The buzzword of the 2026 elections: affordability.What does that mean?

Zohran Mamdani's winning election campaign for New York City mayor's contribution to the 2026 elections is the word: affordability. It is one of those words that can be such an umbrella term, it can mean much to so many that even if it could be defined, it falls into a category of "I can't tell you, but when I see or feel it, I know what it is".  It is sort of like the judge trying to define what obscenity means. In 1964 Judge Potter Stewart wrote an opinion in a Supreme Court case that has become famous in defining a vague term like hard-core obscenity: He famously wrote: "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."  Affordability is like that: hard to define, but a voter knows when he/she sees it.

Lying about it as Trump is doing in Iowa does not fly either. Fact check: Trump says Democrats don’t talk about affordability anymore (they do) because inflation is over (it isn’t)  It is either his staff does not dare correct him, or his gears and mouth are stuck in lying or he thinks his MAGA base is really that  dumb. 

There has been some polling to try to understand what a word like affordability means. One was just published, but the final conclusion was what it meant to most polled concerning specific costs that worried them the most.. Per a New  York Times analysis of an in-depth poll (Cross-Tabs: January 2026 Times/Siena National Poll  of Registered Voters - The New York Times): "When we asked voters what they were most worried about affording, they usually didn’t mention the costs of goods that surged in the wake of the pandemic, like gas, cars, and food. Instead, they mentioned major expenses like housing, retirement, and health care."  The Tilt - The New York Times,  in a column written by Nate Cohn and published January 28, 2026.

MUFTIC FORUM BLOG: Affordability vs economy is not about semantics; both are true at the same time