Before defeating a House incumbent in the 2024 election, Republican Rob Bresnahan accused Democrats of “gaslighting” voters by arguing that grocery prices were not surging.
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Now Bresnahan is seeking reelection in his Pennsylvania swing district and running ads acknowledging that grocery prices are still too high. “Grocery receipts are getting shorter, but the price keeps going up,” Bresnahan says to the camera.
Those circumstances highlight the bind that Republicans — especially those who flipped seats in 2024 — are in ahead of the 2026 midterms. After successfully running on bringing prices down, Republicans face an economy jolted by President Donald Trump’s war with Iran, while rising gas prices imperil the party’s hopes of keeping control of the House.
Pennsylvania is home to four of the most competitive House districts. Two are represented by freshman Republicans who unseated Democrats in 2024 with an economic message that also helped Trump defeat Kamala Harris by two percentage points in the key battleground state.
House Republicans are running on efforts they have taken to make life more affordable, primarily through changes to taxes on tips and overtime implemented in Trump’s sweeping 2025 tax-and-spending law. The president often claims he is overseeing the “best economy ever” and disregarding the Democratic focus on affordability as a “hoax.”
Trump is scheduled to return to Pennsylvania on Wednesday to deliver remarks at a summit intended to tout the state’s role in defense and technology industries. The president’s remarks will follow a session with Sen. David McCormick (R-Pennsylvania) and JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who has warned shareholders that the Iran war threatens significant oil price shocks that could lead to persistent inflation.
Trump on Monday reposted coverage of his June visit to Pennsylvania, where he promised consumers that costs were coming down and they were far better off than they were two years ago.
He also took a victory lap on the Labor Department’s announcement that inflation cooled in June as gas prices tumbled.
“That means prices are coming way down, and we’re doing a great job,” Trump said on Tuesday. “And remember that. Remember that for the midterms.”
The president did not acknowledge that the latest report reflected a drop in energy prices that occurred after a mid-June agreement extended a tentative ceasefire with Iran. The report does not reflect the spike in energy prices since fighting resumed in Iran in recent days.
The average price for a gallon of gas in Pennsylvania hit $3.97 on Tuesday, up from $3.79 a week ago. Renewed fighting and Trump’s announcement Monday that he would reimpose a blockade on Iranian shipping raised Brent crude futures, a key benchmark for energy prices, by nearly 6 percent over the last five days.
Voters continue to face higher inflation than they did when President Joe Biden left office in January 2025, when the consumer price index was 3 percent. And strategists expect higher prices will continue to be top of mind for voters as they head to the polls later this year.
“Voters have said resoundingly over the years, ‘Yes, it does matter, and we don’t care about whose fault it is, we don’t like it,’” said Christopher Nicholas, a Republican strategist in Pennsylvania. “And voters tend to take it out on the party in power.”
Bresnahan exemplifies how Republicans’ messaging on prices was successful in 2024. He defeated incumbent Democrat Matt Cartwright by just over 6,000 votes in a Northeast Pennsylvania district. The Republican was a fixture on local radio during the campaign, often lambasting Democrats for failing to understand how rising prices were affecting his would-be constituents.
“We’re fed up with paying too much at the grocery store. We’re fed up paying too much for groceries. We’re fed up paying too much for rent. We’re fed up paying for utilities that are out of this world,” Bresnahan said on the conservative “Bob Cordaro Show” a week before Election Day in 2024.
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A year after ousting Cartwright, Bresnahan’s Thanksgiving message on X assured Pennsylvania voters were “finally getting to feed their families for less” because of “lower prices.”
But government data released shortly after Bresnahan’s tweet found prices, particularly for food, rose between November and December in 2025, higher than they were at the same time in 2024. The trend has continued into 2026, when the same government data found inflation climbed at its fastest rate in nearly four years, in part because of the war with Iran. Trump said last week that the ceasefire with Iran is now over, and conflict has reignited around the Strait of Hormuz, a development that is likely to drive prices higher.
Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti, the Democrat challenging Bresnahan, has repeatedly accused him of violating his promise to lower costs by backing the president’s war and other policies. “Instead of focusing on lowering costs, he’s sending our tax dollars overseas while our prices keep rising at home,” she posted on June 4.
Samantha Bullock, a campaign spokeswoman for Bresnahan, blamed Democrats for continuing economic troubles.
“Joe Biden and the Democrats’ reckless spending left an enormous economic mess that Republicans like Rep. Bresnahan continue to clean up through the implementation of policies that put hardworking Americans first,” Bullock said in a statement.
Republican Ryan Mackenzie, the other Pennsylvania GOP freshman in a competitive reelection race, ousted Rep. Susan Wild (D) in 2024 by promising “real change” on inflation and blaming Democrats for ignoring it.
“Right now, families all across our country are getting crushed by inflationary prices,” Mackenzie said at a debate in September 2024. In interviews, he said people were having to “change their lifestyle just to put food on the table,” and that “the Democrats and the mainstream media want to gloss over that and tell you how great things are.”
While Mackenzie often notes that “more work remains” on bringing prices down, he has argued that inflation and prices are falling. “After four years of uncontrolled inflation, American families are finally seeing price stability,” he wrote on X in 2025.
And Mackenzie, who is running against Democratic firefighter union president Bob Brooks, campaigned alongside Trump earlier this year when the president claimed that “prices are coming down right now at levels that you’ve never seen.”
Mackenzie said his top priority is reducing the cost of living and he blamed the Biden administration for the “hole” families are currently digging out of.
“As I have done from the beginning, I’ll keep working to deliver on the affordability priorities of the American people,” he said in a statement.
Democrats who were burned by the focus on prices in 2024 see nearly the same arguments that sunk them two years ago as their most powerful weapon against Republicans this year.
“They were not subtle about this in 2024. There were these signs all over Pennsylvania that said Trump, low prices; Kamala, high prices,” recalled J.J. Abbott, a Democratic strategist in Pennsylvania. “So they have created for themselves this permission structure to have to own all the prices for themselves.”
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