MESA, Ariz. – Karl Peterson has been living the cruel inverse of the American dream. His rent keeps getting higher, but his apartments keep getting smaller.
Peterson left the Midwest nine years ago for the epicenter of an economic boom, only to gradually learn that endless sunshine and desert views are increasingly among the few bargains left in Arizona. Peterson married his wife, Tani, and they struggled to save for a home, moving through four apartments as their rent nearly tripled from $625 to $1,800 a month.
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He does not believe that either presidential nominee, Democrat Kamala Harris or Republican Donald Trump, is addressing the paradox of a country that has never been this wealthy even as so many people see themselves left behind. His trust in government is running low. The negatives of inflation and national division are easier to glimpse than are signs of hope.
Voters like Peterson are at the fulcrum of the electorate in Arizona and the handful of other key states that will decide which candidate wins the White House and which party controls Congress.
“I don’t think they’re addressing what’s really going on with me, with my family,” said Peterson, who figures he will need to leave Mesa, east of Phoenix and the state's third-largest city, for Indiana or Wisconsin if he ever hopes to attain the middle-class promise of owning his own home.
Promises by both parties to “help the middle class” ring hollow to many voters who have heard those commitments before, only to see the pressures on housing, education, career, parenthood and the tending of their own aging parents mount.
Harris has pledged $25,000 for first-time homebuyers and tax breaks for new parents. The Trump campaign says mass deportations of migrants living in the U.S. without permanent legal permission will free up housing and that higher tariffs will create job opportunities. Voters are focused on the inflation of the past three years, but Federal Reserve data reveal a deeper gap in which the United States has so much wealth that it can be easy for anyone to feel worse off than their neighbors.
Being — and staying — middle class in a nation of millionaires
Fed data released late last year point toward this complicated reality.
In 2022, when many voters felt inflation was strangling the economy, for the first time the average U.S. household was worth more than $1 million. Yet there is a difference between meeting that average and being the typical household, despite gains since 2019. The median household had a net worth of just $192,900. That's the level at which half are above and half are below.
Plenty of Americans can look at their personal finances and see reasons for comfort, even if they mostly register despair when asked about the health of the country as a whole. Nearly 6 in 10 described their own economic situation as good, even as 7 in 10 said the nation was on the wrong track, according to a September poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs.
John Akers, 34, is one who feels lucky with how the economy has treated him, but worries too many of his family and friends are being left behind.
He and his wife have seen their fortunes improve over the past several years as their high-end audio-visual business has thrived, and the fixer-upper they bought in 2015 in Phoenix has proved to be a wise investment.
At the same time, some of their aging relatives have struggled with rising costs, and a few close friends are thinking about ditching Arizona to find cheaper housing. It's left him wondering if Washington is too focused on hot-button cultural issues.
“No matter what, we're going to have polarization at the end of this election,” said Akers, who plans to vote for Trump. “The political conversation is too often pitting the middle class against each other, and there's been too little focus on the issues that matter, like inflation and housing costs.”
Arizona's economic gains make it a swing state
In some ways, Arizona's Maricopa County is proof of America’s vitality and ability to generate wealth out of seemingly nothing but grit, hard work and applied intelligence.
The state’s 11 electoral votes could make the difference in who wins the presidency, yet the area’s success is overshadowed by fierce political hostilities and a sense that in a warming, costlier world, things are bound to get harder.
The county was once nothing but desert, so vast and with so few people before World War II. But the land was cheap and once water and air conditioning arrived, the cities of Phoenix, Scottsdale, Chandler, Glendale, Tempe and Mesa spread across the once dry sandstone.
Tech companies like Intel, TSMC, Google and others arrived, as developers said the time it took to get approval for a new housing development in the county increased. Out of the biggest counties nationwide, Maricopa posted the largest percentage job gains so far this year, according to the Labor Department. Home prices have nearly doubled since 2016, according to Zillow.
The population surge — Phoenix is now the fifth largest U.S. city — also has fostered competing political beliefs in which the one source of unity is a mutual frustration with government leadership.
A little more than half of Arizona voters said the government should do more to solve people’s problems, according to AP VoteCast, a sweeping survey of the electorate, while less than half said the government was already doing too much. That year, about one-third of the state’s voters identified as “moderates” — a group whose votes could be critical to the outcome of the Nov. 5 election.
Voters see reasons to doubt both candidates' commitment to help
Abel Ramirez, 32, is an assistant pastor at the Baptist church where Karl Peterson worships. Ramirez voted for Trump in 2020, firmly opposes abortion, questions the credibility of the 2020 election that Democrat Joe Biden won, and believes Biden’s administration is too supportive of LGBTQ+ rights.
His family lives in a manufactured home in a mobile home park and he figures that once all his kids are in school, his wife can work full time and he can take on a second job so they can buy a house. But he’s dismayed by a politics geared toward hurting rivals instead of helping voters.
“When it comes to helping the citizen, helping a guy that’s got to go to work every day to provide for their family, I'm not hearing too much about it,” Ramirez said. He is considering not voting in this election.
Samantha Lopez, who voted for Biden in 2020, believes the federal government needs to spend more on education, secure abortion rights and do more to expand Americans’ access to health care.
