Democrats swept to victory in the midterms with a relentless focus on the cost of living for ordinary folks — but voters still think that even those winning candidates are nowhere near as focused on rising prices as they are themselves.
The voters who delivered Tuesday’s historic Democratic landslide say they were driven primarily by affordability, despite President Donald Trump’s attempts to wish it away as a “fake word” and a “hoax.” That goes for all kinds of people in Senate battleground states, according to exclusive polling provided to Crooked Media by the Searchlight Institute that sheds new light on what voters were really thinking when they delivered the biggest blue wave in a half-century.
“It may be impossible for a candidate to come off as too focused on costs,” says Charlotte Swasey, director of analytics at Searchlight, a center-left think tank based in Washington D.C. “It is really the absolute top thing voters are focused on.”
This intense focus on prices and inflation, though, is just one revealing new detail from a poll that asked voters in battleground states to explain themselves — in Texas, Michigan, Maine, Ohio, North Carolina and Iowa. (Findings from Alaska are pending the results from that state.)
Searchlight polled voters in the final two weeks before the election. The data were then re-weighted to match the election results, in order to more accurately represent voting behavior. That means these results are as close as we can get to representing the views of those who actually swung this election.
What were they thinking? Read on!
