Pinching pennies, casting ballots: a midterms dispatch from the Midwest

I'm Ayesha Roscoe, and this is a Sunday Story from Up First. Politicians are saying it. We have an affordability crisis in this country. The affordability crisis literally feels like drowning in costs. Voters are saying it. The affordability crisis that Americans across the country are dealing with. People can't afford to rent. People can't afford gas. This election cycle, the word affordability has most definitely entered the chat. Polls show the cost of living is on people's minds as they consider their choices in the midterm elections, just a week away. And in the Midwest, an area of the country that has traditionally been one of the most affordable places to live, voters are feeling stretched thin. I mean, I am doing independent contractor work as tutoring and pet sitting just to help make extra money to pay for gas in my car. The Midwest. Newsroom has been talking to people in four states, Nebraska, Missouri, Kansas, and Iowa, about the impact of rising costs in their region. You can look at costs, and by that measure, the Midwest looks relatively affordable. But what people are bringing in is also lower. So for basic parts of family budgets, health care, child care, housing, rent, earnings are just not keeping up. Today on the Sunday Story, we'll hear from Midwesterners about the impact of rising costs in their region. and other financial pain points, and whether affordability, or lack thereof, is driving their decisions at the polls in November. Stay with us. I'm Ayesha Roscoe, and this is the Sunday Story. The Midwest Newsroom is a partnership between NPR and local stations in four states, Nebraska, Missouri, Kansas, and Iowa. I'm joined today by managing editor Holly Edgell and senior data journalist Daniel Wheaton. Welcome. Hi, Aisha. Good to be here. Thanks for having us. Holly, tell me, why did you decide to create this series looking at issues of affordability across the Midwest? A while back, I became really obsessed with this column in the New York Times called Affording New York. It looks at how New Yorkers from a variety of income levels managed to live basically in one of the country's most expensive cities. And that made me think that while we in the Midwest seem to enjoy a cheaper cost of living, people here in our region are struggling to make ends meet. This used to be the place people moved to if they couldn't afford living on the coasts or in another part of the country. But it's really no longer that affordable. And so we started our series by sending out a questionnaire that was back in April. And then we did a follow-up questionnaire in September. When economics get tough, people don't exactly shout it from the rooftops. So this questionnaire was a way to get people talking, to get them to share their specific experiences that may not be reflected in data. We really wanted to understand where and how people were struggling. You know, I've noticed here in D.C. and I'm sure a lot of our listeners are experiencing this, too, all over the country. Just trying to buy groceries to feed my kids costs so much money. Like it's just got to give an arm and a leg to get some some cheeses some Pop-Tarts. Is that something you heard from a lot of people that you talked to? Yeah, food costs were definitely a big issue, and that was across the income spectrum. We heard from people who consider themselves working or middle class, who didn't really struggle with groceries before, but now they have to make tough choices about what they can afford at the grocery store. And they're increasingly using credit cards to pay for food. And in fact, Data shows about one in four Americans are using credit at the grocery store. Our colleague, Midwest Newsroom editor Nicole Grunmeier, she's based in Des Moines. She was interested in how people who are on fixed incomes, particularly older Americans, are coping with these costs. So this summer, she visited a Storm Lake, Iowa church on a day when there was a truck from the Food Bank of Iowa. How many are the peppers? One. That's where she met Linda Rufus. She's 67 years old. I am retired. My hobbies is music. That's about it. Music, reading the Bible, praying. Linda was checking out the fresh pineapples, potatoes, and bell peppers. Well, I'm thinking about how I'm going to rob Peter to pay Paul, because food prices are extremely high, and I have to really weigh out what's more important or how I can get the most out of a meal. If it were not for the food banks, you know, supplying us with food, you know, we would be in a lot worse condition than we are. Daniel, you're a data reporter who's been looking into this. Can you break down some of the data on food prices? Yes, Aisha, the cost of groceries keep rising. Food prices in the United States rose nearly 3% over the past year, and the cost of many staples is growing even higher. For example, beef is up nearly 12% year over year. So let's imagine you're a family of four and you wanted to grill some burgers for dinner. You'd need two pounds of ground beef, burger buns, American cheese, and some pickles. Today, that comes out to about $28 at a grocery store where I'm at in Lincoln, Nebraska. Five years ago, that simple meal would have just cost $22.61, $6 less. If you multiply that by all the meals you eat in a year, that adds up. The Midwest also has lower incomes in other regions. The median income is over about $47,000 a year. So those price hikes take up more of those people's