A student at Arizona State University, Lopez recently moved back to her parents’ home about 15 miles from campus after it became clear to her that it would be too difficult to keep up with rent and groceries while paying for school.
“The future feels really unpredictable right now,” said Lopez, who is uncertain how she will vote, between serving customers earlier this year at her part-time job at a downtown Phoenix doughnut shop.
It's all about the housing market
Maricopa County is a microcosm of the boom that has driven American prosperity over the past two presidencies, powering through the Great Recession's housing bust and pandemic era shutdowns. But that boom also destabilized people's confidence in the real estate market that helped drive the growth
More people moved into the area than its cities and neighborhoods could absorb, pushing prices up in ways that made mortgage rates of 6%-plus troubling. Homeowners felt they could not afford to sell and buy a new property. Renters felt that the promise of middle-class stability was increasingly out of reach.
“Many voters see home prices and 30-year mortgage rates and compare that to the experience of their parents and grandparents and say ‘I’m never going to own a home,’” said Glenn Farley, director of policy and research at the nonprofit Common Sense Institute Arizona. “Until those things are brought back under control, voters are going to continue to be sour.”
Other worries also overshadow progress. The country is more educated and more diverse, yet there are persistent worries about mass shootings, crime, personal liberties, illegal immigration, climate change and the capacity of the government to fix any of it.
Why do so many Americans feel bad about the economy? Blame our politics
Americans are finding firsthand that prosperity is not the same as opportunity.
The University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment index, a well-regarded barometer of confidence in the economy, is lower now than during the height of the 2020 pandemic. The index, with Biden in power, shows that people also think about the economy based on their political identity. with Democrats comparatively optimistic and Republicans decidedly bleak.
When Republican John Giles was elected mayor of Mesa in 2014, his goal was to have a place where his children and grandchildren could live.
It’s easy to overlook the city in the shadow of Phoenix, but Mesa’s population of 511,648 makes it larger than Atlanta, Miami or Minneapolis. The closing of Williams Air Force Base three decades ago led Mesa to recruit leading companies and Giles treats his state of the city addresses like a CEO at a tech rollout, recreating scenes from the time-travel movie “Back to the Future” and hanging out with shock rocker Alice Cooper.
But Giles made headlines by endorsing Harris and speaking at the Democratic National Convention in August, saying that her policies would be more helpful for his city than would Trump's. Giles sees the negativity swirling around the population as a byproduct of the politics in which ideologically driven media elevates conspiracy theories and consistently seeks to perpetuate division instead of rewarding problem-solving.
“I always used to think the political spectrum was a pendulum," he said. "There were these forces that would bring us back to seeing the flaws of extremism. But now there’s a lot of people making a lot of money promoting extreme political thought. To be successful at that, you have to fan people’s fears and tell them that they’re unhappy.”
He looks at the economic data — 4.1% unemployment, new computer chips plants opening in Arizona, record levels of factory construction spending, a higher stock market and inflation easing — and confesses that he’s never been one who could overlook the facts and toe the Republican Party line.
“President Biden should be hoisted on our shoulders and walked to the top of the mountain,” he said.
Plenty of new wealth, but a great sense of uncertainty
As economist Farley, who once worked for former Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, sees it, Arizona packed in generations of wealth creation in less than a decade. Its chief virtue was always its proximity to California and ability to capture both people and employers who found that state’s taxes and cost of living to be too high.
Farley said Arizona had a reliable climate and affordable electricity costs, adding 20,000 businesses in under eight years as posh steak houses opened in Paradise Valley, the small Phoenix suburb that is the state's richest city, and Waymo had driverless Jaguar sedans ferrying people through Scottsdale. But that growth also came with the need for a larger services sector with more people working for lower wages and inequality became clearer.
“We’re not the growth state anymore, but we’re not the mature state," he said.
The pandemic also changed Arizona’s economy.
After the Great Recession, it was adding roughly 40,000 people a year on average from other states. But when the pandemic hit, the prospect of bigger homes brought in roughly 100,000 people in 2020, more than what the housing market could absorb. Median home prices in Maricopa County jumped to a peak of $500,767 in July 2022, leaving many renters unable to buy a home.
Trevor Cowling, the assistant pastor at the Baptist church in Mesa, bought his 1,500 square foot home in 2020 for $225,000 with a 3.1% mortgage rate. Mortgage rates more than doubled, until easing recently, as have the prices in his neighborhood.
“The Lord has taken care of us,” said Cowling, who said he could not afford his home at current mortgage rates.
But housing is just one problem.
People in the middle class also feel they’re no longer able to afford schooling or groceries as before.
Juvi Arvizu, 31, with a 5-year-old son in Phoenix, said shopping that used to cost her about $120 a week now often costs $200. After her divorce and with crime rising after pandemic, she moved to a smaller home in a safer neighborhood and decided to enroll her son in a public kindergarten, after having him in a private preschool.
Arvizu voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton for president in 2016. Frustrated by the tenor of the 2020 race, Arvizu she skipped voting. She said she plans on voting in November, but is uncertain for whom.
Regardless who wins, she is skeptical that Washington will be delivering relief to working people like her anytime soon.
“It feels like things are only going to get a lot harder,” Arvizu said.
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Boak reported from Washington.