Inflation and the cost of living have been the biggest drivers of campaigns this year, but the broad term “affordability” breaks down into specific issues, from housing to health care. Affordability has become the buzzword of the midterm campaigns. Around the country, candidates are trying hard to relate to voters’ economic pain.

But Republicans are handicapped by the grind of war, promises they made on inflation during the 2024 campaign and a president who alternatively insists that prices have declined and then dismisses the issue as a con job created by Democrats. Democrats may still have to answer for inflation that hit a four-decade high as the Covid-19 pandemic was receding; Republicans continue to blame today’s economic woes on the Biden administration. Though the overall economy is resilient — 162,000 jobs were added to the market in August — voters across the political divide rank the cost of living as a top issue in public polls.

“Candidates are responding to what people are feeling, what people know on a day-to-day basis and what they see at the grocery stores or gas station. You can’t out-message their reality,” said Todd Belt, a professor at George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management.

Democrats seized on affordability as a five-alarm crisis, recasting an issue that helped propel Mr. Trump’s return to the White House into a midterm weakness for Republicans. Voters have expressed deep skepticism of President Trump’s handling of the economy. Candidates are promising to lower necessities such as groceries, gas, utilities, housing, child care and health care. Roy Cooper’s “Make Stuff Cost Less” tour, Byron Donalds’s “Defending the Florida Dream” tour and Dr. Annie Andrews’s “Gas, Grits and Groceries” tour focus on big-ticket necessities; since the pandemic, home prices have climbed around 50 percent, while 30 percent of income now marks housing cost burdened.