Every Election Is About Money. But This Time It’s Different.

Politics The Oligarchy Election Yes, voters are casting ballots over affordability. But something more fundamental has shifted here. Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images and Serhii Semenovych/iStock/Getty Images Plus. The midterms are unpredictable. Your access to Slate shouldn’t be. Slate Plus members get unlimited reading, ad-free podcasts, exclusive bonus episodes, newsletters, events and more. Join now. It is finally here: the midterms. Today America votes (and has been voting), and we are soon to know exactly how off, or on, the polls were. This will tell us whether the Democrats will retake the Senate, but it’s also going to be a real mood-setter as we head into the presidential election in 2028, for Republicans, sure, but especially for Democrats. On that last bit in particular, I’ve been thinking about the way Slate’s very own politics editor Patrick Reis recently put it: “I think everyone will take the election as proof that their platform is super popular, and the truth will be that it’s great to run against a president who mashed the ‘make things more expensive’ button and then told voters to vote like he was on the ballot.” It’s a great note of caution against putting too much faith into the idea that a few thousand voters in Michigan (in a Senate race that is now a spectacular mess) can resolve a debate that’s been ripping Democrats apart since 2016. It’s also, however, a reminder of a very simple fact: This has been the affordability election. The cost of things—gas, food, healthcare, housing, childcare—has been front and center all season long, with Democrats and Republicans alike promising that they are the ones who can fix it. But this isn’t just the affordability election. I think that in subtle ways, we’re seeing a shift in how American voters of all stations along the political spectrum are perceiving the extreme income inequality we live under and reassessing what it means. It feels like this election is a much broader reckoning about money more than just what things cost: It’s also about who has billions, who is forced to scrape by, and whether the system that has yielded this disparity is one most Americans will keep tolerating. Consider the recent bipartisan backlash against data centers, and the ways in which Big Tech is taking over normal people’s neighborhoods. It’s not a coincidence that Donald Trump and his cronies are the only ones missing this massive reorientation. In a recent Semafor column, David Weigel offers that “I’m not the first take-slinger to ask whether this is the ‘Epstein election’ ”—and, sure, he’s talking about the sexual abuse, but really, this phrasing, and “the Epstein class” in particular, has become code for a world in which having enough money means you can get away with whatever you want. The Epstein class wants to buy the election so they can continue to get away with it, and it’s never been more obvious than this year. Weigel notes that the 2026 midterms have cost more than the 2024 presidential cycle—highly unusual. But that money has become a deeper part of the political story than it often is because of how disgusted people are with it. That’s thanks in part to the huge donations from Elon Musk and his historic unpopularity, as well as the ways in which candidates like Abdul El-Sayed are making this kind of spending borderline embarrassing. But Weigel notes something else too: Many Americans are predisposed to think that wealthy people earned their money and that it’s churlish to try to take it away from them. But it’s easier than ever to argue that some ultra-wealthy people are strange, selfish, and even evil. This has long been the drawback of making income inequality such a major part of a political message: Plenty of Americans don’t want to hate the rich because they want to become rich themselves, and they think that under certain conditions, they can. But this year, there has been more widespread awareness that the wealth we are witnessing is just not the kind of wealth most regular people even have the option to attain. One of the major takeaways of Donald Trump’s second term, as evidenced by countless interviews with former voters who have just had it this time, is that his monomaniacal focus on himself is now just much more obvious. Also obvious is that it’s gross, and it’s hurting regular people. And if you zoom out just a little bit, you see this same disturbing inequality through a much bigger lens—and people are finally getting mad about it. Bernie Sanders has turned his decadeslong effort on this front into the “Fight the Oligarchy” tour, which he’s been on since 2025. Even then he was attracting new and unlikely believers to this tent. Watching a recent Maine stop for the Atlantic, Russell Berman observes Sanders in action: “Before I started talking about it, people would say, ‘What the hell is an oligarch?’ he told the crowd in Bangor. Then he added, to a loud cheer: ‘People know what oligarchy is today.’ ” Later, when Berman followed up with Sanders directly, he said: “I think the American people are undergoing a massive transformation in their views.” And Democrats all over seem to be running on it this cycle—not just the most left flank of the party. A New York Times piece about the Michigan Senate race quotes fellow income-inequality guru Sen. Elizabeth Warren on the story of politics this season: “Let me put it this way,” Warren said. “All across the country, Democrats in competitive races are running on economic populist ideas. They may not call them that. But that is sure as hell what they’re doing.” It’s not just lefties who are running this way this year. In North Carolina, normie Democrat Roy Cooper is basing his entire campaign on the slogan “Make stuff cost less.” In New Hampshire, where I live, Senate hopeful Chris Pappas is constantly threading together the too-high price of regular stuff with the corruption and millionaires in the Republican Party. It helps that his opponent left Washington and made millions lobbying—but even that guy is trying to run on an anti-corruption message. That’s because it’s not even just Democrats who are picking up this ball—Republicans running for Congress, including Michigan’s Mike Rogers, Arkansas’ French Hill, and Iowa’s Joe Mitchell, are specifically campaigning on being on the side of the little guy. In Nebraska, the Senate race is between a Republican worth $200 million and a mechanic who made $100,000 last year. Here’s how the Times wrote about what’s happening there: That yawning gap, between a middle-class salary that is falling behind inflation and generational wealth that has soared over the past two years, is at the heart not just of Nebraska’s competitive Senate contest but House, Senate and governor’s races across the country. It’s not just the price of gas and groceries. It’s about those who struggle watching in wonder at those who don’t.“The perspective has changed from left versus right,” said Jim Begley, director of the William Brennan Institute for Labor Studies at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. “Now it’s top versus bottom. And people on the bottom are wondering what the hell is going on.” What the hell is going on indeed. The price of gas is so high that regular voters are using it to determine their votes, and yet the oil and gas industry is reporting that it’s made $130 billion in just six months of war in Iran. Meanwhile, as if the Gilded Age parallels aren’t strong enough, this weekend saw the president hosting a lavish Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago, where he served caviar and Alaska king crab while boasting about hanging out with his “rich friends” and “the biggest guys on Wall Street.” As Jon Ossoff, who seems to have his Senate seat in Georgia locked down, says, “They are the elites they pretend to hate.” We’ll see just how much America has noticed. Donald Trump Elections Senate Elon Musk 2026 Midterms