Raw Story

Republicans are facing their next crisis after getting thrashed in elections last week — voters are seeing slow growth in their paychecks, making President Donald Trump's blindspot on affordability more startling and creating a larger problem for the GOP ahead of midterms.

Americans are feeling pessimistic over their economic futures and concerned over their own financial health, Politico reports Tuesday.

Economists also predict mass layoffs, climbing unemployment, a dip in job opportunities and hesitation among employers to hire new workers and potentially offer raises for current employees.

As wage growth has fallen and inflation rises, it's hitting lower- and middle-income families even harder since the beginning of 2025, according to the Bank of America Institute. These are the slowest rates of income growth seen since the early 2010s, when the economy was bouncing back from the Great Recession (2007-2009) and the unemployment rate was nearly double what it is now.

“We’re clearly going through a soft patch now,” Gary Schlossberg, an economist and global strategist for the Wells Fargo Investment Institute, told Politico. “Households are going to be feeling some pain. [And] if you’re focused on the trajectory of wage inflation, I think it will be slower next year.”

This presents a "serious risk to Republicans" and exposes the weak point the GOP will face in 2026 as they refine their approach and message to address economic woes for Americans.

And while Trump claims inflation is declining, voters don't agree. Since his second term, he is losing the historic advantage he previously had over Democrats, Politico reported.

Only 34% of voters approve of the president's handling of the economy, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll. This figure matches President Joe Biden's polling results during the end of his administration.

Although Trump's administration has argued he will shift his attention to the economy — even offering potential $2,000 checks for low and middle income Americans with tariff revenue — he's also attempting to lower drug prices and suggesting that 50-year mortgages could help reduce costs for people each month.

Tax cuts promised by the Trump administration could bring some relief, but it's expected that those cuts will help the wealthy and give them better purchasing power.

It still won't change that inflation is rising or how Trump's aggressive immigration crackdown could hit wage growth for lower-income jobs often done by immigrants, Recruitonomics Chief Economist Andrew Flowers told Politico.

The reality is that inflation is “worse today than it was at the start of the year, or a year ago,” Flowers argues.

Although President Donald Trump is confident in his redistricting battle designed to keep the Republican House majority, insiders say Republicans are fretting that last Tuesday's election results gave Democrats an opening to counterstrike, NBC reports.

While one anonymous Republican strategist tells NBC that “The president understands intuitively, in a way that other Republicans don’t … that Democrats are always assaulting us, always, and mostly much of the Republican Party never fights back."

“The redistricting fight is proof that they are not that way. So this is in his DNA in a way that is not in other Republicans’ DNA,” the strategist added.

Two other strategists described as close to the White House say they don't necessarily agree, telling NBC "there are growing concerns in the party that the political war is not going as planned — that the juice may not have been worth the squeeze and could, in a nightmare scenario, result in a net gain for Democrats."

"Misgivings" about Trump's strategy heightened after California voters overwhelmingly approved Governor Gavin Newsom's Prop. 50 plan to redraw the state’s congressional districts in a manner that Democrats hope will flip five House seats in their direction.

“For a few weeks now, he’s had the understanding that they were going to lose Prop 50,” a Republican operative close to the White House tells NBC, adding that Trump "has been planning to sue California over the ballot measure while believing it was a bad idea to get involved in the fight."

"The stakes couldn't be higher," NBC explains, noting that Trump's legislative agenda will be "imperiled by a Democratic takeover of the House," and "also his administration would surely face myriad investigations and he could be impeached for a third time."

“With a narrow majority heading into a midterm, they need more seats for a buffer in order to hold the House. If they can ultimately net five or six seats, then it will be the story of the midterms of success for Republicans,” a GOP strategist tells NBC. “If the whole thing here was to net one seat across the country, then it will not have been worth it.”

In the wake of "strong Democratic showings in predominantly Hispanic areas of Virginia and New Jersey," Erin Covey, a nonpartisan election analyst who is the House editor at The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, says there’s “uncertainty” as to whether Hispanic voters will show up for the GOP next year like they did for Trump in 2024, particularly in states like Texas.

“That does not bode well for Republicans banking on Hispanic voters to help them keep their majority next year — but it doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll see Republican incumbents who would be in safe seats suddenly look vulnerable all of a sudden,” she said.

Another anonymous Republican with close ties to the president agrees and is raising the red flags, especially on Texas.

“I think ‘concern’ is a fair way to say it," they tell NBC.

GOP consultant and data scientist John Eakin puts it more bluntly,

“Nobody wants to go against Trump in this district map because they fear him. They’ve pushed the envelope and it’s going to come back to bite them in the ass,” he said. "They’re high as a f—— kite off of 2024."

MAGA insider Laura Loomer suggested President Donald Trump was not to blame after he chose to meet with a former terrorist the day before Veterans Day.

