Rising gas, healthcare costs squeeze US voters ahead of midterms

Denise Barber retired from steelwork three years ago, but the math no longer works. At 68, living on a fixed income in Ohio's Mahoning Valley, she now finds herself calculating whether she can afford to stay retired. The gasoline prices have become impossible to ignore—up 45 percent since the Iran war escalated in late February, now hovering around $4.37 per gallon. When her husband had a mini stroke recently, she drove him to medical appointments in a region she describes as a medical desert, watching the fuel costs accumulate alongside hospital bills. The only solution she can see is going back to work, part-time, to cover the gap.

Barber is not an outlier. She is one of dozens who showed up at town halls across Mahoning Valley in recent weeks, voicing the same cluster of anxieties: hospital closures, cuts to health programs, the relentless climb of everyday expenses. These concerns arrive at a pivotal moment. November's midterm elections are weeks away, and Ohio—a state President Trump won by double digits in 2024—has unexpectedly become contested ground. Democrats are competitive in several House races and have a genuine opening in the Senate, where former three-term senator Sherrod Brown is challenging Republican Jon Husted, who took the seat vacated when JD Vance became Vice President.

The question animating this race is whether the squeeze voters feel in their wallets will translate into votes. A Pew survey in June found that 29 percent of Americans spontaneously named an economic concern when asked what they wanted congressional candidates to address. For Barber and others like her, the concern is not abstract. Grocery prices stood 2.2 percent higher in August than a year prior. Utilities have climbed. And the Iran war, which Tehran responded to by choking off the Strait of Hormuz after US-Israel strikes, sent energy costs soaring—sometimes meaning hundreds of dollars more in weekly expenses for households already stretched thin.

Paul Sracic, a nonresident senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, sees real danger for Republicans in the Senate race. "The party in power always does poorly in midterm elections," he told reporters. "It was going to be an uphill fight anyway." But gas prices, he added, function as a barometer for how people feel about the economy overall. Husted's support for data center investment has also drawn backlash in a region already wary of promises that never materialized.

Brown is leaning hard into affordability messaging. "Working-class voters didn't want this war," he said at a recent meet-and-greet in Warren. "They didn't want to see explosions in costs of everything." He pointed to the $30 million data centers are spending against him in the state as evidence he will stand up to corporate interests. David Green, a labor leader with the United Auto Workers union in Ohio, echoed the urgency. "Workers are getting crunched right now," he said. Over the past six months to a year, smaller UAW facilities and independent parts suppliers have announced layoffs and plant closures.

Mahoning Valley itself carries the weight of broken promises. Once a Democratic stronghold, it turned red in 2016 when Trump pledged a manufacturing renaissance. That resurgence never came. Mike Rubicz, a retired steelworker, has watched the valley transform from one of the world's main steel centers to a place where steel mills have virtually vanished. "Everyone in this valley is conscious of the need for manufacturing jobs," he said. "But the reality is, the ability of people to come to the valley and get a job is gone." The region's industrial identity remains, but the jobs that once defined it do not. Now, as voters head to the polls, they are weighing whether the party in power can address the costs bearing down on them—or whether change might come from somewhere else.