With prices for gas, utilities, and groceries going up, financial stress is one of the most pressing issues in this year’s midterms. More than 40% of Ohio households are not able to make ends meet, a new analysis shows, including 73% of Ohio single-parent households.

The analysis by the Brookings Institution shows that the issue stretches at least all the way back to 2014, and that a huge swath of the population has been affected. That’s particularly true of people of color and especially true of single parents.

The think tank last week published the first in a series of articles titled States of Affordability, and it broke its analysis down to the state and county level.

“This mix of states shows that although headlines often focus on the cost of housing in big cities such as New York City and San Francisco, affordability crises emerge from a variety of pressures depending on the state or region, such as stagnant wages, child care costs, transportation burdens, and weak job markets,” it said.

The think tank estimated “the cost of living in every U.S. county by bundling housing, food, childcare, healthcare, transportation, and miscellaneous necessities such as utilities for different household types, from single adults to larger families with children.”

Significantly, it did not include student and medical debt in that calculation. So its estimates of hope many are having difficulty making ends meet are likely to be conservative.

The study used U.S. Census data on income to determine what percentage of families were able to pay their bills.

The results may explain some of the frustration among the electorate.

In 2024, 45.5% of households in the country were not making enough to cover their expenses — and that was before the start of the most recent inflationary cycle.

Ohioans fared better than average, with 40.6% not making enough to make ends meet, the analysis said. 

But at the county level, there are disparities. Families in some counties in Southeastern Ohio were making ends meet at a significantly lower rate than in Delaware County, for example.

More stark were demographic disparities.

Among white Ohio’s families, 63.2% were making ends meet in 2024. For Hispanic families, that figure dropped to 47.3%, and for Black families, it dropped to 41.8%.

In other words, most Ohio families of color — 54.2% — didn’t have enough money to pay the bills in 2024.

But even more determinate was household composition. 

The Brookings report said that in Ohio in 2024, a full 73% of single-parent households couldn’t make ends meet.

Between 2014 and 2024, there was a single bump in the percentage of families that had enough to pay the bills, and it came during the pandemic. 

The percentage of Ohio families making ends meet rose to 68.5% at the end of 2022. Two years later, it had dropped to 59.4%.

“In nearly every year from 2014 to 2024, more than 40% of American households have struggled to make ends meet,” the Brookings report said.

“The only exception over this period was during the COVID-19 pandemic recovery in 2021 and 2022, when federal stimulus checks and expanded tax credits provided a significant but temporary boost to post-tax incomes.”

It added, “The expiration of these federal policy interventions, coupled with rising costs, drove the share of households making ends meet sharply downward. While the share of households making ends meet increased by two percentage points over the decade, that share dropped by a full 10 percentage points in just two years following the COVID-19 pandemic, from 2022 to 2024, erasing most of the gains made earlier in the decade.”

And while the political debate over affordability tends to focus on the prices of things, the Brookings report said that’s only half the picture.

“When the costs for housing, health care, education, and food rise faster than wages, families fall behind not because they are failing, but because the math no longer works in their favor,” the report said.

“But more affordable lives are within reach: As of 2024, 37.9 million U.S. households could afford to make ends meet with a raise of $10 an hour. Additionally, if costs declined by $500 per month, another 10 million households could make ends meet.”