This post will be brief as I want to get it out before we get much closer to The Election here in America. Sorry that it relates to politics, coverage of which we do not need more of, but it presents an apolitical finding. And as the authors of the original work sum it up much better than I can, I will lift a lot of text from their very recent report (emphasis added).
“US political leaders have long been caught in a bind around gasoline prices. Voters are more likely to vote against incumbents when gasoline prices are high, yet political leaders have very limited ability to affect gas prices.
This report finds a strong correlation between household gasoline consumption and expenditures and a decreased vote share for Joe Biden in swing counties in the U.S. in 2020. The finding is based on data on consumers’ annual gasoline use and the distribution of 2020 presidential election votes across census block groups in swing counties.”
The report is Driving the Vote, by Metz and Barzilay, over at Coltura. I highly recommend a look. And of course we will excerpt a chart:
Eaton County, Michigan: Average Annual Gasoline Consumption vs. Democrat Vote Share
Eaton County is in the “swing state” of Michigan, and this it is why it was chosen for this work. Boiling down the implications (my take, please see the report for the authors’ views!), with a few cascading assumptions:
If the election comes down to a few votes in a few swing states…
And if these states in turn will turn on the votes of a few key counties…
And if in these counties the relationship between Democratic votes and gasoline consumption holds…
Then marginal voters may “swing” based on how the gas price moves (if they react more to total gas dollars spent than to underlying gallons consumed, and that is my conclusion, not the authors’!)…
Then the 2024 US Presidential Election will hinge on the price of gasoline.
This seems a staggering argument, but it makes some sense. When a vote is essentially tied, a few voters at the margin drive the results. And those marginal votes tend to be driven by economics (all the Culture Warriors on the left and right lined up for their candidate long ago). And nothing drives the perception of good versus bad economic times in the USA like the price of gasoline. For one thing - you may have noticed! - we are a very car-intensive society. But more crucially, there is no price quite like the gasoline price, for three reasons at least:
Everyone uses it. Unlike even that ubiquitous commodity, milk, there is no real substitute1. (I can see angry letters from diesel guys already!)
Everyone sees it. Name another good where the price is posted in large illuminated letters at some 150,000 locations across the country. The price is in your face, every day and every where.
Its impact is uniquely painful. Name another good where, as you consume it, you can see your wallet draining away in front of your very eyes, by standing at the pump and watching the numbers run up.
In short, if the argument I laid out above holds2, our election may depend on how the gas price moves in the next few weeks. Or maybe not: predicting election results is far far beyond almost everyone’s skill set, certainly including mine.
But…here’s the national gas price trend in recent months, from GasBuddy.com. Place your bets, anyone?
Note to self: investigate the possibility of oat-based gasoline.
And obviously there are many, many confounding and factors here, from the linkage between rural voting patterns and high gas consumption, to the linkage between voting and choice of vehicle type (e.g. are low-mpg pickups more Republican?). Correlation is not causation. And also, these voters may not behave symmetrically: that is, they may feel the pain of rising gasoline prices, but not react much to the relief of falling prices.