump won an affordability election in 2024 and then Republicans lost an affordability election (or several) on Tuesday.
Affordability is not a policy. It’s barely even an idea. It’s just a word—a useful word that connects Democrats to voters in a way that establishes the party’s new identity as a problem solving machine in an age of incompetent venality. But eventually you get power and you have to actually solve problems. And that, as Matt Yglesias would say, is where the real work begins.
