Affordability, DOGE and the language that captured American politics in 2025 |
O'Leary Ventures chairman Kevin O'Leary analyzes the Trump administration's economic boom push and the impact of A.I. on the job market on 'The Story.'
The Words That Remade America in 2025
There's a peculiar magic to language moments — those rare instances when a phrase or term suddenly captures something we've all been feeling, but couldn't quite articulate, and then refuses to let go. For most of 2025, I found myself cataloging them, watching as new words and reframed ideas metastasized through our politics, our culture, our everyday conversations in ways that felt genuinely consequential.
If I had to identify the single most consequential word of the year — the one that actually changed the trajectory of elections and scrambled the political narrative — it would be this: affordability.
Affordability: The Word That Rewired Everything
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Here's what fascinates me about the rise of "affordability" as a political frame. For decades, we've operated on the assumption that "the economy" is what matters. It's what campaigns organize around. It's what polling measures. It's what pundits obsess over.
Republicans entered 2025 confident this would hold. Jobs were up. Growth was real. By traditional economic metrics, they should have swept elections nationwide. They didn't. And the reason reveals something crucial about how language actually works — not as data, but as meaning.
Democrats made a deliberate pivot. They stopped saying "economy." They started saying "affordability."
It's a small linguistic move with staggering implications. "Economy" is abstract, statistical, disconnected from lived experience. You can argue about GDP while people feel broke. "Affordability" is visceral. It's your grocery bill. Your rent. Your ability to afford healthcare or childcare or a place to live in the city where you work. It's immediate and personal and undeniable.
The polling told the story: affordability wasn't even measured as a distinct metric in 2024. By the 2025 elections, it was everything. Democrats gained eight points on the issue in the two months before the vote — eight points that translated to flipped races and disappointed Republicans who couldn't understand why their economic talking points weren't landing.
The Miami mayor's race is instructive. For 30 years, Miami had a Republican mayor. Then a Democrat running on affordability flipped it.........