Add as a preferred source on GoogleU.S. Voters Cite Cost of Living as a Key 2026 Midterm Issue
The economy drew a slightly larger share, with 85% naming it one of the most important issues for their midterm vote.
An Oct. 8-12 poll of 1,119 adults found that 84% of voters named cost of living as one of the most important issues for their midterm vote, as September consumer prices rose 3.7% from a year earlier, not seasonally adjusted.
The economy was named by 85%, a slightly larger share, and 64% named the Iran war. The poll’s margin of sampling error was plus or minus 3.9 percentage points. It measured which issues voters considered important, not what drove individual votes.
The consumer price index rose 0.6% from August to September on a seasonally adjusted basis. The all-items index stood 31.1% above its December 2019 level, a comparison spanning more than six years.
In a Nov. 6 essay, Connor O’Keeffe argued that inflation drove recent electoral swings and that neither party will address inflation’s monetary causes. “There’s a very clear explanation for the political whiplash we’ve been experiencing in these last few elections: inflation,” he wrote.
Seasonally adjusted monthly readings of M2, a broad money measure that includes M1, small-denomination time deposits and retail money market funds, rose from $15.410 trillion in January 2020 to $21.666 trillion in June 2022. That was an increase of $6.256 trillion across the period.
The M2 readings and CPI figures describe different measures over different time spans. Neither establishes what caused consumer prices to rise, and the poll does not show how inflation affected any individual vote.