A Sour Economic Mood Goes to the Polls: Prices, Tariffs and the Iran War Top the Ballot
The jobs are plentiful and growth is solid — and voters are grumpy anyway. Reuters reported Monday that high and rising prices, blamed on tariffs and the war, are the mood Tuesday's midterms will be decided in.
The economy voters can measure looks fine. The economy voters can feel does not — and the second one votes on Tuesday. On the eve of midterm elections that will decide whether President Donald Trump's Republican Party keeps control of Congress, voters' minds are on the economy, with high and rising prices a key issue and many blaming the president's policies, specifically tariffs and the Iran war, for nagging inflation, Reuters reported on Monday. 'In short, Americans are in a sour mood.'
The paradox is in the gauges, and they disagree with each other. The unemployment rate remains historically low, more people than ever are employed, overall economic growth is solid, and the artificial-intelligence investment boom had, until recently, been driving the stock market up and padding retirement accounts. One widely tracked measure, the Conference Board's, perked up in October; the University of Michigan's consumer sentiment index, over the same stretch, registered a near-record low. Brian Jacobsen, chief economic strategist at Annex Wealth Management, offered Reuters the reconciliation: the confidence index tracks the macroeconomy, while the sentiment index tracks how people experience their own finances.
The market's own mood has turned with the households'. A wave of corporate earnings from the likes of Amazon and Intel added to growing worries about the sustainability of the AI spending boom and sent indexes such as the Nasdaq Composite sharply lower. Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, warned in a mid-October note that a sharp reset in AI expectations could undermine corporate confidence, trigger a pullback in capital spending and weigh on GDP — just as higher oil prices, tariffs and tighter immigration restrictions push inflation higher, raising the risk of a stagflationary environment in which growth slows even as price pressures persist.
Trump is not on the ballot on November 3, but his economic record is the ballot's weather. Whether the sourness costs his party one chamber, two, or none is the question the six-things watch list cannot answer — but in New York City, where the grocery bill and the rent bill arrive in the same envelope, the desk notes the local form of the national fact: the polls open at 6 a.m. Tuesday, and the price of everything is on the voter's mind walking in.
