Low Gas Prices Don’t Seem to be Moving the Needle for Trump—and He’s No Exception Historically

KEY POINTS FROM THIS ARTICLE

— The price of a gallon of gasoline in President Trump’s first year in office has been relatively low, with gas recently dipping under $3 a gallon on average for the first time in half a decade, when the pandemic was having a major effect on the economy and society at large.

— That said, Trump’s overall approval rating remains underwater, and it is weaker now than it was a few months ago. Trump’s approval numbers on the economy and inflation—the latter of which would seem to be most connected to the price of gasoline—are weaker than his overall approval.

— There is some connection, historically, between gas prices and presidential approval, but that connection has been weaker lately.

Connecting presidential approval and gas prices

In a nationally-televised address to the nation just before the holidays, President Donald Trump made a case for his first year in office. As part of his speech, he touted the low cost of gasoline. “Gasoline is now under $2.50 a gallon, and in much of the country, in some states, it, by the way, just hit $1.99 a gallon,” he said.

Oil was also on the president’s mind when he announced the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on Saturday in a surprise raid by U.S. special forces: “The oil companies are going to go in, they are going to spend money, we are going to take back the oil, frankly, we should’ve taken back a long time ago,” he said. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Wednesday morning that, “Going forward we will sell the production that comes out of Venezuela into the marketplace,” and that the money from selling the gasoline “can flow back into Venezuela to benefit the Venezuelan people.” The Trump administration is trying to make a broader argument that Venezuela can be turned from a foe into a friend by unlocking the country’s oil wealth and using it to benefit Venezuelans. Trump, meanwhile, “needs to stop sounding like he’s just taking their oil,” an unnamed administration adviser told Marc Caputo of Axios.

The future direction of Venezuela and American involvement there is as yet unknown; whether it becomes a major issue in the 2026 elections is also unknown, although it will take significant (and negative) developments for it to move the needle politically. Early polling on the capture of Maduro was mixed: A Reuters/Ipsos poll, for instance, found that about a third supported the intervention, a third did not, and a third did not know or skipped the question.

Trump overstated how low gas prices were in his December address. A CNN fact check pointed out that gas was only priced at $2.50 or less on average in four states, and only a few individual stations (about 100 of 150,000 tracked) were offering gas for less than $2 across the nation, according to GasBuddy.

Still, Trump does have a point about low gas prices: Gas is inexpensive by historical standards right now. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the retail price of gasoline dipped under $3 a gallon ($2.99) in December for the first time since the pandemic, which greatly depressed gasoline demand. So whatever the actual motivation for the U.S. intervention in Venezuela may be, it is not as if the United States is in desperate need of additional gasoline supplies to lower prices at home: Prices are already low. And if they got lower, it’s not clear that the president would benefit politically, as much as he might want that.

The full trend on gas prices over roughly the past half century is shown in Figure 1: The orange line is the actual, “nominal” monthly price of gasoline from 1977 (the start of Jimmy Carter’s presidency) through December 2025, while the blue line is the “real” price calculated in current dollars (so taking inflation into account). Figure 1 is reproduced from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Figure 1: Nominal and real price of regular retail gasoline, 1977-2025

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration

Readers who are middle-aged or older may remember, wistfully, the days of gas prices measured in cents as opposed to dollars, with the final instances of sub-$1 gas prices in these data dating back to 1999. By the summer of 2008, gas prices eclipsed $4 a gallon, or $6 in today’s dollars, the highest spike over this five-decade timeframe. While gas prices rise and fall, traditionally with the seasons but also based on geopolitics and other factors, the real price of gasoline has generally been lower over the last decade than it was the decade before that.

One can map times of political dissatisfaction onto gas prices: the end of George W. Bush’s presidency and the economic collapse of 2008 stands out, as the high price spike that summer cratered much lower by the winter, along with the economy. Jimmy Carter’s turbulent last year in office, 1980, also saw relatively high gas prices for that era, prompted by turmoil in the Middle East.

A more recent price spike came during Joe Biden’s presidency in the summer of 2022 following oil-rich Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. However, that spike quickly receded, with the price of gas dropping from about $5.50 in current dollars to more like $4 by the time of the 2022 midterm. By mid-2024, the nominal price of gas was around $3.50, and it dipped to under $3.20 by October 2024.

For 2025, gas has hovered a little over $3, something that, politically, would seem to be a feather in Trump’s cap.

