If you want to see why President Donald Trump is visiting Pennsylvania to talk about affordability, and why he is planning rallies on the topic around the country in coming weeks, just look at the simple question asked in the new Harvard CAPS Harris poll: "What would you say are the most important issues facing the country today?"
The question was open-ended, and respondents could name more than one issue. The top concern, named by 36% of those surveyed, was price increases, inflation, and affordability. The No. 2 issue, named by 29%, was the economy and jobs. Put them together, and economic issues were by far the most important issue named by the voters in the poll.
After that came a number of issues that rank high on the importance scale, but not as high as the economy: health care, immigration, corruption, crime and drugs, federal budget deficits, terrorism and national security, taxes, guns, and a few more.
Those are the major concerns. At the bottom of the list, that is, those issues named by fewer than five percent of respondents, were: foreign policy at four percent; political correctness and cancel culture at four percent; the Israel-Hamas-Iran conflict at four percent; defense at three percent; policing at three percent; January 6th at three percent; antisemitism at two percent; and other, miscellaneous topics.
It is, of course, the world's least surprising news that the economy and affordability are at the top of voters' concerns. The reason Trump is traveling to Pennsylvania and beyond to talk about affordability is that we are entering an election year, and a significant number of voters, including some Trump supporters, believe the president has spent too much time paying attention to topics at the bottom of the voters' list -- namely foreign policy -- and not enough time on the topic at the top of the list.
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Americans elected Trump last year, in part, because former President Joe Biden had made such a mess of the economy. Today, Trump points out, correctly, that he is dealing with the hangover of the inflation of the Biden years. "We're bringing prices way down," Trump said on Monday. "You can call it 'affordability' or anything you want -- but the Democrats caused the affordability problem, and we're the ones that are fixing it."
But Trump is stuck dealing with a particularly sticky problem, explained by this simple statement: When inflation is going down, prices are still going up. Under Biden, inflation hit 9.1 percent, the worst in a generation. But when the rate of inflation goes down, as it has -- it's now three percent -- that means prices are still going up, just at a lower rate than during Biden's time in office.
In Biden's last year in office, he and other Democrats would often brag about inflation going down. That didn't sit well with voters who knew, through their own painful experiences, that prices were still rising. The way out of the mess was not to make misleading claims but to combine low inflation with rapidly increasing wages.
Trump is making real progress on that. "Wages are rising faster than prices -- this is so important," Fox Business' Larry Kudlow, a former Trump economic adviser, said this week. "Wage income from the latest numbers is plus 5.3 percent. Now, the core personal consumption deflator -- that's the Fed's inflation measure -- is 2.7 percent. That means working folks' take-home pay is now ahead of prices by 2.6 percent. And there's a lot more coming, with tax refunds next year and the One Big Beautiful Bill. ... In [Trump's] first year, wages are already clobbering prices, and that's the way it should be."
Still, it will take some time for wages to catch up with the cumulative effect of the Biden inflation. Plus, Trump's tariffs have raised some prices, although not nearly as much as predicted. With less than a year until the 2026 midterm elections, Trump will depend on the economic benefits that Kudlow predicted to actually become a reality.
Trump's economic program has always been pretty simple: Cut taxes, cut regulation, and make energy cheaper. The energy part, where prices can go down dramatically, has always been the key to his plan to bring down inflation. "Energy has come down incredibly," Trump told Politico in an interview this week. "When energy comes down, everything ... because it's so much bigger than any other subject. But energy has come down incredibly. ... When that happens, everything comes down."
So now Trump is preparing for 2026 with a new emphasis on affordability. Of course, he still has to deal with other issues; no president can focus on just one thing. But when voting is less than a year away, it's a very good idea to listen to the voters' concerns.
This content originally appeared on the Washington Examiner at washingtonexaminer.com/daily-memo/3912552/trump-job-stay-focused-economy/.
Byron York is chief political correspondent for The Washington Examiner. Email him at byork@washingtonexaminer.com. For a deeper dive into many of the topics Byron covers, listen to his podcast, The Byron York Show, available on the Ricochet Audio Network at ricochet.com/series/byron-york-show and everywhere else podcasts are found.
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump’s leadership and bold policies, America’s economy is back on track.
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