Republicans worried about preserving their House or Senate majorities in November are wishing for the miracle of low gas prices, but recent surveys show they needn’t bother. Their goose is already cooked, regardless of where fuel prices go.
When you’re down this far it’s nearly impossible to pull out of the dive, and after several new polls dropped this week, President Donald Trump hit the worst approval rating of his presidency. He also whacked a new low two days in a row with a FiftyPlusOne approval of 36 percent, amounting to a net score of −25.
This is a historically bad rating for a president at this point in his term — worse than Biden’s at this point in 2022, and worse than Trump’s in his first term. It’s so bad now, that analyst G. Elliot Morris says falling gas prices won’t rescue Trump — or the Republican Party.
“Cheaper gas didn’t buy him much, if anything at all,” said Morris, seeing Trump’s popularity fail to lift out of the doldrums despite a brief drop in gas prices this summer.
Generally, a president’s approval drops as gas prices go up. Prices spiked from $3 to $4.50 on average this spring thanks to Trump’s entirely voluntary war on Iran. It dropped to an average of $3.78 in early July when Trump and his media puffed up an Iran “ceasefire.” But national averages jumped back to $4.10 a gallon when that ceasefire evaporated.
It’s been a few weeks and the numbers are in, and what struck analysts was how low Trump’s approval remained even as he enjoyed a premature price dip before his not-at-all-ceasefire blew up.
“While gas and approval had been closely linked from March through May, when Trump’s approval fell, the June gas price ebbing did not result in a commensurate rise in approval for Trump,” observed Morris. “While gas prices recovered almost a dollar from peak, Trump’s approval ticked up a few points. And then slides right back down to where it started.”
Trump and the voters who put him back in the White House in the last election never forgave Joe Biden for high inflation, even after it cooled. Trump personally hammered Biden’s progress, despite U.S. prices steadily being on the decrease up until November, when pessimistic voters removed the Democrat in favor of Trump’s promises.
If this lingering hard feelings looks familiar, it should, said Morris — because Trump is now on the bad end of them.
Voters in 2024 were actually reacting to excess prices, not the rate of inflation, said Morris. When inflation “cools,” prices don’t fall — they just rise more slowly.
“People loathe inflation precisely because they experience it as a permanent cut to their buying power, not a temporary rate that ticks up and down,” said Morris. “… people tend to form their impressions of the president’s handling of the economy and hold onto it.”
Republicans are counting on cheap gas to bail them out this November, said Morris, but the evidence from his presidency — and Joe Biden’s — suggests Americans’ evaluations of Trump and his Republican Party are already baked in.
All that’s left now is for Trump to ride his crashing plane down to where it’s headed.