With the 2026 midterm elections quickly approaching, President Donald Trump’s war with Iran is ongoing and gas prices remain high. 

Americans are taking note: On this week’s episode of America, Actually, host Astead Herndon visits Allentown, Pennsylvania in the state’s bellwether Seventh District, to hear how persistently high gas prices — almost $4.20 per gallon in Pennsylvania — are showing up in residents’ lives. Many said the economy and prices were at the top of their list of issues, and laid the blame at Trump’s feet.

Still, gas is just one expense of many, for voters who are likely also feeling the pinch with the cost of groceries, housing, electricity, and more. So how much power do gas prices really have to shape the outcome of an election — and, potentially, a presidency? And after decades of renewable energy growth, technological disruption, and new existential worries, why are gas prices still so core to the American political conversation?

To learn more, Herndon spoke with Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. They discussed the history of gas prices as a salient political issue, why Americans feel high prices so acutely, even compared to other commodities, and whether voters are ever willing to overlook gas prices when they go to the polls.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.

When did the price of gas become such a political weapon in America? Does this date all the way back to the Model T?

It really dates to the 1970s. That’s when the United States will have two energy crises, in 1973 and 1979, and the price of gas becomes a huge political issue for Americans. It affects presidents, it affects Congress, and it becomes a manifestation in that decade of the problems facing the country.

I think that’s when we start to realize we don’t have unlimited resources and it’s gonna be a political problem.

Can you go in more detail about that? What happened in the ’70s to make it so clear to Americans that this party might not last forever?

Production of oil here peaks in the late 1960s, early 1970s, and then in 1973, OPEC, which is the cartel of oil-producing countries in the Middle East, imposes an embargo on the US because the United States had supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War. And as a result of the embargo, prices go up and supplies go down, and that’s when Americans start to face gas lines.

Then, in 1979, we have another round of this after the Iranian Revolution, and that leads to even bigger gas lines and more stringent rations and government mandates in ’79, and many people think it really helped bring down Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

Carter in 1979 is really reeling from what Americans experience. And it’s not simply gas prices, it’s waiting in line for gas. It’s hearing that you could only buy gas on certain days. It’s reading stories about people stealing gas and violent clashes occurring over getting this commodity. 

There’s a lot of things that go into the mix with Carter — the hostages in Iran — but certainly his difficulty dealing with this fundamental is a big part of what happens in 1980 when Reagan wins the presidency.

Of course, presidents have little control over the global price of oil, yet they are blamed for it seemingly every time. How have politicians and particularly presidents dealt with that reality, considering the price at the pump is so important to their political futures while not always in their control?

In the ’70s they tried with legislation. Carter pushes legislation that deals with energy, but it’s limited in its success. Americans want a lot of oil and it was hard to get them to conserve.

He put solar panels on the White House. There’s really not much that presidents can do. We have the strategic reserves. And other than that, I think presidents just wait it out and hope the timing works in their favor and the gas prices go down again.

Is there an example of a president who beat the gas prices trap? Do we have any example of someone successfully convincing the country, “Hey, look away from the price of the pump”?

I think we have presidents who say, “Just look away for a little while,” and when reelection comes around again, they’re doing better. Even President George W. Bush struggled with some of this after 9/11 and after the war started. But in the end, he doesn’t make an announcement about it so much as focus on other issues such as national security.

And now we see how prices fluctuate, so you just wait for those moments.

Why is it always gasoline rather than other commodities when we think about the priorities for the electorate?

There’s a few things. One is that, historically, the automobile really symbolizes American freedom and American consumption. And so when something impinges on our ability to drive a lot…

Second, it’s a price you just see. It’s just very visible when it goes up or down, more than groceries even.

I think that kind of recurring image for people becomes very politically potent if that number gets too high. So it’s a real struggle, but it’s also symbolically right in front of us. And these days, I think even more so now than in the ’70s or ’80s, it’s become something that the reporters and the media track.

I want to talk specifically about this summer. We’ve crossed $4/gallon again this summer, the highest since 2022, and this time it’s pretty clearly tied with the ongoing war in Iran.

Donald Trump has tried to make the argument that some short-term pain at the pump is worth a long-term national security focus. But his energy secretary said pretty clearly that gas won’t be back to $3 until 2027. Obviously, that puts us after the midterm elections. It sounds like he’s running the exact playbook you just told me has never worked, which is to get people to just pretend this is not happening.

What have you thought about how the president has handled the spike in gas prices?

In part it strikes me as a president who doesn’t really care about the fate of his party. I think it’s a big issue. I think most Republicans understand that. And it’s tied to a war that really doesn’t have public support.

