Why the Price of Gas Has Such Power Over Us

Ask Americans their outlook on the country — its future, its economy, its president — and their mood has risen and fallen in surveys this year in striking sync with the price of gas. Gas prices go up, and fear that the country is on the wrong track often does, too. Gas prices go down, and so does unhappiness with the president.

It’s of course not the case that fuel prices alone dictate the optimism (or surliness) of the nation. But these patterns suggest that gas, distinct from other things we buy, wields real power over how Americans think about their personal circumstances, the wider economy and even the state of the nation. Yes, this year has been marked by economic uncertainty, Supreme Court shock waves, Jan. 6 revelations and enduring pandemic divides. But lurking in the background of it all has been the whipsawing price of gas.

And it is, by the way, now trending down again with two weeks to go to the election.

This year’s turbulent prices — the national average peaked at over $5 in June, tumbled into September, then leveled off — have offered a real-time demonstration of what many researchers have found. Gas prices can affect consumer sentiment and presidential approval ratings (never mind that presidents typically have little control over gas prices).

They influence how we shop and what we spend on other things. They shape travel behavior in the short term. And in the long run, they can alter the vehicles Americans buy, the appeal of far-flung housing and even development patterns.

“When the gas price changes, it changes everything,” said Mansoureh Jeihani, director of the National Transportation Center at Morgan State University. And in America especially, she said, sprawling communities and scant public transit mean most people have no alternative to driving when the cost spikes.

Little wonder then that gas prices might color your mood.

“When prices go up, we have this feeling of oppression that we can’t do everything we want,” said Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, which tracks real-time gas prices across the country. And when prices are low: “You feel like you can go anywhere, you can see anything, you can do anything.”

The reasons for this are embedded in both our dependence on gas and the specific ways it differs from just about everything else we buy.

“There is no other consumer good or service with price tags that are visible from the street, all the time,” said Joanne Hsu, director of the Surveys of Consumers at the University of Michigan.

You see the price of gas even if you’re not the one pumping it (not so with the price of eggs if you aren’t the one who does your household grocery shopping). And if you are the one who pumps it, you stand there watching your purchase, cent by cent, bite into your bank account. Imagine the psychological toll if you paid your rent this way: $656 … $657 … $658 …

Gas is also particularly uniform as a product. There are generally only three options: regular, mid-grade, premium. It’s not like milk, which comes in half or whole gallons, skim or 2 percent, organic or not, in a dozen brands. And when you buy gas, it’s not bundled with other goods.

That makes it easy to track the price. And it makes it hard for vendors to obscure price hikes. A box of cereal might shrink over time to conceal rising prices. But a gallon of gas is a gallon of gas (with a little nuance for summer and winter blends). And it’s also more or less the gallon of gas you’ve been buying your entire driving life.

“What other price series have I been monitoring casually since I was 16?” said Chris Severen, an economist at the Philadelphia Fed.

He and a colleague have found that people who learn to drive as teenagers during gas price shocks like the oil crises of the 1970s drive less even 20 years later in life. For many teens, this is the first time they’re regularly buying a good or service, Mr. Severen said. Gas is their introduction to consumption, and to the broader economy in personal terms.

As most drivers eventually learn, it’s also hard to substitute for gas. When other goods become more expensive, economists generally expect people to cut back on how much they buy, to buy something else instead, or to delay their purchase. But those strategies are trickier with gas, unless you live somewhere walkable or with good transit. Most Americans can’t just drive the kids to school four days a week instead of five, or put off going to work until the gas price falls.

“Even if it’s just gas, it’s just a car — it’s a lot for a family like mine, where we depend on this for a job,” said Denange Sanchez, who works as a cleaner with her mother in Palm Bay, Fla. They fill their tank three or four times a week driving to apartment complexes and private homes. When prices go up, they have no choice but to bear it.

Ms. Sanchez, 20, told pollsters for a New York Times/Siena College survey in July that she believed the country was headed in the wrong direction. Asked recently to expand on her pessimism, gas was the first thing on her mind. High prices, she said, violate her sense that people should be able to afford what they need to access work.

In that July survey, voters who said they filled up their gas tank more often were more likely to say the country was headed in the wrong direction. That is partly explained by partisanship, as Democrats are more likely to live in less car-dependent cities, and also more likely to feel upbeat with a Democratic president. But even among Democrats, the most optimistic were those who said they rarely fill up, or have no car to fill at all.

That survey was taken shortly after gas prices peaked in mid-June. Then, just as steeply as prices rose, they fell every day for the next three months. Another Times/Siena survey in September found voters in a slightly brighter mood: The share who said the country was on the right track rose by 14 percentage points; President Biden’s approval rating rose by nine points.

Other surveys this year have found similar patterns. Measures of consumer sentiment, which tracks confidence in the economy, have been historically low for most of the year but bottomed out in June when gas peaked. Summertime improvements in consumer sentiment, presidential approval and the country’s direction also all stalled or reversed in September around when gas prices stopped falling.

It’s hard to disentangle the effect of gas shocks from other events like the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, the congressional Jan. 6 hearings, tumult in the stock market, higher food prices and rising mortgage rates. But past studies suggest that gas has an independent effect on how people size up the economy and even the president.

“The Fed uses thousands of different data series to try to track how the economy is doing,” said Carola Binder, an economics professor at Haverford College. “But obviously most of us can’t process that much information. So I think we look for rules of thumb.”

Her research suggests people use gas prices in this way. She finds that consumer sentiment becomes more pessimistic when gas prices rise (people who lived through those 1970s crises get especially glum). As a rule of thumb, gas prices are simpler than the unemployment or inflation rates that are announced by the government once a month. You don’t need the government to tell you the price of gas. And you don’t need the media to help you interpret it, either.

Gas prices don’t neatly track other measures of the economy’s health. Early in the pandemic, for example, unemployment soared as gas prices plummeted amid the collapse in travel demand. But there have been other eras when expensive gas and a poor economy have gone hand in hand, perhaps feeding the sense that one is a harbinger of the other.

The Great Recession was one of those times. Some economists even suspect that the rise in gas prices preceding the housing bust helped push some homeowners overstretched on their mortgages into foreclosure (home prices ultimately collapsed the most in exurban communities with the highest commuting costs).

So it’s perhaps not surprising that gas might also cast a shadow on how people rate the president. In data going back to the 1970s, researchers have found that rising gas prices weigh on presidential approval, above and beyond what we might expect given other economic conditions. That doesn’t mean that people personally blame the president for expensive gas (although some certainly do).

Rather, when you encounter those ubiquitous, oversized prices, “it keeps as top of mind things that are not going well in the country, and not going well for you,” said Laurel Harbridge-Yong, a political scientist at Northwestern who has studied the phenomenon.

It’s not hard to draw those connections when expensive gas pushes people to forgo vacations, or to curb their grocery spending, or to put off seeing aging parents and grandchildren.

Teresa Richardson, who works as a personal care attendant in Erie, Pa., said in a Times survey in September that she felt the country was on the wrong path. Her employer has discouraged her and other caregivers from taking clients out for errands and activities. The cost of driving them around is too much.

And so her clients sit at home. Ms. Richardson, 48, sits there, too. Her disabled husband, who used to drop her off at work and use the car, sits at home now also, because it saves gas if she drives herself.

“We’re all stuck at home,” Ms. Richardson said. And that is no way to live. “Can you imagine how many other people feel like that?”

Ruth Igielnik contributed polling analysis.