smaller budgets. What were some of the other things that people mentioned as being like the biggest expenses that they're struggling with? Energy costs are creeping up. So is the cost of daycare. Student loan debt and credit card debt are piling up. And a big one, you won't be surprised, was housing. And so the idea of a starter home at a starter price, well, that's really not really a reality in many places anymore, even here in the Midwest. And finding affordable rental housing that's close enough to where you actually work or that you can get to is also a challenge. Rental costs are lower in our parts of the Midwest compared to the coasts or even a big Midwestern city like Chicago. But again, it's all relative. People living in Nebraska, for example, have seen the cost of rent increase nearly 29% since 2019. The median price was about in the high 800s for renting a month. Now that's topped 1,000. That trend in higher rent includes all apartment sizes, from studios to multi-bedroom, all across the state. Our colleague, Noel Ananen at Nebraska Public Media, met with a man named Chuck Martins in Omaha. He's 77 years old, and he does yard work and other chores for his landlord in exchange for reduced rent. You can never get caught up. So I've been selling books, I've been selling things that my mother has saved, the toys that I played with when I was a kid. And I try not to think of the future because when the day comes that I can't physically do the work there, I have no place to live. It's frightening. And there are so many of us that are in the same boat. It sounds like people are having to get really creative about how they make ends meet. Like, what are some of the other things that people are doing to make it work? Well, I spoke to Grace Englehart in Blue Springs, Missouri. That's near Kansas City. She's about 30 years old. I feel like I've aged years in the last six months. She and her husband both work full time, by the way. I haven't had a good night's sleep in probably a couple months now. I mean, I put on so much under eye cream just to help out of my bags. She even tried to negotiate down her student loan payment. It's nearly $1,000 a month. I get paid $1,600 every paycheck, roughly $1,634 and some change. That's almost an entire paycheck. So there's no way I can use one entire paycheck to pay for my student loans when they're due. So Grace is making payments when and how much she can. She's not the only one. And in fact, Missouri is leading the country when it comes to the rate of student loan defaults. That's basically when lenders say your payment is more than 30 days late. Yeah, and Grace getting a couple of side jobs is by no means a rarity. According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 5% of the U.S. workforce has multiple jobs. Grace gets her dog walking jobs through an app, and she's among one third of U.S. workers who are part of the so-called gig economy. That's how many folks are making it work. So what about people looking to buy a home? Your series includes a couple who had moved to Portland, Oregon for job opportunities, but they couldn't make things work in Portland, so they moved back to the Midwest. Like Daniel said earlier, what people can afford is all relative. I spoke with this couple, Brittany and Ryan Arthur, right after they moved from Portland back to Kansas City. Right after they moved from Portland back to Kansas City, they had lived before. It's Ryan's hometown. In Portland, they started a family during the pandemic and they quickly found they could not afford to buy a house and pay for daycare and other expenses. The market was just unreachable in Portland. Especially in combination with child care costs. Like the fact that we had two kids, one in preschool, one in about to be in daycare. The math just didn't work for those three things to come together. So what ended up happening when they got back to Kansas City? Overall, they're glad they moved, but it's a mixed bag. They did get to buy a house in the neighborhood that they wanted in their budget, but they found that daycare was not that much cheaper in Kansas City than in Portland. And not only that, Missouri charges sales tax, while in Oregon they do not. So the Arthurs had sticker shock in the checkout line when they first moved back to Kansas City. I don't know if it's just, you know, supply chain issues. Like I, I have no clue why prices are higher here, but that's been, you know, one of the things that's kind of shocked us. Now it has been a few months and they're finding ways to compromise. They have one car instead of two. And they're just having to really watch their grocery bills, watch their spending in general, so that they have that money to pay for child care and other things. How are politicians in the Midwest talking about these affordability issues, especially the ones running in competitive race? It's interesting. We haven't seen many candidates offer concrete ideas about tackling the issue. And it varies state by state. But the fact is that despite how important affordability is, there are other issues taking center stage. For example, in Iowa, they're talking about really high cancer rates, and they're really holding their politicians' feet to the fire on that. And in Missouri, they're talking about taxes and abortion. So the term affordability is not on ballots. Of course, in any specific way. And it could be that candidates find other issues are more solvable. But one candidate who is talking about affordability