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I'm super concerned about the affordability crisis that Americans across the country are dealing with.

I think here in Washington, we have a particularly high cost of living and a very regressive tax system, and people are really feeling hard times just to access groceries and health care costs.

She's not alone.

Affordability is the biggest issue for voters this year.

That, according to the hosts of The NPR Politics Podcast, at their recent live recording in Seattle, hosted by Cascade PBS.

Before the episode recording, that voter and others talked about how critical this issue is to them.

I work on housing here in Seattle, and so that is always front of mind, but that really just bleeds into affordability broadly.

People can't afford rent.

People can't afford gas, even though I don't drive, so I don't really care that much.

But people can't afford these things, and so, you know, neither party is really presenting a message that can actually deliver that right now.

I think the Republican messaging has two tracks and they're kind of contradictory.

One is, as you said, the president, who sometimes makes fun of the whole idea, says affordability is a Democratic hoax.

Or sometimes, he says that he's solved the problem of affordability because prices are coming down.

The economy is booming.

We're the hottest economy in the world.

The problem is that he's right on some metrics.

Stock market good, sometimes, GDP good.

You can't eat GDP.

And the thing that matters most to voters are prices, not the rate of inflation, but prices.

And these are people, mostly middle class people.

They aren't poor.

They just are broke.

And they can't afford the things that make up a middle class lifestyle, and the Republican message is not addressing those concerns.

This is what I don't fully understand about the way President Trump has messaged on this, really the last two years, is I felt like coming out of the 2024 election, the big takeaway from how President Biden talked about the economy and about affordability was you can't just tell voters everything's okay.

And that's why I think I always go back to, at the beginning of the Iran War, when President Trump, what did he say?

I'm not thinking about Americans' financial situations at all, or something along those lines.

That was like, that was shocking to hear.

But essentially what he was saying is, when I'm thinking about the war, I'm not worried about how much things cost.

But Americans are thinking about the war, and they are thinking about how much things cost, and they are very unhappy.

Well, and it's a very short amount of time that a lot of these Republicans have to be able to make that pivot towards the general election, right?

Because voting has already begun in many states, and so I think a lot of Republicans were very scared of saying something like, the Iran war needs to end during primary season.

And so now, they're trying to make that pivot while people are literally getting mail ballots in the mail, like, right now.

Also, I think during primary season, a lot of them believed the war was going to end.

I mean, President Trump said it's going to end in six weeks.

A lot of people, including voters, believed that.

Then, there were these sort of fits and starts of ceasefires and talks, and, you know, every other day he was saying, they want to talk really badly.

They want a deal.

This is going to end.

And I think that a lot of people sort of put their politics on hold, waiting to see if it would end.

But now, the president is saying he doesn't expect it to end before the midterms.

But now, the antipathy to the war has become bipartisan.

More Republicans are supportive of it, but what we're seeing is a real convergence on all these economic populist issues, whether it's tariffs, the war in Iran, higher prices.

There's really a convergence between left and right on this.

And I think that's something to watch.

To watch the rest of the recording of The NPR Politics Podcast and hear what local voters told us they cared about most, go to CascadePBS.org.

I'm Paris Jackson.

Thanks for watching The Newsfeed.