•Press Release Government US Foreign Policy World
Nearly a Quarter of Biden 2020 Voters Would Hold Him Responsible for Rising Gas Prices Driven by Widening of War
Washington, DC — A new YouGov poll, commissioned by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), shows that a majority of Americans would hold President Biden responsible for a rise in gasoline prices, if the ongoing conflict in the Middle East were to widen further.
“This is a very large group of people who voted for Biden in 2020 and would hold him responsible for a rise in gasoline prices resulting from a widening Middle East war,” said Mark Weisbrot, economist and Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
“This could easily make the difference in a close election. If a small percentage — even about 1 in 20 — of this large group of voters were to stay home as a result of their dissatisfaction with the rise in gasoline prices, that could be enough to tip the election,” said Weisbrot. This calculation is based on the results of the 2020 election, where a defection of this very small number of Democratic voters would have changed the result, with Biden losing Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia, and therefore getting just 269 electoral votes — not enough to win the presidency.
“The 2024 election could very easily be tipped by just a very small fraction of Biden voters who become upset about high gasoline prices, blame the president, and choose not to come out and vote,” said Justin Talbot Zorn, a Senior Advisor at CEPR.
The survey, conducted January 19–22, 2024, included a sample of n=1,000 adults, aged 18 and older, with a margin of error at +/-3.4 percent.
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