(Adnkronos) – With gasoline prices up 17% in the first 10 days of the war launched by Donald Trump, anxiety and concern are growing among Republicans about the effects that the conflict, and especially its energy costs for Americans, could have on the midterm elections. They are already facing a historically disadvantaged position, considering the traditional defeat of the president’s party, and politically, given Trump’s increasingly declining poll numbers. This is also because these consequences of the conflict risk compromising the Republicans’ main electoral argument for next November, with rising energy costs that will ‘eat into’ at least some of the money Trump can boast of having put back into Americans’ pockets with his tax cuts, Politico writes today.
But above all, the slogan of reducing the cost of living, which Trump and the Republicans are desperately trying to steal from left-wing Democrats like Zohran Mamdani, protagonists of many recent Democratic electoral victories, risks being compromised. Just a few weeks ago, during the State of the Union address, the president rattled off a long list of essential goods whose prices, thanks to him, had fallen in the past year, a list topped by gasoline, the New York Times recalls. “Gasoline, which peaked at over six dollars a gallon under my predecessor, which is truly a disaster, is now under $2.30 a gallon in most states, in some places $1.99,” Trump said on February 24, while now, due to the war he unleashed just four days later, the price of gasoline has reached $3.48 a gallon.
Trump speaks of “short-term increases” and calls them “a small price to pay for the security and peace of the USA and the world,” but Republican leadership in Congress does not hesitate to publicly acknowledge that this price surge is a source of political concern. “The price of gasoline is always a kind of benchmark,” said Senate Republican Majority Leader John Thune yesterday, speaking to reporters. “I think increasing our domestic production will help alleviate it, but it’s something we obviously need to pay attention to. And hopefully, operations in Iran,” he concluded, “will not be an extended situation.”
Words that seem to underscore the message that Republican pollster Mitchell Brown, who is working on the party’s midterm campaign, clearly articulates to the Washington Post: “gasoline was one of the things that had been presented as an economic victory; a reversal on this obviously makes the message more difficult.” And, speaking anonymously, one of a Republican candidate’s campaign consultants confessed to the Post that he had to rush to rewrite a speech for a fundraising event where he had claimed a drop in gasoline prices, just as Trump had done four days before attacking Iran.
