A warning for the new Congress: Don’t stop at ‘affordability’

Detailed summary

An affordability crisis is also a mobility crisis.

It was a night of historic wins for the candidates who understood that “affordability” was at the heart of this election. But the lesson of this election is bigger than the price of eggs and gas, and every candidate – Democrat and Republican – who won should be careful not to miss the point of what voters really want.

As Black business leaders who are experts in navigating and building economic opportunity when the system doesn’t deliver, we had a hunch “affordability” wasn’t telling the whole story. So we spent months before Election Day asking voters and confirmed we were right.

Through internal polling conducted by Workbench Strategies during July 2026 of 1,400 voters, including an oversample of 400 Black voters, and our two-way texting conversations with voters, we found that they gravitated toward a combination of solutions that provide immediate relief from rising costs and build pathways to help them get ahead. For example, nearly half of all voters chose both caps on medical and prescription costs (45 percent) and increasing wages to keep up with the cost of living (43 percent) as a top-three priority. Black voters were even more focused on higher wages, with 56 percent choosing it as a top-three priority.

And over and over again, voters in focus groups conducted by HIT Strategies said that they wanted to take control of their own economic futures and for leaders to remove barriers to opportunity.

It was easy to see leading up to the election that candidates who recognized these concerns and built agendas around addressing both affordability and economic opportunity would be rewarded at the ballot box. Now that we can sit with the results of the election, it’s clear that what voters were calling an affordability crisis is also an economic mobility crisis. And now, the newly elected Congress has only 18 months to demonstrate it understands the difference and begin to deliver on both.

Yes, lowering prices matters – but that only helps Americans get to the end of…

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