RISING INFLATION ALARMS DEMOCRATS
Steeper prices for Thanksgiving, gas at top of voters’ minds
Samantha Martin, a single mother shopping ahead of Thanksgiving, lamented how rising gas and grocery prices have eaten away at the raise she got this year as a manager at McDonald’s.
Gas “is crazy out of hand,” Martin said as she returned a shopping cart at an Aldi in Auburn Hills, a Detroit suburb, to collect a 25cent deposit.
Her most recent fill-up was $3.59 a gallon, about $1 more than the price in the spring. Her raise, to $16 an hour from $14, was “pretty good, but it’s still really hard to manage,” Martin said. “I got a raise just to have the gas go up, and that’s what my raise went to.”
Martin, 35, a political independent, doesn’t blame either party for inflation, but in a season of discontent, her disapproval fell more heavily on Democrats who run Washington. She voted for President Joe Biden but is disappointed with him and his party. “I think I would probably give somebody else a shot,” she said.
As Americans go on the road this week to travel for family gatherings, the higher costs of driving and one of the most expensive meals of the year have alarmed Democrats, who fear that inflation may upend their electoral prospects in the midterms. Republicans are increasingly confident that a rising cost of living will be the most salient factor in delivering a red
wave in 2022.
Democrats’ passage in quick succession of the $1 trillion infrastructure law and, in the House, of a $2.2 trillion social safety net and climate bill, promise oncein-a-generation investments that Democratic candidates plan to run on next year, with many of the policies in the bills broadly popular.
But, despite rising wages and falling unemployment, Democrats are also in danger of being swept aside in a hostile political environment
shaped in large part by the highest inflation in 30 years, which has defied early predictions that it would be short-lived as the country pulled out of the pandemic.
Rep. Elissa Slotkin, DMich., in a vulnerable House district, wrote to Biden this past week that inflation was the most pressing concern of her constituents. A former CIA analyst in Iraq, she urged the president to pressure Saudi Arabia to increase oil output.
Slotkin, who won her seat in the midterm wave of 2018,
is one of two Michigan Democrats in highly competitive districts that include the Detroit suburbs. In the Donald Trump years, Democrats had mixed results in the populous region, advancing in white-collar communities but losing ground with their traditional union supporters.
In an interview, Slotkin said that during a recent visit home, she heard constantly about the high costs of gas and groceries, and experienced them herself. “I buy groceries; I drive a ton,”
she said. “Thanksgiving week is going to be more expensive by a long shot than last Thanksgiving.”
In interviews with voters in suburban Detroit, including from Slotkin’s district and that of the second vulnerable Democrat, Rep. Haley Stevens, residents almost universally acknowledged the pain of rising prices on their budgets. But it was unclear, from their accounts, that Democrats would suffer politically. Most voters ascribed blame according to their party leanings — as they do on almost all issues in an era of hyperpolarization.
Margie Kulaga of Hazel Park, a Trump voter in 2020, said she paid 49 cents a pound, up from 33 cents a pound last year, for a 23pound turkey that she had just bought from a Kroger. Prices for meat and eggs have risen by 11.9 percent in the Midwest from a year ago, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“I blame Biden, his whole administration,’’ Kulaga, 55, said. “I never used to cut coupons, but now I do.”
On the other hand, Gloria Bailey, 63, a special-education teacher who lives in the suburb of Redford, is a Biden supporter who said rising costs should not be laid at his doorstep.
“The coronavirus has affected a lot of shipments and deliveries and crops and drivers who bring the food to market,” she said.
Consumer prices in Michigan and the Midwest rose by 6.6 percent in October, more than the national average, compared with a year ago.
The causes are the same as what drives the national spike, the steepest in 31 years, economists say — high demand for goods by consumers spending again after the pandemic lockdown and a snarled global supply chain. Gas prices are high partly because of a choke on production by OPEC.
In the meantime, Americans’ appraisal of Biden is crumbling. In a Quinnipiac poll released this past week, only 34 percent of Americans approved of the president’s handling of the economy.