is Cindy Holsher. People are making life and death decisions right now because of this affordability crisis. She's a Democrat running for Kansas governor. And there's something else that can make a big difference here. Raising the minimum wage. Here she is speaking at a Democratic gubernatorial forum. The minimum wage in Kansas right now is only $7.25 an hour. We're not going to be able to beat this affordability crisis, keeping the people who are working two jobs at subpar wages like that. At this point, we can't say whether making minimum wage central to her campaign is going to work. Recent polling has Holsher trailing behind her Republican opponent by about four points. And here in Nebraska, affordability is a theme in the Senate race between incumbent Republican Pete Ricketts and independent Dan Osborne. Ricketts, who's a Republican billionaire and whose father's holdings include the Chicago Cubs, has used ads to highlight his work with President Trump, especially the tax changes on overtime and tips. Osborne, on the other hand, has painted Ricketts as an out-of-touch billionaire whose wealth is growing at speeds higher than most other Nebraskans. The people in our series are trying to figure out if any candidate, regardless of party, is willing and able to make change. When we come back, will the Midwest vote with his pocketbook? You know, some campaign promises, what they say, are unachievable. Come live and rule America for a week, and you will see how we're struggling. We're back with the Sunday Story. I'm here with the Midwest newsrooms, Holly Edgell and Daniel Wheaton, talking about affordability in the Midwest. So, you two have been talking to people across the Midwest since April, and recently you went back to some of the people you'd interviewed earlier in the year to ask about how these issues of affordability are affecting their votes in the midterms. I know this wasn't a scientific poll or survey, but can you share some of your takeaways? Sure, Aisha. In our second survey, every single person who responded said, affordability or the cost of living were in their top five election concerns, if not their number one. Most of the people who answered the second questionnaire described themselves as Democrats, with a decent number of independents and some Republicans. That said, when we asked people how strongly they identified with their party, most people said somewhat, which suggests they're not really voting strictly on party lines. And I called up some of the questionnaire respondents, and one of the first people I spoke with was a woman named Luann Schindler. Luann is a Democrat, and his party is a Democrat. She's a Democrat, and she's a Democrat. She's a pretty clear about voting Democratic this midterms. Her husband, Scott, is a Republican. They live in the town of Clearwater, Nebraska, population about 350. He's a farmer, and she's a newspaper publisher. Together, they own the Summerland Advocate Messenger, which serves several communities in Nebraska. And Luann told me she was frustrated because property taxes and farm input costs, that's like supplies and materials, those costs are all up, and so are insurance rates. And she called the prices for food and gas ridiculous. And it seems like it's getting worse every day. I would not really like to find a candidate that just, even if it's one problem and tackles that one problem, like to try and make a difference, just do what you promise. Don't talk out of both sides of your mouth. Luann's husband, Scott Schindler, voted for Donald Trump in 2024. Hello, this is Scott. I also reached him by phone. How are you this morning, Holly? I'm fine. How are you this morning? Oh, I'm a little miserable and wet. Scott was actually out on his farm when I got him. Scott says he gives Trump a B- when it comes to the economy, but when we spoke, it was hard to pull out specifics. He recently attended a community meeting where he met independent candidate Dan Osborne. Again, Dan Osborne is facing Republican incumbent Pete Ricketts for U.S. Senate in Nebraska. Scott said he thought Dan Osborne had some good ideas about the economy, but he doesn't agree with Osborne's stance on immigration. He's talking about letting more foreigners in, and I just don't think that's the right thing to do. Even though Scott is worried about affordability and some of the policies affecting affordability were put in place by the current administration, he's still planning to vote Republican in November. How optimistic would you say you are that things like prices on your farm inputs may improve over the next year or so? I'm not very optimistic, to be honest with you, but it's going to have to, because I don't know. Farming anymore is going in the way of big corporations, and the small farmers are just kind of getting squeezed out of everything. Both Scott and Luann Schindler are pretty active in their communities, and they talk to a lot of people, and they both agree on one thing. Rural America is in crisis. OK, so that's an interesting couple there. The wife is a Democrat. The husband is a Republican. Did you talk to anyone who's an independent, who doesn't always vote along party lines? Yes, we did. Our colleague Noelle Ananen, she checked back in for a second time with Chuck Martins in Omaha. Again, Chuck is 77 years old, and he does chores around his apartment building in exchange for lower rent. When they talked in mid-October, Chuck told Noelle his electric bill was up about $20 since they first spoke