"Gasoline prices decide the fate of an American president."
It is a line often heard in U.S. political circles ahead of presidential and midterm elections. The conventional wisdom in Washington is that when oil prices rise, the party in power sees its approval ratings slide and loses at the ballot box. International oil prices are driven more by outside forces, such as geopolitical tensions in producing countries, but American voters aim their anger at the president when prices at the pump go up. That is also why the phrase "the curse of the gas station sign" resurfaces every election season.
Meg Jacobs, an American historian, coined the term "pocketbook politics" to describe the phenomenon in which voters cast ballots and form political judgments based on their own economic interests — prices, taxes and jobs. A pocketbook is a small booklet that fits in a pocket, but the word is also commonly used to mean a small purse for holding money, cards and personal items. From it came "pocketbook populism," a term for the strategy of winning support through campaign slogans and pledges aimed at voters' wallets.
With oil prices staying high as the war in Iran drags on, U.S. President Donald Trump has reached for cash handouts. He has pledged a dividend of $5,000 per adult if the Republican Party wins the midterm elections this November. He also said health insurance premiums were overcharged under the Joe Biden administration and promised to return $500 each to one million people. Republican-leaning districts in the United States tend to be on the outskirts of large cities or in rural areas, where average driving distances are longer than in Democratic-leaning districts, making resentment over high fuel prices more intense. Facing falling support even among his traditional base because of the war in Iran, Trump has put an extreme form of pocketbook populism — scattering cash — front and center.
What ruined Argentina, one of South America's wealthiest economies in the 19th century, was the cash-spraying populism known as Peronism. One wonders whether the specter of handout populism is now about to take hold of the North American continent as well.
