Voters Swap One Party for Another, Prices Still Rising

Inflation sits at 3.7%, up from 3% when Donald Trump took office, and average hourly pay has climbed to $38.00 as of October 2026. Those are the numbers the Washington Examiner laid out as Democrats won what Yuval Levin calls a massive midterm victory this month. Millions of people showed up to vote for relief. The prices they were angry about are still on the shelf.

Who Gets Crushed

Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) said the quiet part on CNN on Thursday. "People are hurting," he said. He added that the Democrats did "a much better job of acknowledging the economic pain that the American people are going through." Acknowledging it. Not fixing it. That's the whole prize on offer.

The labor numbers tell their own story. More than 7.5 million jobs are open in the U.S. this fall, but fewer people are choosing to work. Labor force participation was 63.4% in February 2020, 62.5% in December 2024 and 61.9% as of October 2026. Pay is up. Inflation hit a high of 9.1% in June 2022, four years ago, and it's still above the 2% target. People are running the numbers on their own lives and deciding the arrangement doesn't add up.

What They're Calling "Order"

The men at the top are busy with a different argument entirely. Trump insisted in a September post on Truth Social that "price increases throughout America were caused by Sleepy Joe Biden and the Biden Administration, not by 'TRUMP.'" Kennedy shot back that Trump "might not have fathered this child, but he's got to raise it." Vice President JD Vance, meanwhile, blamed the GOP's losses on the Iran war. Kennedy suggested voters' view of the economy was more to blame.

The finger-pointing is the product. Each faction names the other as the cause of pain that both administrations presided over. Fox News, for its part, ran a "Sound Off" item asking whether the man behind "The Art of the Deal" can pull off his greatest achievement: uniting the United States.

Levin, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, offered the establishment's most candid read. "The public roundly rejected Republicans but still has a very low opinion of Democrats," he wrote in The Free Press. Congressional Democrats won't have the numbers to routinely override presidential vetoes, he noted, and they didn't even run on any shared agenda. They aren't likely, he argued, to chart any aggressive new direction in governing over the next two years. Read that again. The winners have no shared plan, and the analyst expects none.

What Levin hopes for is a "renewal in the constitutional system" and political competition focused on "the median voter." The hierarchy gets a tune-up. The people who feel the pain get a coalition-building exercise.

What People Actually Did

The Washington Post's Hannah Knowles reported on the rank and file, and they're not waiting for a savior. MAGA voters, young and old, are soul-searching as they look to leaders outside the White House, cross over to Democrats or disengage from politics. In Columbus, Ohio, about a dozen members of Ohio State University College Republicans held their first meeting since the election. The group had grown restless even before the vote, the Post reported, tired of Trump, "his war and his handpicked candidates."

Some are leaving the party. Some are leaving politics. Their loyalty was spent on a machine that handed them a war and a price tag. The Post's headline says it plainly: "Trump's GOP was all they knew."

The numbers keep moving and the ballot keeps changing hands. The next two years are already scripted: two parties, one economy, and a public that has spent its hope twice in a row.