in the spring, and he would not be able to pay for his car insurance on time this month. Chuck describes himself as an independent since 2016. He said before that he was a Democrat, and Noelle asked him about the coming midterms. To be bluntly honest, I'm hoping that the Democrats can take control of the House and Senate. For Chuck, this is not a vote for Democrats, but it's a vote against Republicans. We're already in a financial crisis in the state, partially due to our governor and the president for constantly cutting taxes. So Chuck is a retiree, and he's also worried about Social Security remaining solvent, and he's not optimistic that any party or candidate can have a short-term impact on affordability. I mean, just the transportation cost for goods and services isn't going to go down for a while, and history seems to indicate that when prices go up, they usually don't come down. So, yeah, I don't see that changing. And unfortunately, I don't see the income side of it raising either. Did anyone on either side seem optimistic about the likelihood that their vote would make a difference when it comes to affordability? Of the people we talked to, not really. Here's Grace Englehart again. She's the woman in Blue Springs outside Kansas City who's struggling with her student loan debt. She's also a Democrat. And she thinks it's going to take. It's going to take more than one midterm election to make change. I think in the long run game, there is always so much. this current administration is going to do for us anyway, even if we take back one of the legislators, whether that's the House or the Senate, I don't think we'd get anything done unless we were to take over both. I think Grace is expressing the same sentiment we heard from Chuck Martins in Nebraska. It's hard to see how any changes to economic policy will have an immediate impact, especially when it comes to stagnant wages and inflation. But Aisha, despite the pessimism, the people we talked to seem motivated to vote. It's interesting to note that some polls show Democrats have a very slight edge over Republicans when it comes to the economy, and a new poll from the Associated Press shows that 65% of U.S. adults now blame Trump's policies for these high costs. At the same time, the question that I keep coming back to is how much is the dissatisfaction with the affordability issue going to be expressed when people actually vote? The Urban Institute tracks cost of living through the U.S. economy and the U.S. economy through the U.S. economy. It's American Affordability Tracker. And among other things, the findings show that about 50% of American families say they don't have the resources to cover essential expenses. I talked with the Institute's senior policy manager, Katherine Harvey. She's based in Omaha, and here's what she said. Earnings are just not keeping up, and that's why people feel squeezed. And they feel unseen in a lot of cases. GDP is rising. We talk about this AI growth, and people aren't seeing those gains in their own wallets. And that can leave voters feeling disaffected and fed up. Daniel and Holly, the Midwest used to be this place that you could rely on affordability. It was a place where people could go when they couldn't afford anyplace else. And now, as your reporting shows, the Midwest isn't really super. affordable anymore. So where do people go from here? Well, Aisha, as you can probably imagine, when you already live in a region that's affordable compared to other parts of the country, there are not many places to go. Wages are stagnant everywhere else, too, and the inflation rate is about the same around the country. For now, people we spoke to are just treading water. They're changing their buying habits, using credit, missing payments, and working additional jobs just to pay the bills. And maybe, cautiously, hoping that the midterms will make a difference? Exactly. Aisha, there is one last person I talked to who said something that really stayed with me. Her name is Melanie Magana. She's a self-described independent voter who lives in Olathe, Kansas. That's also not far from Kansas City. Melanie is 57. She works full-time at a local nonprofit, and she was really excited to tell me that she's only a few years away from paying off her mortgage, which she never thought she'd be here. I really made clear what's at stake when affordability is all people can think about. If people aren't squeezed, you know, and having to spend every hour and every day trying to, you know, eke out another couple of pennies, then maybe we could actually have happier, healthier communities that actually, you know, work together and make this place work. I mean, I hate to say it, but make it great. Holly and Daniel, thank you so much for your reporting. Really appreciate it. It was a pleasure. Thanks, Aisha. Thanks so much. That was Holly Edgell and Daniel Wheaton of the Midwest Newsroom, a partnership of NPR stations in Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska. You can find more of the Costly series at the link in the show notes. This episode was produced by Sharon Moshihi. It was edited by Jenny Schmidt, Liana Simstrom, and Sharon Moshihi. Mastering by Anli Huang. Special thanks to Nicole Grunmeier and Noelle Ananen. The rest of the Sunday Story team includes Andrew Wombo, Justine Yan, and Maddie Barron. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. I'm Aisha Roscoe, and Up First will be back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend. Up First