One of the problems with the Biden White House’s scapegoating strategy for high gas prices is that even if the president succeeds in diverting blame from his administration to oil companies, gas station operators, or Vladimir Putin . . . he, and the country, are still stuck with high gas prices.
Demand for gasoline peaks in summer. Gas prices have come down a bit from their peak – about twenty cents per gallon nationally over the past three weeks – but they’re still at an astronomically high price by the standards of recent history, averaging $4.81 for a gallon of regular nationwide.
We don’t know exactly what gas prices will be through July and August, but they’ll probably still be very high. It’s probably going to be several months before they decline below the previous record level of $4.17 per gallon. We don’t know what the price for a gallon when voters cast ballots in November 2022, but we know it will be significantly higher than the $2.10 per gallon national average of two years earlier. The public anger won’t dissipate, and no matter how much blame gets assigned to these other entities, voters will start to ask, “wait, wasn’t this president supposed to restore normalcy?”
Eventually the scapegoating message starts to sound like helplessness: “I wish I could bring down the price of gas, but there’s not much I can do. Russia won’t stop its invasion, OPEC won’t produce more oil, the oil companies are too greedy, the gas station owners are too greedy, Congress won’t temporarily suspend the federal gas tax of 18 cents per gallon, most states won’t temporarily suspend their state gas taxes… there’s just nothing I can do.”
That’s not too different from Biden’s overall message on inflation, or high food prices, or baby formula shortages, or lingering supply chain problems, or the insecure border, or anything else.
If Biden’s message always seems to be some variation of, “I’d like to help, but other forces won’t cooperate, so there’s just not much I can do,” many voters are likely to respond, “if you can’t do anything to help with my problems… then what do we need you for?”