Elections Show Trump’s Edge on the Economy Slipping

A year ago, President Trump won the White House promising to fix the economy. On Tuesday, Republican losses delivered a reminder of the high political price that the party in power pays when voters are still feeling squeezed.

Mr. Trump himself was not on the ballot, and he never held rallies in either of the states where new governors were elected on Tuesday. But the president was still a central character in the campaigns, a mainstay of the Democrats’ advertising and their arguments on the stump.

Democratic victories in New Jersey and Virginia were built on promises to address the sky-high cost of living in those states while blaming Mr. Trump and his allies for all that ails those places. In New York City, the sudden rise of Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist with an ambitious agenda to lower the cost of living, put a punctuation mark on affordability as a political force in 2025.

The results on Tuesday came after a drumbeat of polls showing that Mr. Trump and the Republican Party have seen their longtime edge on management of the economy evaporate.

“Exactly one year ago we had that big beautiful victory, exactly one year,” Mr. Trump said on Wednesday at a breakfast with Republican senators at the White House. “And last night it was not expected to be a victory — it was very Democrat areas — but I don’t think it was good for Republicans.”

Mr. Trump’s own meandering focus on the economy has given plenty of fodder to Democrats. He tore down the East Wing for a new ballroom, lavishly remodeled the Lincoln bathroom, paved over the Rose Garden for a patio like the one at Mar-a-Lago and threw a “Great Gatsby”-esque Halloween party with the theme “a little party never killed nobody” during a government shutdown and on the eve of cuts to food assistance.

“Trump is indifferent to the pain American families are feeling,” said Representative Suzan DelBene of Washington, who is leading the campaign arm of House Democrats headed into the 2026 midterms.

Only 30 percent of voters believe Mr. Trump has lived up to their expectations for tackling inflation and the cost of living, according to a recent NBC News poll, his lowest mark for any issue asked. And a meager 27 percent of voters in a CNN poll in late October said Mr. Trump’s policies had improved the country’s economic conditions — less than half of those who thought he had made matters worse.

“Trump promised to lower costs on Day 1,” Ms. DelBene said. “It’s a big broken promise from the Republican Party.”

Abigail Spanberger, a Democratic former congresswoman, flipped the governorship of Virginia with a campaign highlighting the fallout for the state’s economy from Mr. Trump’s efforts to dismantle parts of the federal government. Mikie Sherrill, a four-term congresswoman, won with a platform that prominently included a Day 1 promise to declare a state of emergency on utility costs and freeze rates.

Both won by double digits.

The New Jersey race was especially revealing because the Republican nominee, Jack Ciattarelli, had tried to tap into the same frustration that voters have about the economic status quo — and direct that rage at Democrats who control the state government. But ads that had attacked Ms. Sherrill as “more of the same but worse” ultimately fell flat.

Kiersten Pels, a Republican National Committee spokeswoman, said that “these off-year races in deep-blue states aren’t predictors of 2026.” She insisted that voters still trusted Mr. Trump and that Democrats had gone “far left.”

And Mr. Mamdani contrasted his own economic focus with the president’s wandering eye on the topic, at times saying that Mr. Trump had won on three promises in 2024 — to punish his enemies, do mass deportations and ease the cost of living — but only followed through on the first two.

Robert Blizzard, a Republican pollster, warned his party not to dismiss Mr. Mamdani and his “laserlike focus on” affordability even as Republican strategists were eager to make the 34-year-old democratic socialist the next face of the Democratic Party.

“Don’t just chalk up a Mamdani win to a woke candidate winning a woke city,” Mr. Blizzard said. “This is the wake-up call for policymakers on both sides of the aisle about the importance of focusing your campaigns on cost and affordability.”

In Washington, congressional Democrats have opened a front in the affordability wars through a government shutdown that is now the longest in American history. Senate Democrats are so far refusing to vote to reopen the government unless Republicans and Mr. Trump agree to address health care costs that are rising as federal subsidies lapse.

But the political dynamics at play on Tuesday were simple and familiar.

Voters are unhappy about the economy and are starting to blame Republicans instead of Democrats.

In some ways, Mr. Trump is in the unenviable position that Democrats were in a year ago, urging voters not to believe their own eyes — or wallets — when it comes to the economy.

“We have no inflation,” Mr. Trump insisted on “60 Minutes” on Sunday. (There is inflation.)

“Our groceries are down,” he said. (Grocery prices are up.)

“No, we’re in great shape,” Mr. Trump pushed back at another point in the interview. “This country is in great shape. We’re ready to really rock.”

Polls show voters feel otherwise.

“People aren’t dummy,” Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, said in an interview. “They know prices aren’t going down.”

This doesn’t mean voters suddenly trust Democrats — the party’s approval stood at 29 percent in the recent CNN survey. But it does mean that Republicans have lost the benefit of the doubt.

Just two years ago, in September 2023, voters gave Republicans a roughly 20-percentage-point edge on the economy in an NBC poll. Now, Democrats and Republicans are statistically tied.

Mr. Trump in particular has been trusted by voters on economic matters ever since he entered the political scene, with a reputation built on a decade of hosting the popular television show “The Apprentice” and the image of a decisive businessman.

Democrats have been seeking to chip away at the gains that Mr. Trump made among working-class voters in 2024 ever since he was sworn in surrounded by some of the world’s richest men: Elon Musk of Tesla, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta and Sundar Pichai of Google among them.

“Our focus on an economic agenda is — it’s certainly deliberate,” Ken Martin, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said in an interview.

Republicans are hardly ceding the affordability fight. In an election eve rally by phone, Mr. Trump had framed Mr. Ciattarelli as the “cost of living” candidate.

And in Washington, Mr. Trump certainly has an economic agenda.

He has pushed sweeping tariffs as a panacea for America’s economic troubles. While his sweeping fees on imports have not caused the market blowback that many economists had predicted, they do say that the tariffs are raising prices for American consumers. A Goldman Sachs report said consumers were bearing a majority of the costs last month.

Congressional Republicans also passed and Mr. Trump signed a sweeping domestic policy bill that slashed taxes and made cuts to Medicaid and other social programs.

But after polling showed that the legislation was unpopular with voters, Republicans not-so-subtly rebranded it from the One Big Beautiful Bill to the Working Families Tax Cut Act.