美國中期選舉將決定誰為即將到來的經濟問題背責

Liz’s view

Today’s US midterm elections are a race to see who gets blamed for a host of economic problems coming down the pike. Democrats are favored to take the House, with control of the Senate still a toss-up.

Whoever wins Congress inherits a stack of problems due to detonate over the next two years — just in time to crater 2028 ambitions — and few have obvious fixes.

Inflation is running around 3.7%, rising in six of the past eight months, and the Fed has gone back to unpopular tightening. That a Trump-picked Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, is leaning hawkish into a midterm election underlines how stubborn the problem is.

The labor market is no better. Employers added just 29,000 jobs in September; July was revised into negative territory. Companies too uncertain about what’s ahead — and unsure of exactly how AI is muddying the employment picture — are neither hiring nor firing, leaving things in what Jerome Powell earlier this year called “an uncomfortable kind of balance.”

Then there are the outside shocks. Reports that the White House is planning post-midterm strikes on Iran may push political fallout from an unpopular war outside the election window, but the economic weight of high gas and diesel prices lands on whoever’s nominally in charge come January.

Those are the known unknowns. AI brings another set of unknown unknowns: A financial squeeze waiting to happen, as investment shows no signs of slowing down even as the returns on that investment appear even further out than we thought. A leaking AI bubble is likely to burst on the next Congress’s watch (as always, look to the jittery credit market, not the booming stock market, for signs of what’s to come).

The second problem is political, and Congress has punted on it. Lawmakers left town in September with no movement on AI guardrails. Dozens of data-center moratoriums and AI referendums appear on the ballot today, with more than 20 in Ohio alone.

Even some of President Donald Trump’s media allies concede that he owns the narrative on the economy no matter what happens on Capitol Hill. But a Democratic Congress would give the White House a foil it hasn’t had since the back half of Trump’s first term, and every stalled bill, shutdown, and soft jobs report could be pinned on the people holding the legislative pen — and subpoena power (more on that below in today’s newsletter).

Either way, the winners tomorrow aren’t claiming a prize so much as signing for a package.

Notable

• Who controls Congress will make little difference to the economy, analysts argue. “A lot of voters head to the polls Tuesday hoping for a fix for affordability,” The Wall Street Journal’s chief economics commentator wrote. “They are going to be disappointed.”