As US President Donald Trump hits the campaign trail in the final sprint to the midterm elections, he is launching an emphatic defence of America's economic performance, trying - as he often does - to bend reality to his will. "We have the best economic numbers of any president in the history of our country, and yet people don't know about it because the press won't talk about it," he said last week. While some economic indicators, including roaring stock market indexes and low US poverty rates, are indeed historic, the overall picture is not nearly as rosy.
Trump is often dismissive of concerns about affordability and the high cost of living in the US, describing them as "fake" and a Democrat-inspired "hoax". The American public, however, sees it differently - and some key economic indicators provide ample evidence for their discontent. Inflation remains high at 3.4%, outpacing wage growth.
The average cost of petrol has soared to $4.37 (£3.30) a gallon and beef prices are at a record high. According to a YouGov survey, 63% of respondents believe the economy is "getting worse". An AP/NORC poll released last week found just 17% of adult Americans approve of the president's handling of cost-of-living issues, while 26% approve of his handling of the economy overall.
Those polls also suggest that many of Trump's policies, including tariffs, aggressive immigration enforcement and the ongoing conflict with Iran, are widely unpopular. "We ask our voters their motivation to turn out, and what we find is cost of living, cost of living, cost of living," said Avery James, the director of communications at the Republican-aligned polling company Echelon Insights. "That's the top issue." That has left Republicans running for office in the Congressional elections on 3 November with an agonising choice - should they be distancing themselves from Trump?
Their fear is that by echoing his sunny outlook they risk losing a number of electoral races that are currently projected to be very tight. But they also know that being seen to break with the president on the state of the economy is far from consequence free. There are few Republican politicians as loyal to the president as Floridian House Congressman Byron Donalds.
And there are few US states as traditionally hospitable to Republicans as Florida. But even in the president's adopted home, which he carried in each of his three elections and which hasn't had a Democratic governor since 1999, candidates like Donalds are finding themselves having to adapt their pro-Republican messaging to acknowledge economic concerns. Donalds - who stood by Trump as he fought his way back to power after his 2020 election defeat and took a prominent role in his 2024 election campaign - is now running for governor of Florida, with Trump's encouragement and enthusiastic endorsement.
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