If you are telling struggling families that the economy is going well because the GDP or jobs data looks healthy, you have already lost them.

That’s the key takeaway from an interesting new report from the right-wing Centre for Campaign Innovation called Voter Vocabulary: The Words Voters Use to Discuss Key Issues.

This makes sense of course. People do not live in macroeconomic indicators and you cannot touch GDP growth. Real people experience the economy through the weekly grocery receipts, paying for fuel at the petrol station, the rent increase notice from the real estate agent, and the quarterly power bill in their inbox.

The CCI data shows working-class alienation and misery in the US. Working-class voters actively tune out corporate economic jargon. They do not want to hear about general inflation. They want politicians who really, genuinely understand their bills and can talk about them like a normal person.

Everyday grievances are focused on real things, material degradation — “Before the end of the month I’m already out of food to feed myself and my husband” says one middle-aged Republican woman. When the cost-of-living worsens, it is working people — and women especially — who feel the burden. Women experience the double burden: low wages and unpaid domestic work.

For Australia, and people concerned about the rise of extremist politics, the lessons from this American research is that we cannot “technocrat” our way out of a material crisis.

The data also shows the real examples of how people talk about corporate extraction and the expansion of inequality and excessive corporate into local communities.

In the US, rural towns and local communities are rebelling against massive tech data centres draining their local water and power grids. In Australia the opposition is growing as well, and increasingly there is a rejection of public assets and energy networks being captured and monopolised by tech oligarchs’ data centres while households pay the higher bills.

When voters demand spending cuts, they are not necessarily endorsing neoliberal ideology. They are venting fury at a corporate state that hands billions to military contractors, consultants, and oligarchs while leaving public clinics and schools to crumble. Nevertheless, beneath this view is the ideology of austerity — corporate propaganda that paints national economies as household budgets, an indoctrination that has been pushed onto Americans — and Australians — for over a century.

There is also opposition to and concern about the endless US wars, and opposition to the Trump regime is there, across partisan lines. Although this is centred on the impact of the war on fuel prices rather than compassion with the people being bombed, it is a rejection of militarism.

Like in the US, in Australia there is a majority view that politicians and politics serves the ultra-rich elite interests, not everyday people.

Of course, everyday people in the US are suffering from a cost-of-living crisis, and the crisis of the status quo, because of the consequences of extractive capitalism and extreme wealth inequality. This problem is not caused by and cannot be solved by better centre-left messaging or political marketing. The purpose of the CCI’s data (a right-wing, Republican aligned polling company no less!) is for political marketing to neutralise and encase the anger and frustration that people feel — the research will not ultimately upend the political system!

When working people in the USA say every politician is bought, will we in Australia treat that as cynicism to be managed and messaged or will we recognise it as an urgent call to confront universal issues, wealth inequality and the dominant extractive economic order?