It was a night of historic wins for the candidates who understood that “affordability” was at the heart of this election. But the lesson of this election is bigger than the price of eggs and gas, and every candidate – Democrat and Republican – who won should be careful not to miss the point of what voters really want.
As Black business leaders who are experts in navigating and building economic opportunity when the system doesn’t deliver, we had a hunch “affordability” wasn’t telling the whole story. So we spent months before Election Day asking voters and confirmed we were right.
Through internal polling conducted by Workbench Strategies during July 2026 of 1,400 voters, including an oversample of 400 Black voters, and our two-way texting conversations with voters, we found that they gravitated toward a combination of solutions that provide immediate relief from rising costs and build pathways to help them get ahead. For example, nearly half of all voters chose both caps on medical and prescription costs (45 percent) and increasing wages to keep up with the cost of living (43 percent) as a top-three priority. Black voters were even more focused on higher wages, with 56 percent choosing it as a top-three priority.
And over and over again, voters in focus groups conducted by HIT Strategies said that they wanted to take control of their own economic futures and for leaders to remove barriers to opportunity.
It was easy to see leading up to the election that candidates who recognized these concerns and built agendas around addressing both affordability and economic opportunity would be rewarded at the ballot box. Now that we can sit with the results of the election, it’s clear that what voters were calling an affordability crisis is also an economic mobility crisis. And now, the newly elected Congress has only 18 months to demonstrate it understands the difference and begin to deliver on both.
Yes, lowering prices matters – but that only helps Americans get to the end of the month.
Helping Americans really get ahead will take solutions that make it possible to own a home, finance a business, compete for a contract, and turn a lifetime of work into lasting financial security for their children and grandchildren – in other words, it will take building pathways to work, wages, and wealth.
This conversation matters for more than economic reasons: our democracy is still on the line.
A growing body of research finds links between economic inequality, institutional distrust, and democratic backsliding. If elected officials fail to create meaningful pathways for far more Americans to get ahead – making sure work pays, wages rise, and wealth can be built – they should not be surprised when voters look elsewhere for answers in 2028 and beyond. Nor should they expect trust in our economy, our institutions, or our democracy to rebound on its own.
Fixing this requires a bold, affirmative economic plan – and for our leaders to realize they’re on the clock with voters to deliver. The good news is that there are solutions that address both sides of the challenge: actions that can help families manage rising costs today while expanding the pathways that help people get ahead over the long term.
Lawmakers should lower costs where families feel the greatest pressure. That means promoting competition in prescription drugs, lowering grocery costs, and expanding proven tax credits that help working families keep more of what they earn.
But lowering costs alone is not enough.
Leaders must also expand pathways to work, wages, and wealth by increasing access to homeownership, supporting entrepreneurship and small business growth, expanding opportunities for workers to own a piece of corporate profits, raising wages, and ensuring that economic growth reaches communities too often left behind.
Finally, leaders must restore trust that the economic rules are fair. That means increasing transparency in concentrated markets, enforcing fair competition, and ensuring tax regulations do not disproportionately reward those who accumulate wealth.
If leaders do not take immediate steps to address rising costs and make the country’s founding promise of opportunity a reality for more Black Americans, and consequently all Americans, we’ll continue in a downward spiral: lack of faith in economic opportunity causes lack of faith in democracy, which harms the whole economy.
Every leader who won in 2026 should take this warning seriously and signal to voters that they understand the mandate underpinning those wins. The clock starts now.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.