LaQuitta Brown sees her salary eaten up every month by groceries, rent and utilities. The 45-year-old Detroit resident, who works at a nursing home, says she and her husband are getting by on double their incomes, but her credit card debt has increased.
Inflation has taken its toll in recent years.
“I used to have a real plan, a budget,” she said in a telephone interview. Now, she said, it’s hard to predict how much they will spend on food. “You have to make a sacrifice here, you have to make a sacrifice there. It depends on what’s for sale.”
Brown is one of millions of swing-state voters for whom the economy is top of mind in Tuesday’s elections. She supports Vice President Kamala Harris, who has made child care and elder care a pillar of her message: Brown has children with special needs and cares for her elderly father, who suffers from dementia.
But economic pessimism — even as inflation has eased and unemployment has remained low — could also be a boon for former President Donald Trump, who has heavily criticized the Biden-Harris administration after years of price increases.
A POLITICO analysis of data in four major cities in key swing states — Georgia, Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania — shows how economic conditions can weigh on residents’ minds as they head to the voting booths. Survey data from Atlanta, Detroit and Philadelphia show that residents have had a harder time meeting their basic needs than the national average.
Prices are rising faster in Detroit and Philadelphia than nationally. And Atlanta, Phoenix and Detroit have all seen the cost of living rise more than the average for U.S. cities since the start of Joe Biden’s presidency.
Brown isn’t alone: More than 38 percent of Detroit households had trouble paying their usual expenses last week, as of September.
Although wage growth has outpaced prices in recent years, costs have exceeded revenues in all four cities over the course of Biden’s presidency. And poorer Americans in particular have borne the brunt of high inflation, which could also play a role in voters’ attitudes.
Joanne Hsu, who leads the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment research, said lower-income Americans consistently expect more inflation than those with higher incomes. And “they have seen less of a recovery in sentiment than their higher-income counterparts since the June 2022 low,” she added.
A particularly painful element of inflation has been the housing market, where prices have risen to unattainable levels for many potential home buyers and rents have risen by more than 20 percent in less than four years. In Atlanta and Phoenix, that trend is particularly acute: Most renters spend at least 30 percent of their income on housing.
“The dwindling supply of low-cost housing only exacerbates costs,” according to a report from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. “In 2022, only 7.2 million units had contract rents below $600 – the maximum amount affordable to the 26 percent of renters with annual incomes below $24,000. This represents a loss of 2.1 million units since 2012, adjusted for inflation.”
More recently, rental growth has slowed dramatically, in part because many new homes have been built in cities like Phoenix, where rents have actually fallen 2.9 percent year over year, according to Apartment List.
Indeed, that is one of the factors that has helped inflation decline, and it is almost back to the level of the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target. In addition to these trends, the Conference Board reported in October that consumers have become more optimistic about both the economic outlook and future employment prospects.
Now it’s time to see how this all translates at the ballot box.
