Most voters see Congress as out of touch on spending despite midterm affordability pitch

An overwhelming majority of voters believe current members of Congress are out of touch with their constituents’ monthly spending habits, even as both parties make affordability a central pitch to key voting blocs.

An exclusive NewsNation/Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ) poll released Tuesday found that 86 percent of respondents believed their current congressmember or senator couldn’t accurately guess what they spend in a month, with 55 percent saying they thought lawmakers would guess too low while the other 31 percent expected lawmakers to guess too high.

Only 14 percent said they believed their lawmakers understood their monthly spending — underscoring the troubles Republicans face as the party in power as the Trump administration looks to quickly ameliorate inflation and cost of living issues before Election Day.

“When you ask [people] how they’re feeling about the economy, they don’t feel like things are getting better,” Geoffrey Skelley, DDHQ’s chief elections analyst, told The Hill.

“They feel like things are getting worse, and considering [President] Trump was elected … in large part, to address economic challenges, I think that is also not helping the GOP,” he noted.

The full results of the poll will be discussed Tuesday night on “Decision Desk 2026 Have Your Say: A NewsNation Town Hall” hosted by NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo.

Rahm Emanuel, former White House chief of staff; Stephen A. Smith, broadcaster and commentator; and Steve Bannon, former Trump strategist, will discuss what they see in the numbers during the Cuomo Town Hall.

Before voters elected him to the presidency for a second time, Trump vowed to lower prices after annual inflation spiked to a 40-year high in 2022.

But inflation, as measured by the consumer price index, increased from 3 percent in January 2025 to 3.4 percent in August of this year. The Iran war and the president’s ongoing tariff fight with Canada have put upward pressure on prices, as has the artificial intelligence build-out .

“The main thing you’re engaged with politically is the fact that my gas price is over $4 now at the gas pump, and … that’s going to breed frustration with the party in power, and the buck stops with the Republicans this time around,” Skelley told The Hill.

He added, “It’s about Trump in part, but it’s also about just certain political realities that the presidential party has always struggled to deal with, especially [when] people didn’t feel like things were going well.”

Despite persistent inflation , Americans are still spending. In September, credit and debit card spending per household was up 6.2 percent, according to the Bank of America Institute’s monthly survey.

Lower income households and the top 5 percent of households saw the fastest spending growth, at 5.5 percent and 5.9 percent, respectively.

But the survey found that spending outpaced wages last month, with lower-income wage growth falling from 4.7 percent in August to 4.5 percent in September.

Trump initially dismissed Americans’ concerns about affordability last year and has blasted Democratic lawmakers and candidates as “communists” on the campaign trail.

“If the Democrats win, you will have an economic depression the equivalent of 1929,” Trump said Monday at a rally in Ohio. “Our country’s going to go to hell. Your 401(k)s are going to be worthless.”

But the president has still appealed to voters’ pocketbooks ahead of the midterms, promising to send every American adult a $5,000 dividend if Republicans maintain control of Congress.

Trump reiterated that pledge Monday, telling rally attendees his administration can tap into money it has collected via tariffs to fund the dividends .

“If the Republicans win, you will each have $5,000 in your pocket and economic success for our country the likes of which we have never seen before,” the president said.

Trump’s pre-midterms economic agenda is not confined to promising $5,000 checks, either.

The Treasury Department has started sending $500 checks to nearly 1 million Americans who, according to the department, were overcharged for their federal marketplace health insurance.

Roughly 20 million Medicare recipients will also receive an extra $90 this month from the Social Security Administration — money intended to assist enrollees pay for their Part B premiums.

On the food and energy fronts, Trump has recently announced an oil deal with Venezuela , reached an agreement for Russia to supply the American marketplace with diesel fuel and slashed tariffs on beef imports from Argentina and Brazil.

Yet, some Republicans are unsure that those moves will be enough to change the economic environment weeks out from the election.

“They have to be perceived by voters as being real and tangible, that these will likely happen,” explained GOP strategist Ron Bonjean.

“It doesn’t feel like it’s penetrated yet to that level,” he added.

The unfavorable economic environment bodes poorly for the GOP in the midterms, giving Democrats a chance to take control of both chambers of Congress for the final two years of Trump’s term.

The NewsNation/DDHQ survey found Democrats leading Republicans with 49 percent support to the GOP’s 42 percent on a generic congressional ballot. Democrats’ edge is just inside the question’s margin of error.

More than half of respondents also said they are voting to “oppose” Trump and his policies, while just a little more than a quarter said their support for the president is motivating them to cast a ballot.

And when the pollsters asked respondents what the country’s most urgent issues are, inflation ranked first at 28 percent, followed by jobs and the economy at 20 percent and immigration at 12 percent.

“Republicans have spent the last year and a half driving up prices while callously dismissing the economic pain Americans are feeling,” a spokesperson for Senate Democrats’ campaign arm said in a statement. “In November, voters will make sure that Republicans are the ones who pay the price at the ballot box.”

Still, while the recent polling points to bad signs for Republicans, Bonjean says the dissonance between voters and lawmakers ultimately hurts both parties.

“When an overwhelming majority of Americans believe their elected representatives do not understand what they spend every month, it’s a stunning disconnect,” Bonjean said.

“Until Washington closes that gap, economic trust is going to remain difficult to rebuild because it’s really earned … at the kitchen tables when families think that the politicians they’ve elected understand what they’re going through,” he added.

The NewsNation/DDHQ poll was conducted by AI research platform TrueDot.ai from Oct. 5-9, with 974 likely 2026 national voters surveyed. The margin of error for the full survey is 3.2 percentage points.