Republicans heading into the November midterms have a problem at the pump, and Democrats know it. In a column published this week at American Thinker, contributor Silvio Canto Jr. concedes as much β the U.S. strike campaign against Iran has left American drivers paying more for gasoline, and the political fallout is landing squarely on the president’s party. His answer to the Democratic criticism, though, is less an argument for the status quo than a warning label: look at what happened the last time the other party ran things.
Canto doesn’t hedge on the foreign policy. He writes that he supports President Trump’s actions in Iran, framing them as a long-overdue response to what he calls the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. What frustrates him is the domestic consequence β higher fuel costs, and a Democratic Party eager to convert that pain into votes.
His case rests heavily on a piece of advice he borrows from Shane Harris: voters should examine the Democrats’ actual energy record rather than assume that electing the out-of-power party will somehow reverse the frustration that drove them to it in the first place. Sometimes, Canto writes, the alternative is worse than the current situation. Republicans who feel discouraged or unmotivated about turning out in November, he adds, should remember how bad things were a few years ago and bring the same urgency they had in 2024.
The numbers from 2022
The heart of Canto’s argument is a comparison across administrations. Gas wasn’t always this expensive, he notes β it was worse, and not that long ago. In 2022, with Democrats holding the White House and both chambers of Congress, the national average for regular gasoline climbed above $5 per gallon at its peak.
President Biden attributed much of that spike to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Canto grants that the war aggravated an already tight global oil market, but he points out that prices had been climbing well before Russian troops crossed the border. He cites Energy Information Administration figures showing regular gasoline averaged roughly $2.38 per gallon in January 2021, immediately before Biden took office. By February 21, 2022 β three days before the invasion began β it had reached $3.53.
Adjusted for inflation, Canto writes, gas averaged $4.69 per gallon in 2022 and $4.02 in 2023, compared with $3.95 so far this year. He acknowledges that’s cold comfort for families paying more than they feel they should be at the pump, but argues it provides context for the current crisis and a reminder that the Democrats’ record was worse.
The column is quick to insist there’s no ideological comfort in any of this. Canto writes that he hates paying high gasoline prices too, and that he’s reminded of inflation every week when his wife visits her favorite grocery store. The point, he says, isn’t to celebrate the current numbers β it’s to ask whether voters really want to hand energy policy back to the party that presided over the last spike.
California as the cautionary tale
For Canto, the cleanest evidence is California. He points to Harris’s observation that on September 25, motorists in the Democrat-governed state were paying an average of $6.24 per gallon, compared with $4.49 nationally. The blame, in his telling, falls on California’s higher fuel taxes, environmental programs and specialized gasoline requirements, all of which have combined to create an unusually expensive fuel market.
He offers an anecdote to make it concrete: a local couple who drove to the West Coast earlier this year and loved the trip but noticed gasoline cost far more than it did back home. The reason, he writes, was taxes and regulations that drove up the price β and it wasn’t Republicans who imposed them.
That’s the pivot Canto returns to repeatedly: if Democrats in Sacramento preside over the most expensive fuel market in the country, why would voters trust the same party to bring down prices nationally? His answer is blunt. He doesn’t.
The messaging gap
Where Canto concedes real ground is on politics. He writes that there’s no doubt Trump’s decision to attack Iran created the environment currently benefiting Democrats β an environment where, as he puts it, all they have to do is go on television and complain about high prices.
What he finds lacking is a Republican counterargument. The president and his party, Canto says, haven’t properly explained what gasoline prices would look like if Iran had acquired a nuclear weapon. It’s a version of the argument that the cost of confronting a threat is ultimately lower than the cost of living with it, and he suggests the GOP simply hasn’t made it clearly enough.
His closing hope is that voters look past the immediate sticker shock and conclude that Democrats have no answers beyond blaming Trump. Whether that argument lands in November is an open question β one that depends less on history than on how long the current prices persist, and how effectively either party tells a story about why they’re high.
Canto’s column is a reminder that energy prices have become a proxy fight over credibility. Democrats can point to the present; Republicans can point to 2022. The candidate who wins the argument probably won’t be the one with the better data set, but the one who convinces voters that the other side’s record is the one that matters.
Source: www.americanthinker.com β https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/10/trust-democrats-over-gasoline-prices/