'you Can’t Just Talk About Gas And Groceries’: Gop Grapples With Housing Affordability Message

Republicans are struggling to find a winning message on housing costs — an issue that’s top of mind for Americans — heading into a midterm election season that both parties expect to be decided by affordability concerns.

After Democrats dominated the 2025 off-year election cycle with campaigns centered on the cost of living, GOP operatives are scrambling to focus their midterm strategies on voters’ wallets. Some Republicans expect housing will be a key issue in 2026. A recent POLITICO poll found homebuying and rental costs were among the top affordability concerns for U.S. adults overall — especially among young and Hispanic adults, whose unexpected shift toward President Donald Trump last year helped Republicans return to power.

“It's a challenge for Republicans in general, because we're kind of dominated by boomers,” said GOP pollster Brent Buchanan, adding that housing affordability concerns have come up more frequently in recent focus groups at his firm, Cygnal.

Housing costs are among a variety of economic pain points candidates will have to address next year. But as the GOP organizes to protect its control of Congress, some Republicans say the party hasn’t been able to coalesce around specific proposals for bringing down the cost of housing because Trump has yet to set a clear agenda on the issue. They’re playing catch-up with popular Democratic voices, including New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, who won his seat largely on a platform of ideas for housing affordability.

The POLITICO Poll, conducted in partnership with the research firm Public First, found the cost of housing came in second place (after groceries) among the issues U.S. adults most frequently cited as “the most challenging” to afford. Housing was the top concern cited by respondents ages 18 to 24.

“You can't just talk about gas and groceries,” said prominent GOP pollster Patrick Ruffini. “You have to talk about health care and housing too.”

While some Republican lawmakers in both chambers are working to advance bipartisan housing policy reforms, GOP operatives say Trump will have to be at the forefront of any unified party agenda about housing and affordability.

“It would obviously be very nice to get Trump focused on affordability,” Ruffini said, adding that the president’s experience as a developer could uniquely position him to speak to voters’ housing supply concerns. “I think the problem right now is a lack of focus.”

Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina, chair of the GOP’s congressional reelection arm, said Republicans are “looking to address” housing as they shape their 2026 affordability message.

“It’s certainly something on our minds,” Hudson said.

Concern over housing costs comes amid growing evidence that homeownership is out of reach for many Americans. Home prices have increased 58 percent since 2010 when adjusted for inflation, pricing out millions of potential buyers, according to a 2024 analysis from Harvard University.

Young Americans have been hit especially hard. The median age of first-time homebuyers climbed to a record high of 40 this year, according to a report published by the National Association of Realtors. Most Gen Z adults, between ages 18 and 28, don’t expect to ever be able to afford their own home.

Young people were among Trump’s surprise 2024 coalition. Although Kamala Harris won the overall youth vote in the presidential election, Trump’s inroads with voters under 30 (especially in swing states like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania) helped propel him to his second term.

Young people, like many of the key voters’ in Trump' s coalition, have consistently lower participation rates in elections than the rest of the country — posing a significant hurdle to GOP turnout efforts.

Republicans are also looking to shape their affordability message to maintain gains with Hispanic and Latino voters. Among Hispanic respondents to POLITICO’s poll, housing and groceries shared first place as a top cost-of-living issue.

Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.) said housing was one of the main affordability concerns that she has heard from the constituents in her majority-Hispanic district. Salazar is one of the few Republicans in Florida whom national Democrats are actively working to unseat in 2026, so she says she’s uniquely attuned to the issues swing voters care about.

“I know exactly what they need right now,” Salazar said. “Housing, food. … We’ve got to be talking about everything.”

GOP political consultant Whit Ayres said 2024 exit polls showed many Hispanic voters had decided to take a chance on Trump because of economic concerns, but Republicans will need successful policies with a clear impact to keep those voters in 2026.

“The issue really is the reality of prices and the growth in the economy — as opposed to how you message the reality of prices,” Ayres said.

Trump has tried to use his bully pulpit to lower interest rates, which can indirectly impact the cost of mortgages, by publicly pressuring Federal Reserve officials.

If Americans actually see lowered interest rates before next November, it would be a “critical component” in addressing their housing concerns, Ayres said.

RNC spokesperson Kiersten Pels told POLITICO in a statement that the president “has made reversing the Biden-era inflation crisis a top priority — taking action to lower grocery bills, cut gas prices, and make housing more attainable.”

Some of the president’s favored policies — like tariffs and dramaticallyincreased immigration enforcement — threaten to make homebuilding more expensive and difficult. But Trump recently signaled interest in other avenues for addressing home supply and cost.

He directed Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte to “get Big Homebuilders going” and shared Pulte’s widely panned idea for the federal government to support 50-year mortgages, which could bring down the monthly payments of a mortgage but increase the total cost over time.

But a spokesperson from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee said the administration’s policy ideas on housing will hurt rather than help the GOP’s election chances.

“When their biggest housing idea is to make mortgages more expensive and force working families to nearly double the time they are in debt, it’s crystal clear to voters that Republicans don’t work for them,” DCCC spokesperson Viet Shelton told POLITICO. “Republicans broke their promise of lowering costs for the American people.”

Since 2024, leading Democratic voices have identified two potential, contrasting messages on the cost of living.

The party’s centrists are excited about the “abundance” strategy, which is focused on removing obstacles to economic growth, as laid out in a book of the same name by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Progressives and farther-left Democratic allies have championed populist rhetoric promising to utilize governmental power to punish bad actors in the market.

Whether it’s rolling back construction red tape or freezing the rent, both camps have highlighted ideas to address the affordable housing crisis.

Republican lawmakers are in a position to address voters’ affordability concerns by boosting the homebuilding sector, said Sarah Chamberlain, president of the economically focused, GOP political action committee Republican Main Street Partnership.

Experts have blamed a short supply of housing for rising costs. Zillow, a real estate marketplace company, estimates that the country is short 4.7 million homes.

Republicans could “own this issue” by rolling back homebuilding regulations, said Chamberlain.

That could look like reducing environmental review requirements for federally supported housing construction — a piece of the bipartisan legislation sponsored by GOP Main Street Caucus Chair Rep. Mike Flood of Nebraska and Missouri Democrat Rep. Emanuel Cleaver — or working with state and local governments to revise zoning and building codes.

“We really have a housing crisis,” Chamberlain said. “This is something that I would every day be talking about back home, if I was a member of Congress.”