Democrats better not confuse gas price fury with thinking they figured out how to defeat Trumpism

The simplest and most seductive political analysis is that voters would share all my policy preferences if Democrats just did what I say they should. And it’s a decent analysis because it’s somewhat true! People and politicians are infinitely more malleable than most of us would ever like to admit.

There are a lot of debates about how you get politicians to share your policy preferences—you can argue they should follow the polls, especially when you agree with the polls, or you should argue for values that drag the polls in your direction, as Republicans do—but they all require persuasion, either of people or the politicians who you want to follow your particular polls. And persuasion, more than anything, requires volume, repetition, and reach.

One of my favorite quotes about politics comes from literature.

I was always complaining about the absence of a future for me as a writer. Lena would say, “Write two thousand stories. They have to publish one of them.”

I would think, What’s she talking about? What’s the use of getting one story published? And I even got offended, though for no reason. We saw scale differently: I put the emphasis on the unit, Lena on the mass. And she was right. You can only conquer with quantity. All of world history bears this out.

— The Colonel Says I Love You, Sergei Dovlatov

Andrea Pitzer, drawing on One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, often writes about the Concentration Camp Tendency, which she describes as the “process by which bad actors portray the economic viability and even the soul of the country as being at risk, with the only solution being to exclude whole groups of people residing in the country from part or all of society.”

It needs to go on for years or even decades before the true roundups begin. But she’s also confronted by people who continually suggest, “Sucks that humanity is just like this and we’re always slouching toward Auschwitz.”

No, she insists.

That panic, that organized fury, that irrational madness of a group isn’t naturally occurring.

“Right-wing politicians certainly do their level best to try to misrepresent reality and link economic difficulty with the presence of foreigners,” she wrote recently. “But one thing I found while researching my history of concentration camps was that this linkage has to be created and stoked on an ongoing basis for voters to embrace it.”

The Lucky Break

This is how reality works.

We live in an information void that doesn’t give a shit about anything.

A recent experiment in Norway that Andrea discussed found that soldiers randomly assigned a bunkmate picked up his politics within eight weeks—nobody argued anyone into it; the bunk decided what was normal, and they matched it.

That void is filled by intention—like Fox News, X, AM radio—or by backlash—the response to the murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, the Iran war, gas prices.

Right now, gas prices (and prices in general) fill that void so completely that we really can’t read this election as about anything else, though specific races have variables that fill voids unique to states or districts.

But gas prices aren’t just an economic story anymore; they’re a constant siren screaming the word “Corruption.”

They’re a constant plot point in a story about a failing, flailing man who will bleed your family dry while vacuuming up every dime, starving poor kids, and setting up his kids to party with Russian oligarchs—all while slapping gold leaf and his name on anything that doesn’t move, celebrating an imaginary glory at the literal expense of everyday Americans.

Voters look likely to reject Trump and Republicans because he personally raised their gas prices. After all, he thought he’d topple Iran in a day like Venezuela, and all he can do now is lie about why we’re there, how we’ll get out, and what it all means.

This unique fluke of history—a president personally taxing every American for a mistake he mocks the voters over—is going to give Democrats more confusion about what works and what they need to fight for than clarity.

The Red Flags for 2028

But the lesson of 2026 should be: there isn’t much to learn from 2026, except what could have worked if gas prices hadn’t drowned out everything else in the void.

Red flag one: Money. Republican-aligned donors already outspent Democratic-aligned donors $880 million to $290 million in the first half of this year, according to Punchbowl, and Musk just reactivated America PAC on top of it. Money buys the one input persuasion actually runs on — volume — and one side is walking into the cycle that decides whether this term gets checked at all with three times as much of it. Is that—combined with Trump’s unprecedented attempt to use the federal government to steal an election—enough to drown out Trump’s gas misery? Probably not this time. But it’s bad to bet against billions.

Red flag two: Silence. A quieter flag sits underneath that one. In April 2025, a wave of Democratic strategists told the party to go silent on immigration and let Trump’s own enforcement operation overreach on its own. G. Elliott Morris is asking the only question that matters now: when do the people who told Democrats to shut up “own up to being frankly just disastrously wrong”? Florida’s Maria Elvira Salazar just told Trump to his face that the same Hispanic voters who elected him feel betrayed by his own raids. The backlash showed up exactly where the silence-first crowd swore it wouldn’t.

The same play is running right now on the way America PAC is using trans people to embolden their base and depress our vote, and on Musk himself — no counter-story, even though, as Katelyn Burns notes, there’s one sitting right there, just the hope that quiet makes it all go away.

Of course, the 2028 presidential primary will solve a lot of this, unless the winner thinks strategic silence does anything except surrender to the void.

Red flag three: AI. Nobody in the party, except maybe Bernie Sanders, has said a single sentence about it that a voter could repeat back. And Bernie’s saying it on the same stage as Steve Bannon. And Bernie isn’t technically even a Democrat. So what the hell are we doing here?

The idea that Democrats can win back Big Tech is the biggest delusion of the century. The parallels with the Big Banks are obvious, and not just because both need to be regulated into boredom. But even before the AI bubble bursts, Americans are sorting themselves against those who prioritize data over people. And verily, there’s an immense strategic error in recognizing that someone is trying to destroy you and the people you represent. Elon isn’t hiding his desire for an Apartheid America; Democrats shouldn’t have to think twice about what side they should be on. Ours.

All three red flags are volume problems that ignore how politics works, which is best explained as always by messaging maven Anat Shenker-Osorio, who told Andrea:

“The rest of the people, if they are up for grabs, what the research shows is that they don’t have a fixed position.

“Here’s the secret,” she adds later. “There’s no thing that they already believe. This is what’s wild about them. They are capable of believing multiple contradictory things.”

Case in point:

We need to adjust our sense of how people’s minds work.

More than beliefs, we have radars that tend toward certain frequencies. And that radar can be jammed by, say, gas prices. Or it can also lead you to believe that trans kids playing lacrosse are the greatest threat humanity will ever face, if that radar gets a constant signal that everyone around them is thinking exactly that.

We are in the information void. Today it’s filled by the pump. Tomorrow it could be anything (probably the AI bubble bursting). The only way to face it is to fill that void with the values we actually believe in and will share, even with people who never expected to share them.

For that’s exactly what Republicans are doing. And they don’t waste their time pretending there’s anything strategic about surrendering to the void.

Want to keep LOLGOP Studios working full-time for democracy past November? A buck a month is all we ask.