For most of the last decade, homeowners insurance sat somewhere near the bottom of the average American's list of election concerns – a dull, back-office line item buried in the mortgage statement. That's changed. With the November 3 midterms closing in, premium pain has crept up next to groceries and gas as a genuine kitchen-table grievance, and it's starting to show up in how people say they'll vote.
The numbers explain the shift. The average US homeowner paid $2,948 a year for coverage in 2025, a 12% jump from the year before, and comparison site Insurify expects that figure to keep climbing – up another 4% by the end of 2026. Zoom out further and premiums have risen 46% since 2021, a run-up that's hard to write off as noise.
A separate federal analysis backs up the trend, if with softer numbers nationally. The Government Accountability Office found in February that premiums generally tracked inflation nationwide but climbed considerably faster in disaster-exposed regions, with coastal parts of North Carolina and Texas seeing real-terms increases of more than 50%. The report's authors also catalogued a menu of federal options – mitigation tax credits among them – but found regulators, insurers and consumer groups far from unified on anything resembling a federal backstop.
Weather is doing a lot of the driving. Severe convective storms – hail, wind, tornadoes – racked up an estimated $50 billion in insured US losses in 2025, making it the third-costliest year on record for that peril behind 2023 and 2024, according to Swiss Re Institute. Layer in the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires – the costliest wildfire event on record at roughly $40 billion insured – and it's little wonder the US accounted for 83% of the world's $107 billion in insured catastrophe losses last year.
None of this is landing evenly. Insurify data shows Oklahoma, Colorado, Iowa, Illinois and Minnesota logging the sharpest 2025 rate hikes, mostly on the back of hail and severe storm losses, while premiums are expected to ease slightly by year's end in California, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Maine, Louisiana and Rhode Island – California being the notable exception, where wildfire-exposed carriers are pushing rates up as much as 16%.
Insurify's own polling, a survey of 1,500 Americans, found 58% say rising insurance costs make them more likely to vote this fall, and 61% believe elections in their state actually affect what they pay for coverage – though only 26% say it will factor into who they vote for, in part because most people don't know who regulates insurance in their state in the first place, per Insurify economist Julia Taliesin.
Florida is the extreme case. A companion Insurify study found 71% of Florida respondents think elections affect their insurance costs and 65% say rising premiums make them more likely to vote, with 49% reporting a premium increase in the past year. That's despite the state posting the country's highest premiums by a wide margin – Insurify puts the statewide average at $8,292 after an 18% jump in 2025 – and despite officials' insistence that the market is finally turning a corner.
And it isn't just Florida. Similar frustration is showing up in the Midwest: a Climate Power/Insurance Fairness Project pollfound three-quarters of Midwestern homeowners worried about rising premiums, with 86% wanting elected officials to do more, against a backdrop of Iowa premiums that rose 28% in 2025 alone.
Florida offers the clearest case study in how messy this politics can get. Governor Ron DeSantis and insurance commissioner Mike Yaworsky have spent the past year touting tort reforms as the fix, pointing to an 8.7% average rate cut for Citizens Property Insurance policyholders taking effect at spring 2026 renewals, alongside separate cuts from carriers including State Farm, Progressive and AAA. Yaworsky has been unambiguous about the cause, crediting the reductions "entirely" to the state's tort reform laws.
But the state's own insurance office approved rate increases for most Citizens customers as recently as last year even as officials publicly touted coming decreases, and the average Floridian is still paying well above the national norm – Insurify projects only a modest 2% rise in 2026, a far cry from the double-digit jumps of prior years, but nowhere near relief either. It's a big part of why, even in a state where regulators say reform is working, insurance affordability keeps bleeding into the property-tax debate heading into the 2026 legislative session.
Here's the detail that matters most for the industry: insurance commissioner is a directly elected office in only 11 states, and four of them – California, Georgia, Oklahoma and Kansas – are holding those elections this November. All four states also happened to record meaningful 2025 rate increases: 24% in Oklahoma, 15% in Kansas, 9% in Georgia and 5% in California, according to Insurify. That combination is why analysts increasingly rank these particular down-ballot races among the ones most likely to actually move future premiums.
California has the highest stakes of the four. Term-limited commissioner Ricardo Lara can't run again, and the field has now narrowed: state senators Jane Kim and Ben Allen, both Democrats, advanced from the June primary to the November runoff. Whoever wins inherits Lara's Sustainable Insurance Strategy – the framework that lets carriers use forward-looking catastrophe models in rate filings in exchange for writing more policies in wildfire country – plus a genuinely stretched safety net. FAIR Plan enrollment jumped 43% between September 2024 and December 2025 after the LA fires, and the plan's total exposure has ballooned to roughly $650 billion, a 289% increase since 2019. Nonrenewals now outnumber new policies written in 46 of California's 58 counties. Insurify projects premiums statewide could still rise as much as 16% this year as insurers roll out risk-based pricing under the new rules.
Georgia pits Republican incumbent John King – who briefly ran for the US Senate before dropping out to seek re-election – against Democrat Keisha Sean Waites, a former state representative and Atlanta city councilmember who won her party's June runoff with just under 59% of the vote. Waites has campaigned on banning ZIP-code- and credit-score-based pricing and creating a task force targeting scams aimed at seniors.
Oklahoma and Kansas round out the four. Oklahoma's outgoing commissioner, Glen Mulready, isn't seeking re-election, and the general election will pit Republican Chris Merideth against Marty Quinn after a crowded primary in which several candidates argued the commissioner's office should be doing more to bring down rates that already rank among the nation's fourth-highest. Kansas incumbent Vicki Schmidt is also up for re-election in a state that saw a 15% rate jump last year.
Beyond those four elected posts, governors appoint the insurance commissioner in 39 states, which means this year's much larger wave of gubernatorial elections carries real, if indirect, weight for the industry. Ballotpedia counts 36 states holding governor's races in 2026, including genuinely competitive contests in states like Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin where control could flip. A new governor doesn't rewrite insurance law overnight, but appointment power over who runs the department – and how aggressively that person scrutinizes rate filings or leans on carriers to stay in shrinking markets – flows directly from these races.
At the federal level, not much has actually moved. Beyond the GAO's menu of options, one idea getting attention in policy circles comes from Dave Jones, a former California insurance commissioner now at UC Berkeley's Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, who has proposed a federal reinsurance facility to backstop state FAIR plans and bring down the cost of last-resort coverage. It hasn't gained real traction in Congress, but the fact that a former regulator is pitching it at all says something about how strained the residual-market backstop has become.
None of this changes what agents and brokers already know about pricing pressure, but it does change the political weather they're operating in. Rate filings, FAIR plan assessments and the general appetite for risk-based pricing models are all, to some degree, downstream of who wins these races – and unlike most of what shows up on a midterm ballot, insurance commissioner contests have a fairly direct line to what shows up in a policyholder's renewal notice. Firms with meaningful books of business in California, Georgia, Oklahoma or Kansas – or with wildfire, hail or severe-storm exposure more broadly – have real reason to watch these down-ballot results as closely as the governors' races getting all the attention.
