It’s affordability, stupid.
The issue that propelled Republicans into the White House, the Senate and the House in the 2024 election effectively stiff-armed the GOP at the polls a year later.
Voters sent a message to Republicans on Nov. 4: We voted for you last year to fix the economy. You did not understand the assignment.
Of the three most prominent races in the 2025 elections, two of the Democratic winners moved to the center and the third just managed to not be Andrew Cuomo.
In New Jersey, energy prices are up 20%. In Virginia, the two largest metro areas are hit disproportionately hard by the Federal government shutdown. And New York City, always an expensive place to live, is becoming impossible. Voters in all three locations voted with their wallets.
The most attention-grabbing race was for mayor of New York City. The winner, Zohran Mamdani, is 34, Muslim, and a communist democratic socialist. He outperformed his opponents by large margins with voters under 45. The focus of his campaign: affordability. New York City, depending on the index, is either the first or second most expensive city in which to live in the U.S.
He campaigned on freezing rents on rent-controlled rental units; free universal childcare; free bus fare; and city-owned and operated grocery stores with no taxes and lower prices because of lack of markup (or “price gouging” in his terms).
It’s not clear whatsoever that New York City can afford this. The city has a significant debt burden and anticipated budget shortfalls. Moreover, according to The Wall Street Journal’s election night data, the only one of Mamdani’s proposals that won him significant votes was freezing rent. He lost families with children by six points to Cuomo and only carried bus riders by a tiny margin.
Context: New York City was not going to have a Republican mayor. Mamdani won because he ran a strategic face-to-face and social media campaign against extremely poor opponents.
Cuomo was forced to resign as governor of New York after a sexual harassment scandal (Apparently, he needed a job, and mayor is almost as good as governor.). After losing the Democratic primary to Mamdani, he entered the race as an independent and ran a lousy and expensive campaign with huge standard TV buys, largely irrelevant in the age of TikTok. The Republican in the race, Curtis Sliwa, is the founder of the Guardian Angels and is otherwise known for having fostered up to 16 cats at a time in his studio apartment.
Both the New Jersey and Virginia governor’s races were somewhat tame in comparison. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, both sitting Democratic congresswomen, beat their GOP opponents by comfortable double-digit margins. Sherrill is a former Navy helicopter pilot, Spanberger a former CIA officer. They both ran moderate campaigns focused on the cost of living and generally avoided trashing the President.
In New Jersey and Virginia, the state legislatures also picked up Democratic seats for supermajorities. Virginia voters even gave the nod to a Democrat attorney general candidate who should have been toxic for social media comments where he mused about murdering a Republican politician.
(I think voters have largely become numb to their politicians saying or posting horrible things. In a world where the American head of state posts an AI-generated image of himself in a fighter jet dropping human excrement over Chicago, are we offended by anything anymore?)
This early round of midterms offers key lessons for both parties. Democrats need to understand that they can’t rest on three high-visibility races. They need better candidates and better stories than what they have been giving the last couple of cycles.
Two very prominent MAGA bro-dudes – Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and his fellow Ohioan Vice President J.D. Vance – quickly picked up on the affordability theme just after the election and are warning their colleagues that Republicans have to get on board.
The GOP will need more than words and redistricting to save the 2026 elections. Voters will need to see signs of an economic turnaround. Young voters and independents are very critical of this administration and of this Congress. Food prices have increased more than 40 percent over the last decade (more than 56 percent in New York City) and inflation is still stubbornly stuck at 3%. Layoffs surged upward in October in response to the government shutdown.
Because so much of what comes out of our elected leaders’ mouths or from their screens is utter swill, voters look to their actions. Shutting the government for five-going-on-six weeks sends a message (note: the shutdown has now lasted so long that the clean continuing resolution will have to likely be scrapped as it only funded the government through Nov. 21). The administration having to be taken to court to fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), delaying food aid to our most vulnerable families and children, sends a message. Canceling flights at our 40 busiest airports because air traffic controllers haven’t gotten a paycheck since Sept. 30 but have been forced to work anyway sends a message.
Against this backdrop, voters also notice the destruction of the East Wing of the White House to begin the construction of a $300 million privately-funded ballroom. It’s not lost on us when the ballroom donor list includes companies with a total $279 billion in defense contracts.
You know, people are tense right now. And I have gotten some tense emails and some snippy elevator chats over what people who don’t know me perceive to be my beliefs. Here’s what I believe: the overwhelming majority of Americans want the same thing. It can be summed up easily in our Declaration of Independence: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. It seems harder and harder to be left to ourselves to pursue our business and support our households and individual passions. And we all are feeling that.
I don’t believe for a minute that we are seeing a Blue Wave and that Democrats have a smooth path to the 2026 midterms. The Democratic Party lacks unity and a core message and has not embraced influencer operations nearly to the level the GOP has. Democrats have been given a gift by terrible policy decisions; there is time to exploit this if the GOP chooses not to listen to Vance and Ramaswamy.
It’s funny how people react to my leaving the Republican Party and becoming an independent. My not being a Republican does not mean that I am a Democrat. Far from it, actually. If I wanted to vote for Democrats and be a Democrat, I’d join the Democratic Party. I do not want to be a Democrat.
I am, at heart, a conservative. I support free trade, fiscal responsibility, robust national defense and government institutions that support individual exceptionalism. I’m a Catholic, a Navy veteran, a business owner and job creator, and I own firearms.
The Republican Party, standing for tariffs, whose members of Congress vote to increase the Federal debt every year, and whose President is letting down our traditional international allies and trampling on individual freedoms, no longer reflects my values. So, I left. I vote for Republicans. I vote for Democrats. I vote for the person who best represents my values.
It’s obvious that this past Election Day, hundreds of thousands of other Americans did the same thing.
Merritt Hamilton Allen is a PR executive and former Navy officer. She appeared regularly as a panelist on NM PBS and is a frequent guest on News Radio KKOB. A Republican for 36 years, she became an independent upon reading the 2024 Republican platform. She lives amicably with her Democratic husband north of I-40 where they run one head of dog, and one of cat. She can be reached at news.ind.merritt@gmail.com.
