It's the economy, stupid — again

By David DesRosiers
President
RealClearFoundation

"It's the economy, stupid." It’s election season and the ghosts of Clinton, Carville, Penn, and Schoen are back — or their playbook for electoral advantage, anyway. We're back to the '90s, but today's Democrats haven't relearned the lesson the centrist Clinton knew: the golden goose of abundance doesn't lay its eggs under all political conditions.

Inflation is eating into the daily pursuit and possession of happiness. If Bill Clinton were still president, he’d be deploying his famous line: “I feel your pain.” The climb toward hand-to-mouth living is getting steeper. Families are going into debt. You need to keep the lights and the heat on, the tank full, everything else be damned. That suffering is real.

And that suffering is the rising tide lifting Democrats' prospects this fall. Sadly, my fellow American, Democratic policy is not prescriptive to mitigating that pain. It only makes it worse.

We're less than 60 days from a midterm election, and this is an affordability election — which makes it an energy election. The rising tide of general prosperity is locked at the hip to an abundant supply of affordable energy. Energy is the neglected input behind the price of everything, and getting the policy right is what makes everything downstream easier. Remember that in November.

The American people want affordable, reliable energy at the pump and the plug. Both are within reach. We're sitting on hundreds of years of natural gas that can deliver falling electricity prices if the political will is there. Sadly, we don't habitually vote for the policies that would get us there — we want the benefits of abundance without voting for the means.

I read the RealClearPolitics average, and I don't like what I'm seeing: Democrats are headed toward a protest-vote win. Good for them. But is it good for you and yours?

This crop of Democrats is among the least prepared in memory to bring down the cost of energy. They have "solutions" — a wholesale transformation of the energy economy — but affordability born of abundance isn't their path. Scarcity and higher prices are the necessary outcome of green mandates applied to everything. My honest read on a Democrat-controlled Congress: nothing improves on affordability unless it comes wrapped in a subsidy.

Republicans are the abundance party. Democrats are the scarcity party. Republicans fixate on juicing supply, Democrats on regulating demand. The former brings more supply and lower costs; the latter constrains supply and drives prices up.

A Democratic Congress won't move the price of crude — that's set globally. But it can slow the permitting, leasing, and infrastructure decisions that determine whether domestic supply keeps expanding over the next 5 years. That's the real stakes of this election.

Yes, domestic production rose under Biden — but that was a wartime necessity forced by a proxy war of choice with Russia, not a policy default. "Drill, baby, drill. Build, baby, build" is Trump's default position, not his emergency response. There's also a lag between pro-drilling policies and production increases — in other words, much of the production growth under Biden happened because of conditions put into play during Trump’s first term. Prices are high today because we spent decades building expensive, unreliable solar and wind while sitting on a natural gas boom we refused to fully use.

In fairness to Trump: he built his congressional majority on shaky ground — clowns to his right in the House, jokers to his left in the Senate, and a deep state resisting throughout — which is why most of his energy agenda has moved through executive orders rather than legislation.

This midterm also carries a consequence most voters haven't priced in: AI. AI is a massive economic bet the stock market and our broader economy are riding. AI firms want to build their own energy supply because they need more power, faster, than utilities can deliver — and they've shown willingness to feed surplus back into the neighboring grid. That's a good deal.

Block a data center, and two things happen: short term, AI firms already in your state still draw from your grid and still pass the cost through to you; long term, the next data center — its jobs, its tax base, its generation capacity — gets built in a state that said yes. Either way, you don't get lower prices. Vote against a data center and you're voting for higher energy costs, less growth, and less tax revenue. That's a Polymarket line I'd take all day.

Vote for one, and you get the opposite. If a Democrat anywhere runs on this logic, vote for them. Looking at Pennsylvania, Michigan, Iowa, and Colorado — where it matters — the frontrunners aren't.

Now let's turn to the pump. The war with Iran is not a forever war, and pump prices will come down — not in time for this election, but before 2028. Iran won't give up its nuclear ambitions without suffering a crushing defeat, and it's proven over the past several months that it cannot be allowed to have the bomb. So crushing defeat it is.

Why do they keep playing a losing hand? Partly us — our adversaries read us as short-sighted and soft, and that shows up in the polling. I'd infer their rationale is rational: prolonged high prices at the pump help Democrats in the midterms, and a Democratic Congress is good for Iran. Meanwhile their people are in genuine economic depression while we complain about prices still near Biden-era levels. Iranians are suffering 69% inflation; Americans, 3%. Steady the course.

The fundamentals still favor relief: oil and gas extraction are scaling up domestically and globally. OPEC is no longer the price-maker it once was — the UAE is effectively out of OPEC discipline and wants the pumps open to fuel abundance, and Venezuela is quietly moving outside OPEC too, rebuilding its pre-Chavista capacity with our help. Scaling up production is how prices fall, for energy and everything else.

The American people want abundance. Only one party is currently building toward it. Vote for it, and alleviate your own pain instead of adding to it.

David DesRosiers is the publisher of RealClearMediaGroup and Conference Co-Chair of the annual Energy Future Forum.