And yet, it’s hard to square those numbers with Trump’s overall approval numbers, which continue to be underwater, as well as his approval specifically on the economy and inflation, which are worse than his overall numbers.

Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin average of national polling of Trump’s approval is 42% approve/54% disapprove, or -12 points on net, and his net approval is about -20 and -28, respectively, on the economy overall and on inflation specifically (these are not exactly apples to apples comparisons, because not all approval polls ask about Trump’s approval on these specific issues). RealClearPolitics, a different aggregator, has slightly better numbers for Trump, but they tell the same basic story: Trump’s approval is -8 net, his approval on the economy is -15 net, and his approval on inflation is -26 net.

This does beg some questions: Could even lower gas prices help Trump with his low ratings on inflation and the economy? Or, if gas prices were to rise, would that drive down Trump’s numbers even more?

History would suggest caution before answering “yes” to either question. There’s not much connection between gas prices and presidential approval, and whatever connection there may be is weaker now than it was a decade and a half ago.

In 2011 and 2022, we looked at the correlation between gas prices and presidential approval (the 2011 article was by our former Crystal Ball colleague Isaac Wood, and the 2022 piece updating his earlier research was by me). Some of the explanatory language below is adapted from what I wrote back in 2022.

Figure 2 shows presidential approval versus the real monthly price of a gallon of gasoline.

Figure 2: Presidential approval vs. gas prices

Note: A few months of presidential approval are omitted because Gallup did not release approval polls during those months.

Sources: Gallup, U.S. Energy Information Administration

The purple line shows the president’s monthly approval rating, as measured by Gallup, which has regularly tracked presidential approval ratings for the entirety of the time period studied here. The figure again begins in February 1977 and ends in December 2025, the last month we have Gallup approval ratings for Trump. The orange line shows the real price of regular gasoline as measured in today’s dollars—that’s the same data as the blue line in the U.S. Energy Information Administration figure above. Note in Figure 2 that while the y-axis scale measuring presidential approval (on the left) goes from lowest to highest as one moves up the scale, the y-axis scale measuring gas prices (on the right) goes from highest to lowest as one moves up the scale. This is a way to visualize how high gas prices might exert some “downward” pull on a president’s approval rating. If high gas prices do in fact contribute to low presidential approval ratings, one might expect that as gas prices rise (and the orange line goes down on our Figure 2), presidential approval would also dip along with those high prices.

We calculated the correlation between real gas prices and presidential approval from 1977-2025. We found that there was a -.47 correlation between those two variables, so there is some negative correlation between higher gas prices and lower presidential approval. The r-squared value measuring the strength of the connection between the two variables was .22 (this is on a scale of 0 to 1, with 0 indicating no association between the two variables and 1 indicating a perfect association). This is shown in the scatterplot between presidential approval and real gas prices, Figure 3. So there is some connection.

Figure 3: Scatterplot of presidential approval and gas prices

Sources: Gallup, U.S. Energy Information Administration

These are the same figures we found when we last looked at this in 2022. From the 1977-2011 timeframe, the correlation was -.52 and the r-squared was .27, meaning that the connection weakened a little when adding the last 15 or so years to the dataset. In fact, if we just look at 2009-2025 (covering Barack Obama’s two terms, Donald Trump’s and Joe Biden’s single terms, and the first year of Trump’s second term), the correlation is .07 and the r-squared is basically zero. So whatever connection there is or was between gas prices and approval is driven more by the more distant past as opposed to more recent presidencies.

Part of what may be going on is that approval ratings just don’t move around very much these days. Presidents are often stuck in a narrow band that even big events don’t move much, so it stands to reason that even something important to most people’s daily lives, the price of gasoline, wouldn’t necessarily have much bearing on a president’s approval rating either.

Trump’s own approval, in the low-to-mid 40s, has been fairly stable. These numbers are better now than they were at this time eight years ago (when his approval was just shy of 40% in polling averages). However, Trump also was generally around or over 45% for much of last year before dipping below that number a couple of months ago. Given the relatively stable price of gasoline over his first year in office—and the longer-term research laid out above that does not show much of a recent connection between gas prices and presidential approval—it does not seem like gas prices are having much of an effect on Trump’s approval.

Kyle Kondik is a Political Analyst at the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia and the Managing Editor of Sabato's Crystal Ball.

See Other Political Commentary by Kyle Kondik.

See Other Political Commentary.

Views expressed in this column are those of the author, not those of Rasmussen Reports. Comments about this content should be directed to the author or syndicate.