Democrats Just Won Big On Affordability. Here’s How to Govern on It.

Some immediate, noticeable solutions to cost-of-living problems.

Credit: istock/hermosawave

By Pat Garofalo, Director of State and Local Policy

Democrats triumphed across the country in Tuesday night’s elections. The headline victories, of course, are Zohran Mamdani’s win in the New York City mayoral race, alongside Virginia Rep. Abigail Spanberger winning her state’s gubernatorial race, and New Jersey Rep. Mikie Sherrill doing the same.

But the electoral sweep goes much deeper. Democrats flipped two Republican seats on the Georgia Public Service Commission, the state’s utilities regulator. They expanded their majorities in both the Virginia and New Jersey state legislatures. Jay Jones shrugged off a scandal to handily defeat Virginia’s incumbent attorney general. New York State Senator Sean Ryan, a labor champion, won the Buffalo mayoral race. Democrats held three seats on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. And they regained their majority in the Minnesota State Senate via a special election win.

Many of these races were unexpected blowouts, with Democrats outrunning their polling numbers, a contrast with years in which President Donald Trump is on the ballot.

A lot of text will be spilled this week as we attempt to extrapolate what these victories mean for the 2026 midterms and even the 2028 presidential election. Much of what’s said will be wrong, because off-year elections in places that are various shades of blue to purple have limited predictive value. No one today knows the economic or world events that could dramatically alter future elections.

But what’s undeniable is that the Democrats who won have a massive opportunity to implement the economic ideas they promoted during the campaigns. All of them, much like Trump before them, explicitly campaigned on lowering costs, pursuing what’s come to be called an “affordability” agenda. Many of them called out specific expenses – rent, utilities, health care – that they intend to lower. And they named the names of the corporations or power centers keeping those costs high, whether they are monopoly utilities, corporate landlords using rent-fixing software like RealPage, or health care industry middlemen.

For example, Sherrill has pledged to declare a state of emergency, freeze utility rates, and take on landlords who collude on rent prices. Spanberger proposed reining in pharmacy benefit managers and making data center operators “pay their own way” for their power needs. Mamdani relentlessly focused on costs, in everything from groceries to rent to street food. Jones’ campaign platform includes promises to crack down on monopoly utilities, deceptive junk fees, and price gouging, and to rein in consolidation in the health care industry. And obviously, Georgia’s PSC candidates were focused on the costs the state’s monopoly utilities are foisting onto Georgia families.

In fact, utility prices were the star of the night, policy-wise. And that makes sense. This year alone, natural gas and electricity bills have risen by 13.8 and 6.2 percent, respectively, and monopoly utilities have requested a record-setting $29 billion in rate hikes. The nation’s average electricity rate today is 40 percent higher than it was in 2019, as regulators have consistently blessed outsized utility profits. Voters in Gainesville, Florida, even voted to strip a state board of power over their local utilities, granting it to the city commission instead.

In addition, the rapidly expanding sea of data centers – often approved under non-disclosure agreements that limit public knowledge or participation – is meeting increasing local opposition, often on the grounds that they will drive up electricity costs. In Virginia, for example, a recent legislative audit found that data center expansion there will cost residents up to $400 annually in increased electricity costs. Spanberger made this a facet of her campaign, as did Democrats down-ballot.

Trump has spectacularly failed to deliver on his promises when it comes to affordability, instead engaging in a bait-and-switch. He’s turned the government over to oligarchs and is gutting the agencies charged with reining in corporate excess and protecting consumers, such as the Federal Trade Commission and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Democrats can and must do better if they want to prove that voters’ trust wasn’t misplaced.

The question now is: Will these candidates, once they take office, be able to move rapidly enough and noticeably enough to harness the potent political power of their affordability platforms? Both the Biden and Trump administrations learned the hard way – as Economic Liberties managing editor Helaine Olen recently pointed out – that simply telling voters that your fixes are delivering relief when they don’t feel it is not a formula for success. No one believes you. It looks like the successful Democratic pols on Tuesday learned this lesson. As Bharat Ramamurti wrote, the explicit embrace of price controls is indicative that these candidates understood the need for short-term and very noticeable solutions to cost problems, rather than relying on supply-side fixes or other ideas that could take years to show results, like some of the cost policies embraced by the Biden Administration that voters never felt until it was too late.

As someone who has worked to enact economically populist policies at the state level, the test for these leaders is clear: They now need to not only implement those ideas – which were very high-profile promises – but pair them with longer-term, more fundamental changes in the ways in which their states and cities interact with corporate power to bring down prices not just temporarily, but permanently, and return a sense of stability and predictability to costs.

For examples of what to do, they can look to what states have accomplished in just the last few years. Six have banned deceptive junk fees. New York adopted a law preventing algorithmic landlord collusion, and California went further, cracking down on algorithmic price-fixing across its economy. Oregon and Massachusetts embraced new limits on private equity firms acquiring health care facilities, while Minnesota placed new requirements on hospital mergers. And states such as Ohio and Kentucky have cut PBMs out of state programs, while Arkansas adopted a law banning them from owning pharmacies.

These policies aren’t a one-size-fits-all agenda that can be slapped onto a particular state without forethought; they need specific state-based organizing and support of the sort Economic Liberties and its allies have provided in the past and stand ready to provide again. They address the affordability crisis the voters see so clearly, the one the Democrats who won on Tuesday said they’d fix. If they break their word, or are not successful at assuaging voter fears about the high cost of living, they will likely find themselves where Trump and the GOP are today, staring at a slate of broken promises and once-again restive voters ready for yet another change.