Cause otherwise midterms discussion will be scattered around a bunch of separate Culture War thread posts. And it's nice to have more off-the-cuff rapid reactions in a dedicated megathread.
The first thing I've noticed so far: if the exit polls are correct, Americans are very pessimistic about AI.
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Notes -
Average US gasoline price in October 2006 was $2.32/gallon, or about $3.87 in today's money. Accounting for fuel economy is harder to do, but I would caution that while economy has improved as far as specific cars are concerned, the market has shifted toward less economical vehicles. In 2006, passenger cars accounted for 11 of the top 20 best-selling vehicles in the US. In 2026, they accounted for 4, and that's giving the Tesla Model Y credit for having infinite fuel economy despite being an SUV. The modal American appears to have replaced a sedan that gets 25 mpg with an SUV that gets 25 mpg. But this is all pointless because nobody is comparing gas prices now with what they were 20 years ago. Fuel economy was about the same one year ago as it is now, and gas was significantly cheaper. Hell, if you look at the 2024 election, it was over a dollar a gallon cheaper. People notice when it costs an extra $20 to fill the tank, and it's not exactly an occasional purchase.
I just filled up yesterday at about $4.2. Yeah, it's a little higher. Not enough to scream "the economy is ruined!". Yeah, we have wars in two major oil-producing nations, it's going to affect the price of oil. But the economy is not ruined at all, and there are many more factors than the price of oil.
What makes people think the economy is ruined is the barrage of news that sound like this: [Xbox] Project Helix reportedly launching in late 2028, projected to cost between $1,200 and $1,800. Or also on the gaming front the quite novel phenomenon of seeing the cost of a console increase dramatically over this generation rather than drop. These are things that young people care about, and there's a GTA game dropping now which puts extra attention on this. You can bet anyone who casually looks at this would get the impression there's something extremely wrong with the economy. While this is more RAM unavailability than tarrifs, RAM unavailability as an issue is owned in the public's eye by the tech industry's AI obsession, and by virtue of Trump's embrace of their AI obsession, by the Republicans. So that's the "games" part of "bread & games", the "bread" isn't doing that much better either, Trump couldn't single-handedly fix elevated prices, which I wouldn't really blame him for, but considering how he pinned high egg and other food prices on Biden he can't really complain the same's done to him.
If your problems is a newest ever fresh from the presses gaming toy costs too much, I don't think we have any issues with the economy. We have the issues with people's perspective. I mean you hear people talking in terms like they're on the verge of starvation, and then it turns out the problem is a newest shiniest toy is a little bit too expensive? Maybe diamond tiaras and Hermès handbags are too pricey too now? How can a simple working man get by in such an economy???
It's not just that though. Housing is notoriously expensive, at least in the places that people want to live in. Many younger millenials have given up on ever getting a house short of inheriting one. Cars... The average new car transaction recently hit above 50000$. If you account for typical dealership bullshit "destination fees", add taxes and such, you'll find there's only limited options that won't cost you over 30000$. Beef prices are still much higher than in recent memory. So it's gaming toys... and food, and houses, and transportation...
I'm mentioning RAM-related game console prices because the problem here is recent enough and "owned by Trump" enough that one can pin that one on him, being that enthusiastic about datacenter buildup, but the other problems are still there and from the public's perspective not only did Trump not solve them like he implied a president could, but he got distracted by other stuff (like endorsing AI development and the Iran war) that added some on top.
TVs are still cheap I guess, but they spy on you though.
We all know why (or at least one of the reasons why). People are selfish and short-sighted. They want housing built, in theory, but not where the good housing is, because that'd ruin the value of the good housing. There's no real solution for it that does not involve somebody left unhappy. And usually already having an expensive house correlates well with being able to leverage your desires into policy outcomes. So guess who is going to be left unhappy.
There are plenty of housing that is affordable if you don't want to live within 15 minutes walk of 200 restaurants and 50 shoe stores. One just needs to see what their priorities are. Again, there's no solution that would make desirable places inexpensive - it's a contradiction in terms, until somebody invents infinite space and infinitely scalable housing, people with more money will always outbid people with less money for desirable living spaces.
Also, the millennials (not only them of course) have been voting for various state-allocated goodies for decades. Redistribution have been growing rampantly. We're financing and subsidizing megatons of stuff we didn't before. Where all this is coming out? From the pockets of the people, ultimately. Via taxation, via inflation, via costs increases, via wages stagnation, via standards of living reduction.