On Monday, Trump welcomed Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa to the White House despite his past ties to terrorism. The Syrian leader had links to Al-Qaeda under the nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Golani, and he battled U.S. forces in Iraq before entering the war in Syria.

At one point, al-Sharaa had a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head and was eventually imprisoned by U.S. forces in Syria for several years.

Loomer blamed the meeting between him and Trump on "the people who work for President Trump."

"Sometimes I feel like some of the people who work for President Trump deliberately go out of their way to sabotage him," the Trump insider wrote Tuesday on X. "Who said: let's invite the ISIS terrorist to the White House for a photo op in the Oval the day before Veterans Day? How many US soldiers did Julani kill?"

Several of Loomer's followers accused her of holding Trump blameless.

"I think it's high time that people stop making excuses for Trump by blaming the people around him like he has no control whatsoever," one person replied to Loomer. "Just remember the guy sitting in Florida who everybody MAGA thought was not qualified to be president is doing far more conservative things than Trump ever thought of doing."

"I am a huge Trump supporter and voted for him 3 times. I hate feeling betrayed by what he's doing but I am," another commenter said. "He's imploding from within his own administration. It's his fault tho... He's his own worst enemy because his ego blinds his common sense."

A significant number of President Donald Trump’s supporters may have reached their “breaking point” as costs continue to climb, according to a new poll from Politico published Saturday.

The poll found that the “typical” Trump supporter would be willing to pay $65 more per month in taxes if it meant supporting the president’s agenda. After the Democratic sweep in this week’s elections, however, Politico’s Jessica Piper argued that Trump’s policies – which some critics have blamed for the rising costs of goods and energy – had officially gone too far for Trump voters.

“The POLITICO Poll results are a reminder that — while many of Trump’s supporters have a reputation for intense loyalty — they also have a breaking point,” Piper wrote. “And Tuesday’s election results suggest that despite Republican voters’ willingness to pay a literal price for Trump’s policies, the Trump agenda to date may have pushed voters too far.”

Trump’s tariff policy in particular has seen the cost of goods soar, with Americans bearing the cost of the tariffs by as much as 55%, NBC News reported. Energy prices have also soared, increasing twice as fast as inflation since the COVID-19 pandemic, largely due to the Trump administration’s war on clean energy, and in spite of Trump’s pledge to slash energy prices “by half within 12 months.”

The Democratic candidates that clenched victory this week all ran on the issue of affordability, signaling an appetite among voters for politicians pledging to lower cost-of-living expenses. The messaging proved so successful that Trump himself has launched a new push to target affordability, while decrying Democrats’ attempts to advocate for affordability a “con job.”

President Donald Trump has ordered senators to remain in Washington D.C. throughout the weekend to negotiate an end to the ongoing government shutdown. But negotiations — even among Republicans — have become fractious.

That's according to a Friday article in Politico, which reported that bipartisan talks in the Senate have appeared to sputter after an offer from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) was almost instantly rejected by Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) along with most of the Senate Republican Conference. That deal included a one-year extension of Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies that are due to expire at the end of 2025, in exchange for Democrats voting for the House of Representatives' continuing resolution that House Republicans passed in September.

Now, Politico reports that senators are once again at an impasse. Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) was not optimistic that his colleagues would be able to hammer out an agreement by the end of the weekend.

"What we have here is an intergalactic freak show," Kennedy said after leaving a closed-door meeting with the Senate Republican Conference. When asked what senators could accomplish this weekend, the Louisiana Republican said "nothing."

"We're going to be here for a long time," he said.

Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), whose bill to fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or food stamps) was blocked by Thune in October, was unmoved by Republicans' apparent inability to come together on a solution to end the shutdown.

"My adage is, put them in a barn and don’t let them out until they come up with a solution," he told Politico.

According to the outlet, senior members of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees have been assembling a three-bill package that would fund government agencies and programs for a full year, while bipartisan Senate negotiators are contemplating three separate bills to fund government agencies through next year. Senators are also pushing for legislation that would prevent Trump from making so-called "pocket rescissions," in which the president refuses to allow money appropriated by Congress to be spent. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) argued it was "insane" that Trump had yet to meet with Congressional leadership to iron out a deal.

"They refuse to engage," he said. "It’s killing the country."

Look, Zohran Mamdani is not the future of the Democratic Party.

I know this is true, because the same was said of Eric Adams. New York City’s outgoing mayor did not live up to his billing. Its incoming mayor (presumably) is almost certainly not going to live up to his. The reason isn’t because Mamdani will become as corrupt as Adams became (though who knows?). The reason is that New York is New York.

