Here's How Inflation Became The Biggest Story Of The Midterms

The NPR Politics Podcast

NPR

Politics, Daily News, News

4.5 • 24.9K Ratings

🗓️ 4 November 2022

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Trump and Biden signed off on historic amounts of stimulus money that helped the country's economy weather the pandemic, but — on top of supply chain straggles and shutdowns — that money may have come with a downside: increasing inflation. Now, as voters considered their midterm voter, rising costs are top of mind.

This episode: political correspondent Susan Davis and White House correspondent Asma Khalid.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there, it's the MPR Politics Podcast.
0:06.4	I'm Susan Davis, I cover politics.
0:08.3	And I'm Wes McCullough, I cover the White House.
0:10.6	And we're doing something a little different on the podcast today and taking a deep dive
0:14.9	into one of the defining issues of this election.
0:18.2	Inflation.
0:19.2	The polls consistently show it's the top issue for most Americans.
0:22.8	Housing, gas, food, travel.
0:24.7	It all costs more than it did than when President Biden took office.
0:29.0	But how voters are processing this economic reality and how they might vote because of it
0:33.6	is complicated.
0:34.6	Asma, we are now days away from election day, but you have been talking to voters across
0:39.9	the country for more than a year now about how inflation is impacting their lives.
0:44.8	When did you realize that you needed to start paying attention to this issue more closely
0:49.2	than any other?
0:50.2	Well, so I'll start by a bit of a personal anecdote.
0:54.3	You probably know this, when you have a baby, you go into hibernation.
0:56.8	So I had a baby right after the election in 2020, didn't go out anywhere, reemerged in
1:01.7	May, and it suddenly felt like life was more expensive.
1:05.2	This was May, June of 2021.
1:07.2	And so I went out on my first reporting trip shortly thereafter to Northampton County
1:12.4	and Pennsylvania, you're probably familiar with this area.
	...

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