Because the US election campaign will be decided at gas stations and supermarkets
It is certainly not on the search in Mar-a-Lago or on Trump's judicial pending that Joe Biden and the Democrats will be able to rely on to gain support and stem the Republican wave in the midterm elections in November. The analysis by Mattia Ferraresi for Domani Quotidiano
It is certainly not on the search in Mar-a-Lago in search of documents hidden by Donald Trump or on the judicial pending of the former president that Joe Biden and the Democrats will be able to rely on to gain support and stem the Republican wave in the midterm elections in November. .
From the operation of the federal agents, the Republicans have immediately obtained a powerful electoral campaign for the people of the right and coagulating elements for a party frayed in more or less Trumpian currents, and there is nothing better than a classic FBI plot to to give vent to the " paranoid style of American politics, " according to Richard Hofstadter's classic definition.
A proof of the success of the conservative extremist strategy is in the various contests in the primaries around the country, where the candidates supported by Trump win and those chosen by the establishment tend to lose, sometimes in a humiliating way, starting with those who voted with the Democrats. the impeachment of the president after the assault on Capitol Hill. Trump had said the ten traitors would be at the top of the Trumpian purges list, and he is delivering on his promise.
"I DID THAT!"
Rather, the election will be decided at gas stations and supermarkets, where Americans empirically measure the growth of inflation.
In internal briefings, Republicans are already calling elections "gas and groceries" and Axios ' legendary palace scoop specialist Mike Allen has set his sights on a White House memorandum that aligns the Democratic election message: Republicans must be presented as the friends of the big corporations who embrace "an extreme agenda that weighs on families".
On both fronts Biden has collected some comforting news in recent days: the average price of gasoline has fallen below 4 dollars a gallon after months , a fundamental psychological red line for the electorate.
The drop in oil prices brought the cost of fuel back to March levels, after peaking in June, and in July inflation rose more slowly than expected. But for the moment these are short breaths of fresh air for a troubled president.
Since the beginning of the energy crisis unleashed by the invasion of Ukraine, stickers with Biden pointing his finger at the price display and saying "I did that!" Have begun to appear on the petrol pumps, just to clarify what is one of the main themes. on which the president is playing a popularity that has ended at lower levels than those reached by Trump in the same period of the presidency.
ELECTORAL FUEL
But how important is the price of fuel on the outcome of the elections?
It is obviously difficult to isolate the impact of gasoline on the vote, but a comparative study of price swings and presidential consensus between 1976 and 2007 conducted by Laurel Harbridge, Jon Krosnick and Jeffrey Wooldridge establishes a broad correlation: the increase of ten cents of gasoline corresponds to a drop of 0.6 percentage points in the popularity of the incumbent president.
The trend in Biden's consensus is broadly in line with the estimates of political scientists: the difference between the average price of gasoline on the day of the inauguration and the peak in June would suggest a drop of more than 11 percentage points, while the index has gone a little worse. Because in addition to gasoline, there is everything else.
Unlike Europe, in the United States the pump price is a crucial electoral indicator and enormous psychodramas on the subject were consumed during the campaigns; armies of spin doctors and countryside specialists have had to suddenly change direction or engineer containment strategies to respond to the sudden change in mood in the country dictated by the growth of gasoline.
THE CASE OF 2008
It looks lunar from the present, but there was a moment during the 2008 campaign, a few months before the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the financial system, when 72 percent of Americans believed that the most serious economic problem they faced was the cost of fuel, which increased by 30 percent within six months.
So the two candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain, who until then had been primarily concerned with foreign policy (there was the legacy of George W. Bush's wars to deal with) hastened to propose the cut federal excise duties to stem discontent. There was a rapid escalation from there.
To respond to the Republicans who at McCain's rallies called for domestic drilling to the cry of " drill, baby, drill ", the Democrats gave in to the possibility of new oil exploration and Obama, frightened by the decline in consensus, had to abandon his opposition to exploitation of offshore fields.
Soon the great financial crash would have rendered all this debate essentially useless, as the crash of oil drove gasoline into very low prices, and the president had a lot more to think about. But at that time it was the issue that completely dominated the national debate and electoral calculations.
PUTIN AND THE MIDTERM
When he blocked Russian oil imports to damage Putin's war machine, Biden knew full well that the decision would help raise the price and explained that " defending freedom will come at a cost ."
From now to the November elections Biden and the Democrats will have to see if and to what extent Americans will be ready to pay the price of freedom, as they are pressured by domestic inflation and the cost of gasoline, the most reliable measure of the electoral mood of the present. .
(Extract from the analysis of Tomorrow; here the full version)
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/perche-la-campagna-elettorale-usa-si-decidera-alle-pompe-di-benzina-e-nei-supermercati/ on Mon, 15 Aug 2022 06:26:23 +0000.