have not kept pace<\/a> with rising expenses in recent years.\n <\/p>\n\n Prices are up 6.8% since December 2024. Average hourly pay is up 5.9%. That gap is the whole story in two numbers, and it\u2019s why \u201cthe economy is improving\u201d lands like an insult.\n <\/p>\n
\n A 20-something in Atlanta, Kay Jones, summed up her friends\u2019 finances for me in four words: \u201cWe\u2019re in a recession.\u201d By every official measure, we\u2019re not. She wasn\u2019t describing a definition. She was describing a feeling, and that feeling is what shows up in the polls.\n <\/p>\n
\n No single catastrophe wiped out the people I met. It was the grind: housing, insurance, food, childcare, electricity, all of it climbing, none of it optional. That left them one surprise away from crisis: a $70 tire, a $400 vet bill, an $1,100 utility bill due Monday, a dead battery in a snowstorm.\n <\/p>\n
\n What I wasn\u2019t prepared for was how many of them had already, quietly, worked out what came next. And how often the answer was the car.\n <\/p>\n
\n Phebie keeps her car insurance paid before almost anything else. \u201cJust in case I need to sleep in it,\u201d she told me, \u201cand I pray that that never happens.\u201d I asked her to explain. She said she knows plenty of people who already do, and \u201cyou won\u2019t know that they\u2019re sleeping in their car until they tell you.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n At a free clinic in Tampa, I sat down next to a 64-year-old cancer survivor named Elen Trosino, and when I asked how long she\u2019d been living in her car, she said, \u201cUh, like a week now.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n In Rocky Mount, North Carolina, Sheila Scarborough, a veteran on a fixed income, slept in hers most nights for seven weeks this summer after the city cut her power. On the Outer Banks, a tour guide named Stu Laird lived in his truck until the battery died in a January storm and he ended up with frostbite, three hospital stays and a broken hip.\n <\/p>\n
\n They differ in age, race, region and politics. Every one of them landed on the same contingency plan, alone. I\u2019ve covered this stuff for nearly two decades, and I can\u2019t find that safety net in any government data series. For millions of Americans, it\u2019s a depreciating asset with a back seat.\n <\/p>\n
\n This one still gets under my skin.\n <\/p>\n
\n In every city, people facing forces that took decades to build \u2013 predatory lending, a childcare market that runs on poverty wages, a state that refused to expand Medicaid, a war that sent diesel past $6 \u2013 looked at the damage and assumed they were the problem.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cI didn\u2019t make the right decisions,\u201d Jolene told me. Phebie said if her generation had known better, they would have done better. Corey Goodhue, an Iowa corn and soybean farmer staring at his over-budget diesel line, told me, \u201cEither I did it wrong or inflation got me. The buck has to stop at this desk.\u201d A Tampa woman who spent 35 years getting other people onto food stamps and Medicaid, now uninsured herself, said, \u201cI can counsel anybody, I can\u2019t counsel myself.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n I\u2019d smile at first, because it sounded absurd and I assumed each was delivering a knowing quip. Then I\u2019d realize how much they meant it, and, to be candid, I\u2019d get pissed. When a system breaks quietly enough, the people it breaks blame themselves.\n <\/p>\n
\n But self-blame doesn\u2019t stay self-blame forever. Jolene said it best near the end of our conversation: \u201cI\u2019m kind of questioning why more people aren\u2019t mad.\u201d They are now. More than three-quarters of Americans say they\u2019re dissatisfied or angry about the direction of the country, and 37% call themselves flat-out angry.\n <\/p>\n
\n The anxiety I heard wasn\u2019t only about this month\u2019s bills. It was about who gets to stay.\n <\/p>\n
\n Greg and Audrey Dunn paid $114,000 in daycare in a single year for three kids in suburban Boston. \u201cEven if we wanted a fourth kid,\u201d Greg said, \u201cwe could never afford a fourth.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n On the Outer Banks, business owner Chris Marik buys houses just to keep his staff and figures his three daughters will probably never be able to live where they grew up. \u201cIf I play by the rules, pay my taxes and do this, it should work out,\u201d he said. \u201cOn paper, it\u2019s never gonna work out.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n In Atlanta, Mayra Martinez watched her immigrant parents get priced out of the neighborhood they helped build. They \u201clost two homes,\u201d she said: the country they left, and the community they made here. In Iowa, a young farmer explained that under current tax rules, it makes more sense for an older relative to die holding the land than to sell it to him.\n <\/p>\n
\n And Jolene, who never had generational wealth to inherit, is determined that her son will. \u201cIf I\u2019m having trouble and struggling at 42,\u201d she asked me, \u201chow do I expect my gonna-be-18-year-old to get a place?\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n That\u2019s why voters under 35 are among the most pessimistic in the country: 84% rate the economy poorly. It isn\u2019t a mood. It\u2019s math about their own futures.\n <\/p>\n
\n As I sat at kitchen tables and personal offices walking line-by-line through childcare invoices, utility bills and budget spreadsheets, I often caught myself marveling at the willingness of so many to be so transparent about their personal financial pressure points and struggles. Part of it, I came to believe, was that nobody else had asked.\n <\/p>\n
\n Sheila said it outright. \u201cThey\u2019re not listening,\u201d she told me. \u201cWe are trying, as citizens, trying to tell you what\u2019s going on, but nobody\u2019s listening.\u201d When I asked Phebie whether policymakers understand what she\u2019s going through, she said one word, \u201cNo.\u201d Then: \u201cBecause they don\u2019t have the struggle.\u201d And when the campaign calls came while Sheila\u2019s power was off, she had a message for them: \u201cUntil you help get my lights on, don\u2019t ask me about voting for nobody.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n That\u2019s what makes this election so hard to read. The economy and cost of living lead every other issue, at 43%. But 29% say neither party would do a better job on it. And among voters who aren\u2019t highly motivated to show up, 51% call the economy their top issue, compared with 36% of the most motivated. The people most consumed by the cost of living are the least sure their vote changes anything.\n <\/p>\n
\n Here\u2019s what stays with me after more than 60 hours of interviews with more than four dozen people over the course of the last six months. None of the people who let me into their homes \u2013 who sat with me at their kitchen tables, put out a chair and plate for me at their family dinners, took me to their most personal thoughts, places and financial information \u2013 asked for much.\n <\/p>\n
\n Not a bailout or a handout, just a floor that holds: rent that doesn\u2019t double, a utility bill that\u2019s right, a shot at the same starter home their parents got, a fair chance for their kids to stay. They did the math themselves, often more precisely than the people sending them mailers. Then they blamed themselves, then they got angry, and now they\u2019re deciding whether showing up is worth it.\n <\/p>\n
\n That\u2019s what\u2019s really at stake on November 3.\n <\/p>\n
\n I came home from these trips heartbroken more often than I\u2019d like to admit, but never cynical. Phebie still goes to the beach because it\u2019s free. Sheila stood up at a city council meeting for the first time in her life. Corey still calls his optimism \u201cmental illness\u201d and gets up for harvest anyway.\n <\/p>\n
\n They\u2019re holding up their end. In a few days, they\u2019ll tell us whether they think anyone else is.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"From Cleveland to the Outer Banks, the cost-of-living crisis that will decide the midterms, in the words of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":902216,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[28,101],"class_list":["post-902215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=902215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902215\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/902216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=902215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=902215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=902215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}