It’s a war without the kind of clarity that many people felt after 9/11 with Afghanistan, and Iraq for a while. It’s the worst of all worlds. And so I think he’s really fumbled on this issue, and there was part of him that hoped people either wouldn’t care even if they noticed, or somehow the prices would diminish. It’s certainly not looking that way.

Welcome to the first edition of The Midterms, Actually. Every week I’ll be writing about two things: one thing I’m thinking about — a big idea or trend I see forming across the 2026 primaries — and one thing I’m hearing, from a voice on the ground. You can sign up here to get it in your inbox every week. Let’s get into it.

One big idea

There are two ways of looking at the current divides within the Democratic Party. The first — and more dominant — narrative is that the party’s left wing is on an upward march, one that began with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s election in 2025 and has continued through this year’s Democratic primary season.

The second, and I believe more accurate, explanation is that the party is rudderless — an ideological fight to be settled in the next presidential election — and that the left’s success in New York City, Colorado, and even Maine (before Graham Platner’s campaign collapsed) grows out of a void left by a bigger, less-talked-about story: an establishment in free fall, on the wrong side of fundamental shifts across its own rank-and-file base.

The difference between those interpretations is fine, but important. I don’t think the Democratic base agrees with every position articulated by successful left-wing candidates — like “all deportations are wrong” (as NYC’s Darializa Avila Chevalier told me) — or have suddenly become committed democratic socialists. But I do think the left is on the right side of the gateway issues the base is currently prioritizing: a working-class-led affordability agenda, a skepticism of artificial intelligence, and a moral opposition to President Donald Trump’s war against Iran and to Israel’s campaigns of violence in Lebanon and Gaza. Those issues, more than any others, have defined the Democratic Party’s internal battles since 2024.

Progressives have also benefited from a moderate wing that, in many cases, has yet to lay out an affirmative vision. After the signature policies of the Biden administration flopped as political motivators, the center has seemed frozen in time, unable to offer its own blueprint for the electorate’s concerns (“abundance” aside). When I sat down with Third Way president Jon Cowan, he had no trouble assailing Hasan Piker, Abdul El-Sayed, or any number of the party’s most prominent progressive figures. But when I asked whether Third Way was actually responding to the clear shifts among the electorate — on Medicare-for-all, on abolishing ICE, on foreign aid to Israel — his answer was far less sure.

Cowan on America, Actually:

We’ve never said that there’s a problem with Hasan Piker because he advocates for Medicare-for-all. … I think Medicare-for-all is still very problematic as a political issue, and if someone were nominated for president on the Democratic ticket and they were for Medicare-for-all, I think it would be a major barrier to getting elected. But that’s not our beef with Hasan Piker at all.

It was the same evasion whenever the conversation turned from the messengers to the message. In a recent interview with US Rep. Jim Clyburn — the powerful South Carolina Democrat who has endorsed US Rep. Haley Stevens’s Senate run in Michigan — he bluntly defended insider politics, insisting party leadership was not at fault for the 2024 result. The blame, he told me, belonged to the Black voters who hadn’t turned out for Kamala Harris.

Clyburn on America, Actually:

When the white vote turned out 71 percent two years ago, and the Black vote turned out 59 percent, you tell me whose fault that is. … If that 59 percent had been 69 percent, she would’ve won.

When I asked him directly whether the argument was that Black voters had let Harris down, he didn’t hesitate: “In many instances, absolutely.” It is a remarkable thing to hear from a member of leadership — the base failed us, not the other way around — and it is exactly the instinct that has the establishment on its back foot.

This is why I think it matters to read the Democratic Party’s post-2024 convulsion as a story of establishment collapse rather than left-wing ascension. Stevens, Clyburn, and the party’s leadership would prefer to make this a referendum on the left — on the acceptability of its candidates and its media figures. But the base is communicating something else: a lack of confidence in the center, and in a version of establishment politics that prizes seniority and loyalty over voters’ values. Establishment collapse also explains the Democratic results that don’t fit neatly on the moderate vs. progressive binary: like Attorney General Phil Weiser’s victory in Colorado or whatever is happening in the Wisconsin governor’s race.

The center’s other problem is that its core general-election pitch — we may not thrill you, but we’re not Trump — is losing relevance the weaker that Trump looks politically. I spent a night at Trump’s UFC event on the White House lawn in June, an evening engineered to speak to the young men who broke his way in 2024, and found plenty of them cooling. “He was promising lower prices on everything,” one told me. “We didn’t know wars were gonna start.” Even the MAGA operative Jack Posobiec conceded that “the numbers are softer today, there’s no question about that.”

When the opposition’s own coalition is cracking, branding yourself as an inoffensive vessel who can gather up the most anti-Trump voters looks less compelling. The establishment needs an affirmative reason to be chosen — and it hasn’t found one.

