The American public has done the math on corporate leadership and come back with a hard no. A new poll from Brunswick Group and Echelon Insights, first reported by Axios, finds that CEOs are facing a deeply skeptical electorate that is overwhelmingly focused on one thing: the fact that everything costs too much and nobody at the top seems to be losing any sleep over it.
The Number That Should Keep C-Suites Awake
Let's start with the headline figure. According to the Brunswick Group and Echelon Insights poll, shared first with Axios, 41% of Americans said their single biggest issue right now is something tied directly to affordability — cost of living, the economy, or jobs. Not culture wars. Not whatever happened on social media this week. Groceries. Rent. Whether the paycheck stretches to the end of the month.
That is not a niche concern. That is nearly half the country pointing at their wallets and saying this is the problem. When four in ten Americans independently land on the same category of answer in an open-ended priority question, you are not looking at a messaging problem. You are looking at a material crisis that has become the defining political fact of daily American life.
For context: the midterms are less than 100 days away. Every politician in the country is staring at that 41% figure and trying to figure out whose fault it is. The answer voters seem to have settled on is: everyone who has been running things. That includes Washington. And it very much includes corporate America.
CEOs Want to Be Neutral. Voters Don't Care.
The Brunswick and Echelon poll, as Axios reports, carries a specific advisory message for corporate leaders: build trust through consistency and neutrality, rather than chasing political headwinds. That is the sanitized, boardroom-friendly version of advice that translates roughly to: stop trying to be MAGA one quarter and socially conscious the next, because people have noticed and they hate it.
Here is the uncomfortable truth buried inside that advice. Neutrality is not a safe harbor when people can't afford their insulin or their kids' school supplies. Telling a CEO to be "consistent and neutral" on affordability is like telling a doctor to maintain a neutral position on whether the patient is bleeding. At some point, the abstention itself becomes the statement.
Corporate America spent years convincing itself that stakeholder capitalism and ESG commitments were the path forward. Then the political winds shifted, half of those same companies sprinted away from their own public pledges, and the public watched every step of it. The poll result is not surprising. It is the receipt.
The Midterm Math Is Getting Ugly
The timing of this polling is not accidental. Brunswick Group and Echelon Insights are not releasing this data as an academic exercise. With midterms less than 100 days out, as Axios points out, this is a warning shot to corporate leaders that their public standing is now a live political variable.
When the dominant voter emotion is fury about affordability, any CEO who wades into politics risks being cast as either a villain or a hypocrite. The companies that slashed workforces while posting record profits, the ones that blamed supply chains for price hikes and then quietly kept prices elevated long after supply chains normalized — those decisions are baked into how Americans feel about business leadership right now. No amount of "consistent and neutral" messaging is going to rinse that out before November.
And the politicians know it. Expect to see corporate executives become a recurring punching bag in campaign ads between now and election day, regardless of which party is throwing the punch. "The out-of-touch CEO" is a villain archetype that plays well across party lines when people are genuinely struggling.
Affordability Is Not a Vibe. It's a Verdict.
It is worth being precise about what "affordability" means as a political issue, because pundits have a tendency to treat it as an abstract economic sentiment rather than a concrete lived experience. The 41% of Americans in this poll are not expressing a vague unease about macroeconomic conditions. They are describing the specific, daily experience of prices that went up and never came back down.
Grocery prices are still roughly 20% above pre-pandemic levels, according to data tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Housing costs remain at historic highs in most major markets. Credit card debt in the United States hit a record $1.18 trillion earlier this year, according to Federal Reserve data. Wages have grown, yes — but not fast enough and not for everyone, and certainly not for the people showing up in that 41%.
The Brunswick and Echelon poll is measuring the political temperature of a public that has been running a fever for three years. The fever has not broken. The question now is whether anyone in a position of power — in government or in a corner office — is prepared to do anything about it beyond issuing a thoughtfully worded statement about shared values.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe that the path forward for corporate America is "neutrality." Forty-one percent of the country just told pollsters that their biggest concern is whether they can afford to live, and the strategic advice being handed to CEOs is essentially: try not to alienate anyone. That is not a plan. That is a waiting room.
The deeper problem is that corporations spent the better part of a decade claiming they were stakeholders in the communities they operated in, that profits and purpose could coexist, that they were not just machines optimized to extract value from workers and consumers. Then, when political pressure shifted, many of them quietly dropped those commitments and hoped nobody was keeping score. Everybody was keeping score. That is what a poll showing deep public skepticism of corporate leadership actually looks like.
With midterms under 100 days away, the affordability crisis is the dominant political fact in the room. Politicians will perform outrage about it. CEOs will release statements about it. And the people in that 41% will go back to doing the same impossible arithmetic they do every month, trying to make numbers work that were not designed to work for them. Whether anyone who could actually change that chooses to is a different question entirely — and the answer, historically, has not been encouraging.
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