Yes, it’s the largest urban center in the country. Yes, its influence cannot be overstated. But what’s good, or bad, for New York isn’t necessarily what’s good, or bad, for America. It may no longer be entirely true that all politics is local, but most of politics still is.

Once you accept the truth of this, all other considerations of Mamdani and the rest of the Democratic Party seem rather dull, as he becomes just another politician in a constellation of politicians who figured out how to appeal to a winning majority in their respective constituencies.

Once you accept that a city isn’t a metaphor for a country, or for a national party, the talk about how he’s dividing Democrats looks kinda stupid. Yes, he calls himself a democratic socialist. So what? Is that going to work in a place like Virginia? Maybe, but probably not. If it did, someone would have tried it. Since no one has, there’s your answer.

Think of it this way. Donald Trump is from New York. His business is based there. He represents the city’s elites. But he’s never won there. Three straight campaigns made no difference. Is anyone going to seriously suggest that, in this context, as New York goes, so goes the country (or so goes the GOP)? No, because that would be stupid.

Yet somehow, seemingly no one thinks how stupid it is to ask if Mamdani is the future of the Democrats, because only the Democrats, never the Republicans, are subjected to that kind of questioning. The reason for this is rooted in the Democratic Party itself, among certain elites who want to prevent it from becoming a fully realized people’s party. And they do this, foremost, by accepting as true the premise of the lies told about the Democrats by Trump and the Republicans.

What lies? First, remember that the number of actual democratic socialists in the Democratic Party (I’m talking about people who choose to call themselves by that name) is vanishingly small. Only two have any kind of national profile. (They are US Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Sanders doesn’t really count. He’s technically an independent.)

This stone-cold fact means nothing to Donald Trump. All Democrats, all liberals, all progressives, all leftists, and all socialists, democratic and otherwise, are the name. They are radical Marxist anarchist communists or whatever word salad pops into his soupy brain. There are no enemies to his right. There is nothing but enemies to his left. Does he respect his enemies enough to speak truthfully about them?

No, he lies.

His lies are what certain elites inside the Democratic Party are paying the most attention to. They are not celebrating Mamdani’s success. They are not defending him on the merits. They are not standing on the truth. They are not even standing in solidarity. What they are most focused on is the lies Donald Trump tells, which are magnified by the right-wing media complex, which are echoed by the press corps.

And what they see is either a fight they believe can’t be won or an opportunity to shiv a competing faction within the Democratic Party. Either way requires accepting as true the lies told about their own people, thus making it seem perfectly reasonable to wonder if winning a major election in America’s biggest city is good for the Democrats.

(The answer: don’t be stupid. Of course, it is.)

That these certain elites would rather surrender to lies than fight them tells us their beef with Mamdani isn’t about ideology. (It’s not about whether “democratic socialism,” or any other school of thought, would be appealing to voters outside New York.) It’s about how Mamdani, but specifically lies about him, complicates messaging efforts in a media landscape already heavily coded in favor of Donald Trump, especially of his view of the Democrats, which is that they’re all communists.

Those who are worried about Mamdani’s impact on the Democrats also take for granted the assertion that voters rejected Kamala Harris on ideological grounds – that her policies were out of touch with voters whose main concern was good-paying jobs and lower inflation.

They are ignoring that Harris actually campaigned on so-called working-class issues and that few voters could hear her working-class messaging over the din of Trump’s lies about her. The crisis facing the Democrats is not one of ideology. It’s a crisis of information. Certain elites are pretending otherwise, because it’s better for them if they do.

Mamdani’s victory is a local matter. That is the lesson for certain elites inside the party. It’s also a lesson for their loudest critics.

Certain progressives, let’s call them, believe that Mamdani’s popularity comes from focusing on class (the cost of living in New York). They believe that by doing so, he transcended “identity politics” to amass a following sizable enough to defeat the Democratic establishment.

This overlooks the fact that the establishment, in the form of the DNC and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, are backing him. But more important is again the question of ideology. Certain elites think his will turn off voters outside New York. Certain progressive think it will turn them on. They believe a class-based ideology is the unifying force that working people across the country have needed. They just can’t see it, they say, because the establishment gets in the way.

But race and class can’t be easily disentangled, not in America. To many Americans, the idea of government of, by and for the people is a perversion of the “natural order.” It flattens the hierarchies of and within race and class. This belief is bone deep in many of us. It prevents lots of white Americans from being in solidarity with nonwhite Americans, even if they face similar grinding hardships.

Most of all, such thinking overlooks the basics. Many New Yorkers struggle to make ends meet. Housing is too high. Healthcare is too expensive. Food is too much. I trust Mamdani when he says he’s a democratic socialist. But I also trust that he’s not fool enough to believe that struggle is the same as class consciousness. He identified the problem. He asked voters to give him the power to try to solve it.

That’s not ideology.

That’s just good politics.