EXCLUSIVE — The Cost Coalition, a bipartisan group opposed to President Donald Trump‘s economic agenda, is looking to maintain momentum coming out of the 2025 elections with “targeted” affordability-focused investment campaigns for both House and Senate races during the 2026 cycle.
The group was founded in May by Terry Holt, a longtime adviser to former President George W. Bush and former House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), and Andrew Bates, a White House spokesperson for former President Joe Biden. Austin Weatherford, the former chief of staff to former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), also joined the coalition earlier this year.
The group will send a memo, obtained by the Washington Examiner, to political allies and donors on Friday, previewing an aggressive expansion of successful 2025 campaign strategies early next year.
“Trump voters feel burned by broken economic promises, and Tuesday’s results demonstrate that they are imminently persuadable with a message focused squarely on costs,” the memo reads. “Trump and his allies will spend huge sums to try and dig themselves out of the hole they’ve dug. Which means it’s critical to put our foot on the gas pedal even more.”
The memo additionally teased plans to actively engage in both House and Senate races in the 2026 cycle, with plans to announce new endorsements and launch ad campaigns targeting “working families, veterans and military families, small businesses, and people of faith” in the first quarter of next year.
Cost Coalition officials declined to provide an estimate for the expected total ad spend.
The bipartisan efforts mirror a Biden campaign tactic, later picked up by former Vice President Kamala Harris, to court Republican voters disaffected by Trump. That effort failed during the 2024 cycle, but, since Cost Coalition’s launch in May, the group appears to have made a significant impact.
The group endorsed both Governors-elect Mikie Sherill (D-NJ) and Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) in late spring and hit the pavement in New Jersey and Virginia throughout the summer and fall.
Affordability messaging certainly resonated with voters last Tuesday, with exit polls consistently ranking elevated prices as the top issue this cycle.
“Lowering costs is the way to create a big tent in a time when Washington is making life
unaffordable. A credible, bipartisan messenger laser-focused on affordability can make an even
bigger, unique impact in 2026 and beyond,” Cost Coalition’s memo concludes.
Trump and Republicans have sought to downplay the effect that the president’s economic agenda had on last Tuesday’s results, most notably with Trump telling reporters at the White House that affordability is a “con job” by the Democrats.
“The Democrats are good at a few things, cheating on elections and conning people with facts that aren’t true. We are much better than [former President Joe] Biden and all of them now, just so you understand,” he stated last week. “Do you remember that the Biden administration had the highest inflation in 48 years? The reason I don’t want to talk about affordability is because everybody knows that it’s far less expensive under Trump than it was under sleepy Joe Biden.”
Still, Trump’s deputy chief of staff James Blair conceded in a post-election interview with Politico that Trump “recognizes, like anybody, that it takes time to do an economic turnaround.”
“Why did Zohran Mamdani do so well [Tuesday] night? He relentlessly focused on affordability,” Blair proffered. “People talk about communists; they can say all these things, but the fact is, he was talking about the cost of living.”
And Trump himself has announced a number of proposals that seem keenly focused on addressing souring consumer sentiment.
Last Friday, the president directed the Justice Department to open a price-fixing investigation into meatpacking companies. On Saturday, Bill Pulte, the president’s Federal Housing Finance Agency director, confirmed that the administration is “working on” a 50-year mortgage option for homebuyers. On Sunday, Trump touted on Truth Social how his tariffs were making the United States “the Richest, Most Respected Country In the World” and his plans to use tariff revenue to send taxpayers a $2,000 stimulus check, “not including high-income people.”
TRUMP SAYS AFFORDABILITY IS A ‘DEAD’ ISSUE. HIS RECENT PROPOSALS SAY OTHERWISE
On Monday, Trump suggested that he would authorize $10,000 bonuses for any air traffic controllers who did not take time off during the government shutdown. Pulte again made headlines on Wednesday by announcing that the administration is “evaluating” plans for portable mortgages.
