The national average for a gallon of gas hit $4.50 this week. In California, where Gavin Newsom has spent years waging regulatory war on refineries, it's $6.24.
When Joe Biden took office in January 2021, the national gas average was $2.38 per gallon. By February 2022, it had climbed to $3.53. By summer of that year, Americans were paying north of $5.00 a gallon while Biden's team insisted the economy was doing great. Inflation hit 9.1% in June 2022 — the highest in more than 40 years.
Biden's energy record wasn't an accident. It was policy. On Day One, he revoked the permit for the Keystone XL Pipeline, which would have carried 830,000 barrels of oil per day. He paused new oil and gas leasing on federal land. He introduced an EV mandate requiring 50% of new vehicles sold to be electric by 2030 — a mandate President Trump has since reversed.
The consequences showed up at the pump, and they showed up in California first.
The Phillips 66 refinery in the Los Angeles area began shutting down in 2025. The Valero refinery in Benicia, California completed its idling in April 2026. These aren't abstractions — they're physical infrastructure that turns crude oil into the gasoline people need to get to work, and California's regulatory environment chased them out. Newsom's state now imports refined fuel at premium prices, and every driver in the state pays for it every time they fill up.
Adjusted for inflation, gas averaged $4.69 in 2022, $4.02 in 2023, and $3.95 so far in 2026. The trend is moving in the right direction under Republican governance. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act pushed household income to inflation-adjusted record highs in 2025. None of that happened because Democrats discovered fiscal responsibility.
The Democratic pitch on energy has always had a structural problem: the policies they campaign on — restricting drilling, killing pipelines, mandating EVs — are the same policies that make gas more expensive. There's no version of the Democratic energy platform that results in cheaper fuel. The math doesn't work because it was never designed to. Expensive gas isn't a bug in their program. It's the mechanism. The whole theory is that if gas costs enough, people will stop driving.
The United States became a net energy exporter in 2019 for the first time in 67 years. That happened under Trump's first term. Biden spent four years trying to undo it, and the price tag showed up on every receipt at every gas station in the country.
Some voters have floated the idea of sitting out elections to "send a message" to Washington. But staying home doesn't lower gas prices. It doesn't reopen shuttered refineries. It doesn't restart pipeline construction. It just hands the keys back to the people who created the problem.
Democrats will not make gas cheaper. In fact, if they retake power it will go higher.