Democrats seized on a surge in oil prices on Sunday, arguing that it was an immediate consequence of the war in Iran that would inflame an affordability crisis, as Republicans sought to downplay the data.
“We’ve been saying for months that affordability is the No. 1 issue,” Representative Tom Suozzi, Democrat of New York, said in an interview. “But this is a very real-life consequence of some of the actions being taken by the administration.”
Mr. Suozzi, who was among a few Democrats from swing districts who expressed cautious approval for the initial strikes in Iran last weekend, said it was now apparent that the administration had not fully planned for the economic costs.
“While there’s a sugar high — you feel good, hey, we’ll get the bad guys — it’s not really very well thought out,” Mr. Suozzi said of the war, which the U.S. is waging with Israel against Iran.
The global oil benchmark topped $100 a barrel for the first time in four years on Sunday, hitting a threshold that could pose political challenges for the party in power. Other recent economic data, including a weak jobs report, has put Republicans on the defensive on one of the central issues of the midterm elections.
President Trump, who is often quick to react to market swings, immediately sought to minimize the jump. On social media, he wrote that prices would “drop rapidly when the destruction of the Iran nuclear threat is over,” and that “ONLY FOOLS” would not see the surging oil costs as a small price to pay for global security.
Democrats saw it differently.
“As Trump refuses to acknowledge Americans’ concerns with the war, prices at the pump are soaring and working families are being crushed by high prices at the grocery store,” Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement.
The week-old war in Iran is unpopular with most Americans, according to opinion polls, and it is unclear how long the fighting might go on. The administration has offered conflicting visions of how the coming weeks might play out, though Mr. Trump said last weekend that the war could last “four to five weeks.”
Kiersten Pels, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, said in a statement that Democrats were “fearmongering” about gas prices. “President Trump is confronting the Iranian regime and protecting American security while Democrats try to rewrite their record of weakness,” she said.
Still, the huge jump in oil prices suggested that traders were growing increasingly concerned about the flow of oil and natural gas from the Persian Gulf with the war grinding forward.
Gas prices in the U.S. have in recent days become a bigger focal point in the midterms. Nationwide, the price of a gallon of gas has surged by 47 cents in the last week alone, according to AAA.
Four years ago, under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrats were the ones playing defense on fuel prices. Prices surged after Russia invaded Ukraine, and Mr. Biden banned imports of Russian oil, gas and coal in a bid to hamper Moscow’s war effort.
By June 2022, the price of a gallon of gas was about $5, despite a bid by Mr. Biden to lower costs by releasing millions of barrels of oil from a strategic reserve. (The current national average gas price is $3.45, according to AAA.) And Republicans hammered the administration over the surging costs, which were primarily driven by the Covid-19 pandemic’s effects on supply and demand.
Gas prices fell during the summer of 2022, and Democrats had a better-than-expected showing in the midterm elections that year.
On Sunday, even before oil prices surged briefly above $110 a barrel, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic minority leader, was calling on the Trump administration to release oil from strategic reserves.
“Due to Donald Trump’s reckless war of choice, gas prices have surged to their highest levels in years,” Mr. Schumer wrote on social media. “His response? ‘If they rise, they rise.’ He couldn’t care less.”
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