With less than a fortnight until Americans head to the polls, the Guardian’s US operation is convening a specialist panel of business and labour correspondents to field reader questions on the economic forces shaping the midterm verdict. The live digital event, scheduled for Thursday at 12pm Eastern Time, arrives as household budgets remain the singular issue cutting across partisan lines.
The panel and the brief
Four reporters will share the virtual stage: Lauren Aratani and Gaya Gupta on the business desk, Michael Sainato covering labour, and Heather Timmons focusing on consumer and corporate rights. Between them, they have tracked the inflation surge, the tariff fallout, the tightrope walk of the Federal Reserve under its new chair, Kevin Warsh, and the policy proposals each party has put forward as remedy. The session is the fourth in a series of pre-election Q&As; previous editions examined the Democratic coalition’s composition, the dark-money networks bankrolling candidates, and the electoral reverberations of the Iran conflict.
An economy that defies easy spin
Polls consistently place the cost of living at the top of the voter agenda. Food and petrol prices remain elevated, the jobs market sends mixed signals, and consumer sentiment has soured to levels rarely seen outside recession. The White House argues that macroeconomic fundamentals — low unemployment, rising wages at the bottom end, resilient GDP growth — tell a story of recovery. Republicans counter that real wages have fallen for eighteen consecutive months and that the administration’s spending programmes lit the inflationary fuse. The panel will be expected to adjudicate between those narratives without adopting either as gospel.
Format and access
Readers must register or sign in to submit questions, a measure the Guardian says keeps the conversation civil and traceable. The hour-long stream will be embedded on the Guardian US homepage and archived for on-demand viewing. Editors have signalled they will prioritise questions that probe specific policy mechanisms — how a proposed gas-tax holiday would be funded, what the Fed’s next rate move implies for mortgage holders, whether the CHIPS Act can reshhoring manufacturing jobs in time to matter politically — over broad partisan point-scoring.
Context: a newsletter and a narrative
The Q&A series sits alongside The Stakes, a weekly midterms newsletter that distils race-level reporting into a digestible briefing. Together they reflect a newsroom strategy that treats the midterms not as a horserace but as a referendum on governance. A companion piece published this week, As the US midterms approach, Trump’s boasts on the economy fall flat with voters, underscores the central tension: a former president claiming credit for a boom he did not oversee, while the incumbent party struggles to convince the electorate that stability is preferable to disruption.
Why it Matters
In an election cycle awash with culture-war theatrics, the Guardian’s decision to hand the microphone to subject-matter specialists rather than pundits is a quiet act of journalistic discipline. If the midterms ultimately hinge on kitchen-table economics — as every available metric suggests they will — then equipping voters with granular, non-partisan analysis may prove more consequential than any rally soundbite or attack ad. The public’s trust in institutions is fraying; transparent, expertise-driven dialogue is one of the few tools left to mend it.