For much of 2025 we have been mocking the University of Michigan survey, and especially its short and long-term inflation expectation question, for the simple reason that the divergence between republican and democrat respondents is no longer merely grotesque but is a caricature of Goebbelsian propaganda, meant to spark fear that runaway inflation is coming and crash markets (even as today’s CPI showed – again – it isn’t).
But maybe we were wrong all along, and Democrats – who by definition live mostly in Democratic states – are indeed experiencing higher inflation.
According to a geographic analysis of price trends from Bloomberg, while the overall US inflation rate rose 2.4% in May from a year earlier, sharp geographic divergences remain. Indeed, bicoastal inflation in the predominantly Democratic states along the East and the West coasts of the country were generally above the US average, and far above Republicans strongholds like flyover states and the deep south.