Blaming Trump for data center buildup is the weirdest complaint of the season, to be honest. Trump didn't invent the AI boom, he just didn't destroy US chances of being the leading nation for the next 50 years by suppressing it. Europe is pretty much non-contender in this, but China very much is. China already leveraged perfectly the reluctance of the West to have physical industry - now if you want to manufacture anything, you have to go to China. Trump tried to change the trend, but that has costs - so everybody is whining "why Trump is making everything so expensive?!" You want it so that if you want to have any AI-related development happen, you'd also have to to go to China? And have China - read CCP - own all the best data centers and all the data in them? That, plainly speaking, is hooting insane. Trump didn't do that - for which I can't even really praise him, as not being hooting insane is not something we usually praise a person for. We are in the middle of a technological change, yes, it will have some pains, and it has nothing to do with Trump. Trump could make it worse, but he did not.
Well, this is something you can indeed blame Trump - and any politician - for. There are limits of what a politician - even the President - can do, and they are not as wide as they like to imagine. But you can't really run on the platform of "You know, really I can't do a lot, shit just happens and I'll try not to ruin good shit happening and maybe make bad shit happening slightly less bad, but that's all you can really expect of me in the best of cases". That would be a honest and a realistic platform, and nobody ever could win any election with it. No, actually, I am lying, this guy did: https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-16223571/man-wins-council-election-qualified-money-politics.html - but not a Presidential election.
Don't connect them to the internet. It's your choice.
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Your modestly cherry-picking a low price during the time frame.
https://www.macrotrends.net/3591/us-gasoline-prices
And to be perfectly fair for affordable it would be better to compare to a wage index. Inflation comp makes sense to compare too but affordability would be wages.
Just eyeballing peak war gas prices are inflation adjusted basically 2006. Wage adjusted guessing 30% cheaper. Adjusted for fuel efficiency even cheaper. And some reason I remember back than seeing north of $5/gallon though I’m guessing that data isn’t adjusting for taxes.
Looked at a Brent crude chart and it peaked $12 higher in 2008 then the highest price during the Iran War. Oil is definitely a lot cheaper today than what we’ve had historically.
Better comparison is what gasoline prices were January 2025 when Trump took office vs last few months. By macrotrends, it's $3 vs $4, a 33% increase. Younger voters possibly didn't even exist in 2006, they don't care about that.
But that’s just not a lot of money to most workers. Like 5-10 a week. It’s copium to say the election swung on a minuscule expense. Gasoline just isn’t a big budget item like it use to be because of fuel efficiency.
Plus Americans get all that money back since we now produce our own oil. Texas elected a Dem and all the oil money significantly goes to texas.
This feels like copium blaming gas prices
The big swing in Texas was Hispanic voters. I think the takeaway is once you have immigrants you can’t keep out more of them in a Democracy. Your only choice is fascism or figuring out how to run ethnic politics.
We probably need to make a deal with Hispanics to block immigrants from any other country.
You're making the same mistake that Republicans (well, Trump at least) did on the campaign trail where you handwave away voter concerns. "Well, I did some calculations and the increased prices as a result of my policies are only costing the average family $514.64 per year. You should be able to afford that." isn't a good message. Inflation is 100 basis points more than when Biden left office. Biden telling the American public that inflation was transitory and that no government response was necessary was bad politics. Trump telling the American public that cost of living isn't even an issue and, by the way, look at how great this gold-covered ballroom you'll never attend an event at is is even worse politics.
Those were the same Hispanic voters who propelled trump to a 14-point win in Texas in 2024. For years, Democrats assumed that they owned the Hispanic vote (which was always a curious position since they loved George W. Bush) and got owned themselves when they took the vote for granted. Then the Republicans made huge Hispanic gains and immediately pissed them away by assuming the same, even going so far as to redistrict based on this shift. The takeaway here is that Hispanic voters are ultimately like any other voters and will respond to the same things that other voters respond to. And this only considers Texas; it doesn't explain similar leftward shifts in Kansas, Iowa, Ohio, Mississippi, and other places with much smaller Hispanic populations.
I’m not making a mistake on gasoline prices (and your $500 calculation seems super high). Voters are possibly stupid on things like this - or it’s just pure copium and something else so going on.
And to your second paragraph the point of politics is NOT gainful employment. It’s wielding power. My point is once immigrants are here there is no way to prevent more. They will always side with their non-American tribal outsiders. Hispanics hate Dems because simplistically they are gay. They hate GOP because we wanted to deport their illegals. I’d rather shoot our shot at fixing the country than just have some dude with GOP next to his name sitting in the White House.
