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When Florida Democrats suffered through Gov. Ron DeSantis’ 20-point wipeout of Charlie Crist and the loss of four House seats in 2022, Dems figured there was nowhere to go but up.
When Donald Trump won Florida by 13 points in 2024 and U.S. Sen. Rick Scott cruised to reelection victory, Dems quickly realized things can always get worse.
Yet in 2025, a few rays of hope appeared. An April special election in the ruby-red 5th District shaved 10 points off the GOP’s margin of victory from five months earlier. Seven months later, Miami elected its first Democratic mayor since 1997.
These victories, along with similar blowouts in the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races, shared one common theme: a relentless focus on affordability.
There’s a reason this theme is resonating with my fellow Floridians: since Trump’s return to office, his policies have only exacerbated the cost-of-living crisis he promised to solve.
Electricity prices jumped 6.3 percent in the first year of his second term, arguably due to the power-hungry AI data centers Trump’s Silicon Valley cronies are building all over the country.
Beef and coffee prices are up 15 percent and 18 percent, respectively, thanks largely to his reckless and destabilizing tariffs. Grocery prices in general have continued to go up.
Mass deportations have caused home construction to drop nationally, even as rents continue to rise. Oblivious to economic realities, the Republicans running Florida went all in on the immigrant hysteria, adopting policies that flattened our state’s once-exceptional rate of job growth as well as terrorizing the Latin community within the state.
Meanwhile, Trump seems laser-focused on Gaza, Ukraine, Venezuela, Cuba, Greenland, and Iran — anywhere but the country he was elected to lead.
Florida Democrats should seize on this opportunity in 2026. The possibility of a GOP gerrymander could make it harder to flip House seats, but the governorship and Senate seat are both winnable if we play our cards right.
A successful affordability agenda should focus on the areas where Americans are feeling the most pain: housing, childcare, health insurance premiums, and utility bills.
At the same time, however, Democrats must avoid embracing polices that harm the vulnerable people they’re intended to help.
Look no further than Trump’s tariffs. They were supposed to recoup money supposedly lost to other countries through trade so more could be invested here at home. Instead, they only ended up fueling inflation, which hurt the poor in particular.
Now, the Supreme Court has struck down Trump’s tariff-making power, making all of it moot. Most Democrats opposed the Trump tariffs, but they can still take a lesson about how seemingly pro-American policies can backfire.
Or consider an older and less known problem, the Durbin Amendment, which passed Congress in 2010 and capped interchange fees on debit card transactions as part of the Dodd-Frank Act. Its intentions were similarly noble — businesses would pay lower fees and pass the savings along to customers.
The results were disastrous. Ten years later, researchers found no evidence of consumer savings, according to a study by Jerome Davis and Robert J. Shapiro of the Progressive Policy Institute. Banks made up for the lost revenue by increasing overdraft fees, cutting back on free checking, and offering more incentives to switch to credit cards. These new policies hit low-income Americans and racial minorities the hardest.
Florida Democrats should be especially attuned to these concerns. We’re the party that believes in good government and the power of public policy to help ordinary people.
It’s Democrats who can claim credit for so many of the federal programs we rely on today, from Social Security to Medicare to SCHIP. Time and again, Democrats here in Florida have stood up to the Republican agenda to slash government at all costs.
But it’s equally important that we avoid bad policies that could make life even less affordable for the average American. The country — and Floridians — are regaining trust in our party to make the economy work again. We need to repay that trust with smart results.
While President Trump is waging war on affordability, embracing it is Democrats’ best path to victory — in Florida and across the nation, in 2026 and beyond. But we can’t just talk about bringing down the cost of living. We actually need to do it. Voters don’t want empty populist messaging; they want us to do th hard work of crafting policies that weigh tradeoffs, foresee complications, and deliver real results.
Ediberto Roman is a professor of law; director of Immigration and Citizenship Initiatives, Florida International University, and editor, Citizenship and Migration in the Americas Series, New York University Press. Visit http://nyupress.org/series/citizenship-and-migration-in-the-americas/.
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