So here’s my amendment to the narrative of the moment: The story isn’t a left-wing party discovering its confidence. It’s an establishment losing its own — and a base voting, in New York, in Colorado, and soon in Michigan and Wisconsin, on how much faith it still has that the center will name what it actually wants and fight for it. 

What I’m hearing: A Michigan reporter’s take on the Democratic Senate race

I reached out to Samuel Robinson, a reporter for the state’s oldest Black newspaper, the Michigan Chronicle; he also has a Substack, Detroit One Million. Robinson is based on Detroit’s east side, and he’s someone I’ve known for a while, as we’re both members of the National Association of Black Journalists. 

Both the Democrats’ moderate and progressive wings have invested so much in the state — it’s become the proxy war in the party’s fight over its future. What is it about Michigan that you think has made the stakes so high? 

Stakes are high because of the control of Congress. But also, Michigan is like a microcosm of America. It swings back and forth every four, eight years. But our US Senate seats have been held by Democrats since 1992. Republicans say they’re going to spend a ton of money to flip the seat being opened by Gary Peters retiring. Women moderates (Dana Nessel, Gretchen Whitmer, Jocelyn Benson) won big in 2018, and eight years later, all three to some degree have disappointed their own voters. Dems had a legislative trifecta from 2022 to 2024, and many people feel like Dems let down Black residents who got them elected in the first place. 

That’s one thing that unites the Black progressives and the Black establishment: Members in both camps feel the Democratic Party hasn’t done enough. 

How would you describe the difference between a Haley Stevens supporter and an Abdul El-Sayed supporter? 

Haley supporter — usually older; the young people I’ve met who support her typically come from wealthier backgrounds. Haley supporters are usually not involved in politics or people who keep up with national discourse. Haley supporters are worried about the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. They are worried about Trump nationalizing elections or not leaving the White House after ’28.

Abdul supporter — usually younger; the older people I’ve met who support him often acknowledge they are in the minority of their peers. The younger people who support him are all over the place in terms of their backgrounds — rich, poor, highly educated, no college. He has the support of most young people under 35. They are mostly worried about sending American taxpayer dollars to Israel, and the influence of AIPAC. I hear more about that than I do Medicare-for-all. 

Stevens has sought to capitalize on El-Sayed’s perceived weakness with the Black vote. How real do you think that vulnerability is? 

Abdul struggles with certain Black voters mostly because they don’t know who he is. I’ve heard from countless people who have said something to the degree of, “I don’t know enough about him.” He received media attention as the Detroit and Wayne County health director, but not enough for people to feel it. Most people know that he ran for governor in 2018 with no experience. People see Haley Stevens ads and mailers. Most Black voters aren’t on Twitter.

I saw this post on X where you were talking to a Stevens supporter who expressed some pretty bigoted claims about El-Sayed’s candidacy. How widespread is that sentiment? When I was reporting on Mamdani’s election in New York City, it was clear that there was anxiety among the Black political class that the rise of Asian, Latino, Muslim communities could displace them. Is that fear at play here? 

The race is definitely a tension point between Wayne County’s Black and Muslim population. Many who have shared with me similar sentiments will point to the anti-Black racism and exploitation of our community at the hands of Arab gas station and liquor store owners. That resentment builds up and then bubbles over in a race like this. We certainly live amongst each other, like off Seven Mile on the east side, where Bengali families and Black families live side by side as next-door neighbors. But there’s a resentment that goes both ways.

The Midterms, Actually is a new weekly newsletter from Astead Herndon. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Tuesday.

The gerontocracy is real: The median senator is 64 years old, and 20 members of Congress are over 80. One legal scholar called it the “old-igarchy.” It seems the combination of President Donald Trump’s recent 80th birthday, the sudden death of Sen. Lindsey Graham, and the currently unknown health status of Sen. Mitch McConnell has called collective attention to the advanced age of our elected officials — and with good reason. 

So this week, I talked with Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina on his 86th birthday. And I wanted to (delicately) ask a question that’s been brewing in my head since the whole fiasco with then-President Joe Biden: Why don’t the oldheads want to retire? 

Over a long interview, I asked the House Democratic leader about generational change, shifts in the electorate on corporate PAC money and artificial intelligence, and whether he thinks there are any lessons to learn from the 2024 election.

On the question of age, Clyburn told me, “I know people who are 66 years old with much less energy than I have, and none of the experience that I have.” Clyburn said he would also be open to a recently proposed law calling for members of Congress to take cognitive tests, though he dismissed the idea of term limits or an age cap. 

Here’s what else I learned: 

1. They aren’t giving up power because they don’t want to

That’s the whole thing. The reason the boomers (and Clyburn’s Silent Generation) won’t step aside isn’t that no one has asked. It’s that they don’t want to. And for Clyburn, I think the armor doubles as the blind spot. When I asked about younger generations being distrustful that older politicians can deliver, he invoked his grandparents, saying, “Don’t worry about what people call you. It’s what you answer to that’s the issue.”

