Inflation At The Checkout: The Hidden Political Cost Of Tariffs

Next month’s midterms will be the third straight election cycle where affordability has been the biggest issue for most voters.

Given how much Americans rely on cars to meet their transportation needs, and on trucking to move goods around the country, a great deal of attention has focused on gas and diesel prices.

But grocery prices are also affected by those prices — and by other policies, such as tariffs, as well as bad weather and outbreaks of disease in livestock.

And the bad news for the GOP is that, just about a month before the election, those prices are up again at bargain-basement grocer Aldi.

For just under a year now, my firm has been surveying the price of a basic weekly shopping basket for a theoretical family of four at Aldi. In some instances, we’re buying more than we might need in a week, but we’re looking to buy the best value items—which may come in bulk (e.g., I’m guessing few families actually eat ten pounds of potatoes in a week). The basket probably doesn’t 100 percent represent what your family is buying, but it’s intended to give us a snapshot that is replicable over time.

Here’s what that basket contains:

• 42 ounces of quick oats
• 2 gallons of 2% milk
• A dozen Grade A large white eggs
• 1 pound of salted butter
• 8 ounces of mild cheddar cheese
• 32 ounces of generic pasta twists
• 2 pounds of lean ground beef (5 percent fat or lower)
• 2 loaves of white bread (20 ounces each)
• 18 ounces of creamy peanut butter
• 18 ounces of strawberry jelly
• 28 ounces of crushed tomatoes
• 10 pounds of russet potatoes
• 2 pounds of carrots
• 1 pound of bananas (or six bananas)
• 10 ounces of solid white tuna in water
• 12 ounces of frozen peas
• 3 pounds of chicken nuggets
• 32 ounces of tater tots
• 12 ounces of orange juice concentrate
• 8 ounces of generic instant coffee
• 6.8 ounces instant vanilla pudding mix
• 4 cans of 10.75 ounce Campbell’s red/white can chicken noodle soup
• 1 pound of sliced bacon
• 9 ounces of uncured smoked ham
• 5 pounds of all purpose flour
• 24 ounces of original applesauce
• 4 pounds of granulated sugar
• 12 ounces of classic hot dogs
• 12 ounces of frozen corn

When we started the exercise, the prices Aldi was listing for these products online applied nationwide. Otherwise put, we couldn’t detect a discount in, say, Nevada over prices shown online that presumably were intended to apply there and in, say, Fairfield County, Connecticut, where I live and where even a family bringing in $300,000 a year feels poor.

Over the course of our surveying, we found that prices did drop in December 2025, January 2026, and February 2026.

At the end of March, however, we began running the numbers for specific locations. We thought it would be most interesting for political purposes to look at counties that were as close as possible to Trump-Biden-Trump counties in swing states, and see what was happening to prices in those locations—as opposed to, say, the darkest red and darkest blue areas in America. Here’s the list we compiled:

Maricopa County, AZ (Trump-Biden-Trump)
Clark County, NV (Clinton-Biden-Harris, but moved towards Trump in 2024)
Iowa County, WI (Clinton-Biden-Harris, but with decent movement towards Trump in 2024)
Macomb County, MI (Trump-Trump-Trump, but in the low 50s until 2024)
Erie County, PA (Trump-Biden-Trump)
Peach County, GA (Trump-Trump-Trump, but narrowly)
Nash County, NC (Trump-Biden-Trump)

We found that prices were lower at those locations—probably an indication of lower general costs in those locations compared to, say, an Aldi in Los Angeles.

And we started our county-specific analysis with this baseline. Note that in some cases, the most bargain basement goods were not available. In that instance, we decided to do what we figured most shoppers would do: Replace the product we needed, even if it meant buying a more expensive one.

Here were our costs for our weekly shop:

Maricopa County: $91.36
Clark County: $95.53
Iowa County: $96.48
Macomb County: $85.36
Erie County: $96.78
Peach County: $90.03
Nash County: $94.64

Fast forward to the end of September, and broadly speaking, it’s bad news. Here’s where things sat, with substitutions added for unavailable goods:

Maricopa County: $95.58
Clark County: $94.62
Iowa County: $93.91
Macomb County: $97.25
Erie County: $101.64
Peach County: $98.78
Nash County: $96.56

In percentage terms, here’s what that means: The price of our weekly shop has gone up, or reduced, by these amounts since we started the county-specific analysis at the end of March:

Maricopa County: +4.62 percent
Clark County: -0.95 percent
Iowa County: -2.66 percent
Macomb County: +13.93 percent
Erie County: +5.02 percent
Peach County: +9.72 percent
Nash County: +2.03 percent

Of note, prices were also up in every one of these counties over last month.

What does this all mean, politically? There’s always a chance the answer to that question is “nothing.” If both parties achieve maximum turnout of their political bases, many of those voters won’t be voting based on pocketbook issues at all. They’ll be casting ballots thinking about things like policy regarding gender transitions or climate change or something else that registers as a relatively minor concern for the biggest chunk of voters. If would-be swing voters and independents just don’t turn out much, issues like inflation could have far less of an impact.

But my suspicion is that this is on balance pretty bad for the GOP, and that it helps explain both why Republicans in Arizona, Michigan, Georgia and North Carolina are very badly-positioned to win, but why Joe Lombardo in Nevada might be better positioned than most to win re-election, even in what looks like a blue wave year. This could also be true of Tom Tiffany in Wisconsin—though I personally doubt he prevails.

Substantively and policy-wise, what does it tell us? For starters, that tariffs are bad for food prices. In every county except for Maricopa, the price of chicken noodle soup jumped by about a dollar in one month. What happened during that month? Tariffs started hitting imports from Canada, including materials used in tin cans. Not only do some metals used in canning occur naturally in Canada to an extent they just do not in the U.S. (meaning we cannot just “Buy American” our entire way out of the Campbell’s soup pricing conundrum), Canada also has a large, integrated mining/processing/manufacturing base, which makes it cheap — in the absence of tariffs — to acquire product from North of the border.

The Aldi data also hints that Trump was smart to increase cheap beef imports, as he recently did. Most Aldi stores only carry USDA product, which is “Made in America” exactly like the U.S. beef lobby would prefer; prices in those locations haven’t really moved. However, for example, at the Aldi location we use in Maricopa, imported beef is available. And surprise, surprise, the cost is lower. So, yes, tariffs do affect food prices; they are inflationary.

It’s too late for the Trump administration to learn this lesson and change course in a way that will improve voter sentiment before next month’s elections.

But it’s not too late for both political parties to take the basic point on board: People may say they want more reshoring of U.S. industry and are prepared to pay higher prices for more American-made goods. But the reality is, tariffs hit the least well-off consumers hard, and when they’re applied to goods in the grocery supply chain, they raise food prices.

We’ll see what that means in terms of their relative popularity based on next month’s election results, but data available as of now suggests that when push comes to shove, more voters want lower prices than want the sort of economic “self-reliance” that pro-tariff populists like Peter Navarro, Howard Lutnick, Jamieson Greer and, yes, Trump have historically preferred. Somewhere, Bill Clinton and the ghost of George H. W. Bush are smiling.

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Liz Mair is the owner, founder and President of Mair Strategies LLC. You can subscribe to get her firm’s grocery price updates here.

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