Cheap gas won't save Trump, now at a new all-time approval low
The price of gas fell in June, but Trump's approval on inflation didn't rise accordingly
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After several new polls dropped this week, Donald Trump just hit the lowest approval rating of his presidency. Worse than that, he hit a new low two days in a row (and counting). Our own average over at FiftyPlusOne has the president around 36% approve, and 61% disapprove — a net score of −25.
This is a historically bad rating for a president at this point in his term. It’s even worse than Biden’s rating at this point in 2022, and worse than Trump’s in his first go-around:
Much of that drop was directly caused by the war in Iran — specifically the rise in gas prices. Here is a chart of how U.S. adults rate Trump’s handling of certain issues, again from 50+1:
This is a very bad situation for the president. He is historically unpopular and has lost ground on all the issues on which he won the 2024 election — namely prices and immigration. The Republican coalition has shrunk significantly since Trump’s inauguration 18 months ago, and the party’s position in the midterms is increasingly bleak.
And yet, the midterms are a long way away. A lot can happen in politics in three months. One question readers of this newsletter have asked me recently is whether Trump could regain his lost ground if he can get the price of gas back down. If not 2026, what about by 2028?
Back in April, I asked whether cheaper gas could rescue Trump’s approval and concluded it probably couldn’t. Now we have a direct test of this prediction. This week’s Chart of the Week looks at the data and concludes falling gas prices won’t rescue Trump — or the Republican Party.
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Gas price go up = approval number go down
Gas prices spiked from $3.00 to $4.50 on average this spring, then came back down to as low as $3.78 in early July. That was when Trump and the media were championing a negotiated “ceasefireùh” with Iran — that ended up ending in a week. The national average price of a gallon of gas is now $4.10.
We can look at the relationship between President Trump’s popularity and gas prices in June and see if his approval went up the same amount as it went down when gas prices surged in March-May. Spoiler alert: they did not.
For much of Trump’s second term, his approval on the cost of living has shadowed the price of gas. The chart below shows the president’s net approval on the issue — calculated by averaging over the issue approval questions pollsters publish on things like “handling prices” and “the cost of living” — alongside the national-average gas price. (The gas price series has been inverted so that up means cheaper, to match the directionality of the approval trend.)
Especially since early 2026, the relationship between these two variables has been that when gas prices surged, approval fell; and when gas prices fell, approval ticked up. The two metrics have a correlation of about −0.8.
But there is a notable asymmetry in the relationship between these variables. The chart below normalizes each trend and scales it such that the average value in March 2026 is rescaled to 100 for both values:
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. While gas prices (orange) recovered almost a dollar (22%) from peak, Trump’s approval (green line) ticked up a few points. And then slides right back down to where it started.
Cheaper gas didn’t buy him much, if anything at all.
We’ve seen this movie before
If that pattern above looks familiar, it should. It’s the story of Joe Biden’s whole presidency.
Annual change in the consumer price index rose from 1% in January 2021 to 9% in June 2022. By the summer of that midterm election year, President Joe Biden’s approval rating had completely collapsed. That July, he bottomed out around a -20 net approval rating, the lowest point of his term. He would nearly return there in January of 2024.
But then, in 2023, inflation receded. Yet as you can see in the chart above, Biden’s approval stayed low. I’ve written about the reason before but the basic theory is that voters in 2024 were reacting to excess prices, not the rate of inflation. 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.
In a newly published journal article, political scientists Derek Epp and Christopher Wlezien from the University of Texas at Austin (Hook ‘em!) show that public opinion reacts much more strongly to bad economic news in good times than to equally good news in bad times. Applying that logic to presidential approval, you’d predict that approval would fall fast when prices jump, but not that it climb back when prices ease.
As both the June-August 2026 approval-gas price relationship and Joe Biden’s presidency illustrate, people tend to form their impressions of the president’s handling of the economy and hold onto it. The forecasting literature says change in the economy tends to predict subsequent change in voter behavior throughout a president’s whole term, not just toward the end.
Republicans are counting on cheap gas to bail them out this November. The president has recently heavily promoted a series of gas stations that supposedly have cheaper fuel than their surrounding pumps.
But the evidence from his presidency so far, as well as Joe Biden’s, suggests many Americans’ evaluations of Trump and his Republicans may have already become hardened.
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what cheap gas? Since US attacks resumed on Iran ~2 weeks ago & the price of oil shot back up, gas in my neighborhood has gone from $3.89/3.99 to $4.29. & since the toddler is frustrated at not getting his way, I expect the attacks to continue & gas to keep going up.
Roughly 1/3 of America would support Trump even if he were an ajudicated sex offender, thief and lier. They've proved it.