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"Diesel Is the Number That Will Decide November"
by Larry C. Johnson
"For four years Republicans had a simple message on energy: prices were higher under Joe Biden. It worked. Voters remembered $5 gasoline in the summer of 2022, and Donald Trump promised to bring it down. The war with Iran has turned that argument on its head, and the evidence is in the government’s own price data.
I went back through the Energy Information Administration’s monthly averages for every month since 2017. Here is what they show. Source: EIA monthly US retail averages; my calculations. Biden’s peak monthly prices were $4.93 for gasoline and $5.75 for diesel, both in June 2022.
Before the war, the Republican claim held up: in his first year back, Trump presided over cheaper fuel than Biden’s average. Since February the picture has reversed. Gasoline has jumped about $1.50 a gallon in seven months. It has not yet passed Biden’s 2022 peak, so on gasoline the two administrations are now roughly even. Diesel is a different story. September’s $6.29 average is the highest monthly figure on record, half a dollar above the worst month under Biden, and AAA’s daily average set an all-time high above $6.50 in late September. On the fuel that moves the American economy, this is now Trump’s record, not Biden’s.
Consumers feel it at the pump. Businesses feel it everywhere. A family that drives 15,000 miles a year in a car getting 25 miles per gallon burns about 600 gallons of gasoline. At September prices that works out to roughly $870 a year more than before the war. That hurts, especially for working people who commute long distances. But the larger damage is the one most voters will never see on a receipt, because diesel is the cost that hides inside every other price.
Almost everything Americans buy moves on a diesel truck at some point. Diesel was $3.71 a gallon a year ago; it is now around $6.39. Willy Shih of Harvard Business School estimates that hauling a load across the country at $6.50 diesel costs about $3,000 in fuel alone. Trucking margins are thin even in good years, and carriers cannot absorb a 70% jump in their biggest variable cost. FreightWaves counted at least eight large trucking companies filing for Chapter 11 in September, and close to 2,000 layoffs across delivery firms, manufacturers and packaging companies in a matter of weeks. Owner-operators, the one-truck businesses that are the backbone of the industry, have no cushion at all.
Farmers are getting hit at the worst possible moment: the fall harvest. A Joint Economic Committee analysis found that diesel added more than $1.4 billion to the cost of planting the country’s major crops this year, a 63% increase over 2025, with Illinois, Iowa and Minnesota hit hardest. In Minnesota, the average farmer is paying about $1,500 more each time the farm’s fuel tank is refilled. Farmer John Boyd puts the cost of filling a single combine at around $1,000. These are the same farmers already squeezed by the fertilizer shock I have written about, and who often voted for Trump.
Then the costs move downstream. Freight surcharges are passed to shippers, shippers pass them to retailers, and retailers pass them to the grocery shelf and the hardware store. Construction, mining, waste collection, school buses and emergency services all run on diesel. Higher diesel prices work like a sales tax on the entire economy, and that tax has gone up by about 70% since the war began.
The polls are tracking the pump: Trump’s approval numbers have fallen as fuel prices have risen. Reuters/Ipsos had him at 47% shortly after he took office in January 2025. By mid-March, two weeks into the war, he was at 40%; a week later, after gasoline had risen about a dollar a gallon, he was at 36%. In September, as diesel set its record, he hit 32%, the lowest of his political career. Only 17% of Americans approve of his handling of the cost of living, which voters rank as their top issue.
The most telling number is inside his own party. Republican approval of Trump fell from 82% to 73% in a single week in September. For the first time, more Republicans disapprove than approve of his handling of the cost of living, 51% to 44%. These are not abstractions to voters who drive a truck, run a farm or own a small business. They see the cost every week.
Rich Baris’s Big Data Poll, who I believe is the premier polling outfit, tells the same story. Its surveys found Trump’s approval recovering in June, after a peace deal with Iran was announced, then falling to a new low of 38.7% in late July once the war restarted and pump prices climbed again. Two-thirds of voters, 67.4%, said the war was not worth paying $4 a gallon for gasoline, and 27.6% would not accept paying more than the roughly $3 pre-war price. By mid-September Big Data Poll had Trump at 38.8% approval and 58.5% disapproval, the worst intensity score of his second term, and Democrats ahead by 11 points on the generic House ballot among likely voters. Democrats led by more than 10 points on inflation and the cost of living, the issue voters rank first. “Republicans are quickly running out of time to improve their outlook for November,” Baris warned.
Polls move for many reasons, and the war itself has grown less popular. But the timing is hard to miss: as gasoline and diesel climbed, Trump’s approval fell, and the steepest drops came as diesel reached record highs. Putin’s diesel will not save him The administration knows fuel prices may decide the midterms, and its answer arrived on October 9. After a call with Vladimir Putin, Trump announced that Russia would supply diesel to the United States and world markets, and his Treasury lifted sanctions on Russian diesel until April. He promised prices would fall “in record numbers.” The arithmetic says otherwise.
Trump’s own post listed 300,000 tons “immediately,” 500,000 tons in November, a million tons after that and three million more later. That is about 4.8 million tons, or roughly 36 million barrels, with no delivery dates for most of it. The United States burns about 3.8 million barrels of distillate a day, so the entire package equals about nine and a half days of American demand. The first 300,000 tons cover less than one day. Against the global shortfall of middle distillates, which analyst Karl Miller puts at a minimum of 3 million barrels a day, the whole deal covers about 12 days.
American prices are high because they are set in a world market that is short, not because American refineries lack product: the United States already produces about 5.2 million barrels a day of distillate and exports 1.6 million. Diesel futures dipped on the headline and the retail price barely moved; it was $6.28 on the day the deal was announced. Trump has also said he is “thinking about” banning US diesel exports, an idea his own Energy and Interior secretaries have criticized. These are gestures aimed at the news cycle before November 3, not at the supply problem.
Isaias: a near miss that shows how thin the cushion is: Then came Hurricane Isaias. Before it made landfall near Destin, Florida, on the evening of October 9 as a Category 2 storm, producers evacuated 129 of the 371 staffed platforms in the Gulf and shut in about 72% of offshore oil production, roughly 1.5 million barrels a day, and 59% of natural gas output. About 500,000 barrels a day of refining capacity sat in or near the storm’s path, led by Chevron’s 356,000-barrel-a-day refinery at Pascagoula, Mississippi, along with plants near Mobile and Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
The country appears to have been lucky. The track stayed east of the big Louisiana refineries at Garyville, Baton Rouge and Norco, and as of Saturday there were no reports of serious refinery damage. Offshore production that was shut in as a precaution usually returns within days if the platforms and pipelines are undamaged. But the storm exposed how little room there is for error. US distillate stocks are at their lowest level for early October since the EIA began keeping records in 1982, and East Coast stocks are about 30% below normal. Diesel futures jumped about 26 cents in a single day as the storm approached. Florida, which has no refineries and no pipeline links to the Gulf refining centers, depends on trucks and barges from the very Alabama and Mississippi plants that were in the storm’s path.
In a normal year a glancing hurricane is a few days of headlines. In this market, with the Persian Gulf’s refineries damaged and inventories at record lows, any outage at a Gulf Coast refinery goes straight to the price of diesel. The hurricane season does not end until November 30, three weeks after the election.
The honest answer is that no executive order can conjure diesel out of the damaged refineries of the Persian Gulf, and the shortage will outlast the election. For years Republicans told voters that the President owns the price at the pump. They were right about the politics. Now they own it."
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