A majority of voters are convinced that gas prices are even higher than they actually are, a new poll shows, spelling trouble for President Donald Trump with just four months to go to the midterms.
Results from The POLITICO Poll, published Friday, found that three in five Americans overestimated fuel prices in their area, handing Democrats a win as Trump faces mounting criticism over the economic fallout from his conflict with Iran.
The president, 80, is scrambling to restore confidence in his administration amid voters’ increasingly bleak assessment of the economy ahead of the November midterm elections. Trump has been trying and miserably failing to bring an end to the conflict he launched in February over fears it could cause a global “economic catastrophe.”
According to Politico’s analysis, 46 percent of respondents say changes in gas prices will influence how they plan to vote in the midterms. Just under 40 percent say they are considering backing a different party than they normally would, including 49 percent of MAGA Republicans and 57 percent of non-MAGA Republicans.
The analysis compared respondents’ estimates of local gas price increases with data from OPIS, a Dow Jones company, using average regular gasoline prices in their zip code from Trump’s first week in office through the week before the July 12-15 poll. While roughly one in four Americans believed prices had risen by $3 or more a gallon, no zip code had experienced an increase of that scale on average since Trump returned to office last January, according to Politico.
“It is a particularly tough dance that many Republican candidates will have to endure for the next three months,” Arizona GOP strategist Barrett Marson told Politico. “How do you feel the pain of your voters without feeling the wrath of Donald Trump?”
Longtime Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson argued that voters’ anxieties about fuel prices leave Republicans “very vulnerable to the economic pain and very vulnerable to the economic argument the Democrats are going to make.”
“Three-quarters of the country is confronting higher gas prices and feeling it,” Ferguson said.
According to motor club AAA, the national average for a gallon of regular gasoline climbed back above $4 on Monday, up about 13 cents from a week prior and well above the $3.14 average recorded at the same time last year.
The price jump follows an escalation in fighting between the U.S. and Iran. The conflict has disrupted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil supply normally passes, sending fuel prices soaring.
White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers told the Daily Beast that Trump and his energy team “anticipated these temporary market disruptions, communicated them openly to the American people, and implemented an aggressive plan to mitigate any impacts.“
“As the U.S. military degrades the terrorist Iranian regime’s ability to attack commercial vessels and disrupt the free flow of energy through the Strait of Hormuz, oil and gas prices will plummet back to pre-conflict levels,” Rogers added. “President Trump remains committed to unleashing American energy dominance, cutting costs, and putting more money back in the pockets of hardworking American families.”
Trump previously acknowledged the economic risks posed by the Iran war, telling reporters at the G7 summit in France in June that it “could have caused an international depression.”
“I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe. If you kept this going, that could have happened,” Trump said.
“The one president I did not want to be was the late, great Herbert Hoover,” Trump went on, referring to the U.S president widely blamed for the Great Depression following the 1929 stock market crash.
He added that without a deal, the market “would go down at levels that nobody ever saw before, maybe except for 1929.”
