Let’s start with this one, from the guy who analyzes gas prices for the GasBuddy app.
I was thinking about this tweet when I was filling gas in a small town in rural Oregon. The Pilot across the street had a pump failure, and the other gas station in town had been kind enough to only charge 30 cents/gallon more than Pilot would have. It’s that kind of consideration that makes you appreciate the petroleum industry.
De Haan also says there won’t be diesel or gas shortages in the near future.
Still, assuming a 15 gallon fill up, Trump’s stupid war costs between $30-50 each fill, depending on the kind of fuel you’re buying. I have to think that this simple fact is going to outweigh everything else when low information / swing voters go to the polls. They will vote for the D to send a message to the R.
Moving on to the “trans” issue, I thought this was interesting:
If you click on either one of those crosstabs, you’ll see that the number of respondents to those polls who label “LGBTQ issues” or “Wokeness / trans issues” as the number one issue is between 0 and 1%. Insofar as voters vote on issues, which is questionable, and insofar as they respond honestly to polls, also questionable, the whole “trans” issue is residue from the panic that enveloped the institutional Democratic Party in early 2025. The bottom line here is that if you don’t have principles, you are subject to panics, and that’s what happened in the 2026 election for those candidates who are throwing trans folks under the bus.
I also want to highlight a comment from Adam Bartel yesterday. I assume Adam lives in Texas:
I’ve been so disappointed in Talarico’s campaign the last month. Paxton is hammering him at least 10-1 in TV ads, and the ones he is putting out are generic fight the billionaires/term limits crap. Nothing on his corruption. The consultants are running the losing playbook again, playing nice and stripping all the character away from him
I think the 10-1 hammering is probably not surprising — Republicans always have more money. But if you have 10% of the attention of TV viewers, the right answer is to do something memorable, not to push out “generic” messaging.
The real question I have is whether those ads do anything to move the needle. I want to highlight, again, the only study I know about that looked at political ads. It says that they didn’t do much to change minds in the 2016 Presidential election. Since there hasn’t been a ton of research on this topic, who knows if the millions of dollars dumped into TV spots matters. I know that in the 2008 NY-29 Congressional race, the guy who won, Eric Massa, had very little TV, just because he had very little money. There were negative PAC ads against him. I’m sure far more money was spent on those than on his positive ads. Still, he won. And that was back when people still actually watched TV.
Paxton can outspend Talarico 100x or 1000x on TV ads, but the most powerful thing that voters are seeing between now and November are the crazy prices they’re paying to fill their tanks.