To the latter point I guess Im a fascists now. I think as a native my vote should count more than someone who showed up yesterday most likely illegally. I’m not sure what solution we have now. If Trump could figure out how seize power I have no problem backing him.
And my reading of the political scene is technologically the State has more power to protect itself than ever before but the electorate is more fractured than ever before. There is no silent majority to back America anymore. It’s tribe versus tribe now.
Dude, that wasn't a calculation. It was an arbitrary number somewhere in the ballpark of your $5–$10/week estimate. But beyond that I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. I thought it was some kind of explanation of why the Republicans lost so badly. If the only explanation you can come up with is that everybody else should have the same opinions as you, even when those opinions run contrary to core constitutional principles, then I don't know what to tell you.
I’m fairly certain when the data comes out it’s going to be the Hispanic vote with the big move. I hope you update your opinion that it wasn’t “gasoline” prices that caused the midterms.
Because gasoline prices should have roughly the same effect on voters regardless of race.
I'm not doubting that the shift in the Hispanic vote had an influence on the election, but you seem uninterested in why the Hispanic vote shifted so much from 2024. And while it was a big shift, preliminary data suggests that Talirico still got a lower share of the vote than Beto did in 2018. These shifts precisely suggest that there isn't some kind of ethnic spoils thing going on, especially since the Hispanic population in Texas hasn't increased that much since 2010, at which time nobody thought the state would ever be in play for Democrats.
Correct, but some races have lower average incomes than others and thus feel the pinch more. Some voters aren't ideologically inflexible and are open to voting for candidates of different parties. You seem to believe we can group people into demographic buckets and make assumptions about how they'll vote. Democrats did this back in the 2000s with their "Demographics is Destiny" argument, and you see how well that went. Republicans thought they'd have a permanent presidential majority with the electoral vote expected to shift to Texas from California, but now it looks like they'll have to actually win Texas and not take it for granted. Things change, people change, and you can't just assume that they'll stay the same. If your goal is to ensure a conservative majority by keeping out immigrants, it doesn't work like that. If Democrats think that allowing more immigration will allow them a permanent majority, it doesn't work like that. If things ever start to head in that direction there will just be a realignment. There are certain economically depressed white areas around Pittsburgh that 25 years ago you'd be nuts to think would ever consider voting Republican, but now they're prime Trump country. It's the nature of the beast.
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Half of American households dont have $200 in savings, which means an extra $10 a week on a must spend expense forces them to give up $10 that otherwise would have been spent on something they wanted. And given the lack of savings cutting $10 from the another want is probably a pretty sizable cut.
What benefit does the average American see from the Iran war that's worth giving up maybe 20% of their fun budget?
The modal poster here is very, very different from a sizable share of voters.
That's one I'd like to see a bit more detail on, in terms of how it's calculated. There was a while where I didn't have "$200 in savings", having only about $25 in my "savings account", but I instead had about $5k in my checking account (at a similar interest rate but more convenient, same credit union), and a bunch more in a Cash Management Account stored in a MMF. Would I have counted as "not having $200 in savings"?
The full reports dont seem to be there but this describes a bit of background:
https://solofunds.com/blog/the-2025-cash-poor-report-the-true-cost-of-living-paycheck-to-paycheck-solo-funds
Relevant to your question:
Not according to that definition.
Maybe I'm missing something, but the report is entirely survey-based, correct? Not only that, they then need to extrapolate their fee estimates from this survey claims, adding another potential level of error, though that's irrelevant for this particular discussion, I guess.
So it entirely hinges on how well-selected the set was (usually the answer is no), how trustworthy you think the people filling it out are, and however they interpreted the question.
Sure, but the survey results align with BEA's likely better survey data (the income is validated against tax returns). Which finds that about half of households have a negative personal savings rate.
https://www.bls.gov/osmr/research-papers/2024/pdf/ec240050.pdf
None of this seems shocking to me, I've learned a little about friend's and acquantance's finances over the years. Does everyone here only know people who are prodigious savers?
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It's a visible and ever-changing one, though, in a way that groceries (weekly list might change) or even a daily coffee (which tends to be pretty smooth) isnt. Every day, you drive past the price of gas, and notice when it changes. So it's an obvious sign of "prices are going up" in a way maybe everything else isn't.
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