11/21/2021- 12:45 p.m.
The president’s recent tour of ports, bridges and car factories – which was intended to promote infrastructure legislation – has been overshadowed in part by inflation fears.
When he test-drive an electric Hummer at a General Motors plant in Detroit this week, his message about a future of zero-emission vehicles was overshadowed by a gift that sees Americans driving more miles in conventional vehicles, contributing to rising gas prices.
Representative Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat in a vulnerable borough of the House, wrote to Mr. Biden this week that inflation was her voters’ top concern.
A former CIA analyst in Iraq, she urged the president to pressure Saudi Arabia to increase oil production.
Ms. Slotkin, who won her seat in the 2018 midterm wave, is one of two Michigan Democrats in highly competitive districts, including the suburbs of Detroit.
In the Trump years, Democrats had mixed results in the populous region, advancing in white-collar communities but losing ground with their traditional union supporters.
In an interview, Ms. Slotkin said that during a recent home visit, she constantly heard about the high cost of gas and groceries, and experienced it herself. “I buy groceries, I drive a ton,” she said. “Thanksgiving week will be by far more expensive than last Thanksgiving.”
She acknowledged the political danger that rising consumer prices could pose to her party if it continues next year. “Kitchen table issues affect Michigan and the Midwest more than any other national problem in Washington,” she said.
In interviews with voters in suburban Detroit, including Mrs. Slotkin’s district and that of the second vulnerable Democrat, Representative Haley Stevens, residents almost universally acknowledged the pain of rising prices on their budgets.
But it was unclear from their records that the Democrats would suffer politically. Most voters blamed their party leanings — as they do for nearly all issues in an age of hyperpolarization.
Hazel Park’s Margie Kulaga, a 2020 Trump voter, said she paid 49 cents a pound, up from 33 cents a pound last year, for a 23-pound turkey she just bought from a Kroger market.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, meat and egg prices in the Midwest are up 11.9 percent from a year ago.
