The US Cost of Living Index
Voters Give Up on Prices — and Trump
May 27 - June 17, 2026
The latest reading (May 27–June 15) shows cost-of-living sentiment remaining at -16, unchanged from the previous wave and continuing a pattern that has now persisted for three months. At first glance, that may not sound particularly dramatic. But in the context of social media analysis, it is highly significant.
Social media is where people react. It captures immediate emotions, knee-jerk opinions and responses to the latest headlines. One day people are arguing about inflation, the next about foreign policy, interest rates, housing costs or gas prices. The events change constantly and so do the conversations surrounding them. If you were sitting in a bar listening to groups of people talk, you would hear countless different opinions, emotions and reactions to whatever had happened that week.
Yet over time, a broader mood emerges. That is what this tracker measures. And what is striking about the last three months is not that sentiment became so negative, but that there has been almost no sign of it improving. Despite new headlines, changing economic data and endless political debate, Americans continue to return to the same conclusion: life is expensive and there is no sign of that changing.
That is what makes the current data so interesting. The cost-of-living conversation increasingly feels as though voters have given up on prices coming down. The debate is no longer about when affordability will return. For many Americans, that discussion appears to be over. High grocery bills, expensive housing, rising insurance costs and growing household expenses are increasingly discussed as facts of life rather than problems waiting to be solved. There is no sign of optimism. No sense that things are going to change.
Politically, the most significant development is that this mood is becoming increasingly attached to the administration itself. Discussion of the Trump Economy now accounts for 31% of all negative conversation, up dramatically from just 10% in the previous wave.
That suggests voters are moving beyond frustration with prices themselves and increasingly asking who is responsible. What emerges from the discussion is not necessarily a belief that Donald Trump caused every aspect of the cost-of-living crisis. Rather, it is a growing belief that he is not going to solve it.
That distinction matters. Voters will often tolerate difficult circumstances if they believe improvement is coming. What becomes much harder to reverse is a situation in which people stop believing that someone has an answer. The conversation increasingly suggests that many voters have reached precisely that point. The administration is not only being judged against economic reality, but against its apparent inability to turn it around.
Six months from the midterms, that may be the most significant finding in the data. The challenge for Republicans is no longer simply that voters think prices are too high. It is that many appear to have abandoned hope that prices will come down and are increasingly unconvinced that the administration has a credible plan to fix it. Once voters stop expecting improvement, they also become far less receptive to promises that relief is just around the corner.
Visit our Substack for the full archive
About The Cost of Living Index
Most economic data captures outcomes after the fact and often fails to reflect how conditions are actually experienced. Our work instead tracks how Americans talk about the cost of living, job security and financial pressure in real time. This human-read data trains a proprietary language model that highlights early shifts in confidence and behavior at scale, before they appear in polling or government data — if at all — with clear implications for voting preferences and turnout in the 2026 midterms.