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By Daniel Bush
White House Correspondent
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Republicans are in danger of losing control of the House in next year’s midterm elections amid growing voter concern about affordability, former Ohio Republican governor John Kasich said Thursday.
Democratic victories last month in state and local elections that turned on affordability issues and a closer-than-expected congressional race this week in Tennessee underscored the public’s mounting unease with the direction of the economy under President Donald Trump, Kasich said in an interview with Newsweek.
“The voters have spoken. They believe that the economy is not in good shape and they’re upset about rising prices,” said Kasich, a former House lawmaker and longtime Trump critic who ran for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. “And Republicans know it.”
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The 2026 midterms are “going to be very tough for the Republicans,” Kasich added. “I expect they’re not going to hold the House.”
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Trump has gone back and forth on the question of affordability in recent weeks as he seeks to refocus attention on his economic agenda heading into the 2026 midterms.
The president praised Zohran Mamdani at a White House meeting last month after Mamdani made cost of living issues a centerpiece of his winning New York City mayoral campaign.
But Trump changed course this week, saying that affordability was a “con job” perpetrated by Democrats and blaming the Biden administration for inflation.
“It doesn’t mean anything to anybody. They just say it, affordability,” Trump said of Democrats, during an event Tuesday in the Oval Office. “I inherited the worst inflation in history. There was no affordability. Nobody could afford anything.”
Kasich said that argument won’t resonate with voters.
“You can’t convince people about how much they’re spending on items when they go to the grocery store,” he said.
The former Ohio governor argued that Trump could regain momentum on economic issues by backing a push to balance the federal budget. Kasich championed a balanced budget plan in a column published online Thursday, and said he sent the proposal to the White House.
Newsweek reached out to the White House for comment.
In the Newsweek interview, Kasich also touched on Trump’s popularity with Republicans and the 2028 election.
According to a new Gallup poll, Trump’s approval rating has fallen five percentage points to 36 percent, the lowest mark of his second term. Trump remains popular with Republicans, the poll found, but his support has dropped somewhat in his first year back in office.
Some 84 percent of Republicans said they approved of Trump’s job performance in November, compared with 91 percent in January.
“You can see that the Republican support is not what it was. It’s dropped,” Kasich. He said that he didn’t expect Trump to lose much support among core Make America Great Again voters, however.
Kasich predicted crowded primary fields for both Republicans and Democrats in 2028.
“There’s going to be a wide open primary” for the Republican presidential nomination, Kasich said. On the other side of the aisle, “the question for the Democrats is simply going to be can they nominate somebody that understands the values of the public,” he said. “If they go far left again they’ll get wiped out.”
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