And while that is wisdom, hardened over the decades, I don’t know if it works as well as a leadership philosophy. Stay the course and ignore the criticism can also be read as ignoring electoral feedback. “I don’t react to that stuff,” Clyburn said, when asked about calls for generational change.

2. Clyburn says what the establishment thinks: It’s the voters’ fault

Clyburn articulates the core view of establishment politics as cleanly as anyone: There is nothing much to change. He doesn’t believe the party made significant errors in 2024, and he doesn’t take the primary results in New York City, Colorado, and elsewhere to be anything other than a flash in the pan. Pushed on what political lesson he took from an administration built to stop Trump that ended with Trump back in office, he went to turnout: “When the white vote turned out 71 percent two years ago, and the Black vote turned out 59 percent, you tell me whose fault that is.” Asked directly whether the argument was that Black people let Kamala Harris down, he didn’t hesitate: “In many instances, absolutely.” 

At its heart, this is a philosophy that blames the voters and insulates the party establishment from reflection. 

But this is also why the next round of primaries is so important. It’s easy to file New York, Colorado, or Graham Platner’s rise in Maine as one-offs — local flukes, not an overwhelming trend. But the Michigan and Wisconsin primaries are coming, and those are the ones that decide whether this gets treated as a pattern. The temperature of the freakout is still yet to be set.

3. He defends the establishment’s alliance with the Congressional Black Caucus

The moderate wing of the Democratic Party is held up, at the grassroots, by Black voters — particularly in the South. Clyburn knows that, and he defended both the alliance and the corporate policies that tie them together. 

Clyburn holds that taking corporate dollars is necessary for minority candidates who don’t come from family wealth — “I would challenge you to find me one single vote I have ever cast that pharma supported and my constituents didn’t.” He deferred to a pro-Israel colleague, Rep. Gregory Meeks, on questions of Israel: “I’m guided by Gregory Meeks.” He made no apology for backing Andrew Cuomo over Zohran Mamdani in this year’s New York mayor’s race — the same Cuomo he’d said should resign in 2021.

I asked him what Black communities have gotten in exchange for that loyalty. His answer was an agenda: “What did we get out of our support for Obama? What did we get out of our support for Biden?” And that’s a real answer. But I think there’s also another one underneath it.

I see Clyburn’s actions through the context of changing power within the Democratic Party, just as much as what’s going on outside of it. The Black political class, specifically, is invested in holding its own position against the party’s rising coalitions, immigrant communities in particular. That’s part of what’s at the heart of Clyburn’s endorsements of Cuomo and Haley Stevens in Michigan, and even the recent fight over which states should vote first in the Democratic presidential primary. 

Find the full episode — including a bonus segment where Clyburn defends the party’s approach to Israel — wherever you get your podcasts.

The Democratic Party is at war with itself, and nowhere is the fight clearer than the Michigan Senate primary. On one side: Rep. Haley Stevens, backed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and the establishment, who says the left is too untested and too extreme to win a general election. On the other: Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the former public health official who wants to blow up the whole premise of the question.

More than $40 million in outside money has already poured into this race — a big chunk of it from pro-Israel groups lining up against El-Sayed — because it’s less a Senate primary than a proxy war for where the party goes next. And at the center of it sits that dreaded word: electability. 

That term has become a catch-all used by Democrats to encapsulate whatever approach they think has higher odds of winning the general election. 

This week on America, Actually, I sat down with El-Sayed about what his theory of electability actually means. 

Here are three takeaways from our conversation:

1. His electability pitch is an “America First” argument  

El-Sayed takes the two things his critics treat as liabilities — his opposition to US support for Israel and his populism — and fuses them into a single kitchen-table argument: money going abroad is money not going to you. Anti-war politics and affordability policy become one and the same.

“My priority is money out of politics, money in your pocket, Medicare for all. That’s what I’m campaigning on,” he said. That reminded me of a similar argument I heard from Darializa Avila Chevalier, the socialist candidate who won an insurgent congressional primary in New York City. 

“Kids need glasses, kids need schools, kids need functional infrastructure,” El-Sayed continued, fleshing out his case. “And I’m gonna find the money that we’re sending to do heinous things to other people and keep it here.” 

He says that pitch appeals to a broader swath of the electorate than the traditional left: Voters, he says, feel that the government is making them “unable to afford my groceries, unable to afford a home… and then [it is] sending my money abroad telling me that somehow that’s in my best interest?”

2. He rejects the left-right dichotomy

El-Sayed also repeatedly rejected the left-right spectrum entirely. His read on Michigan isn’t that voters keep lurching between extremes — it’s that they are searching for a fresh type of politics, which neither traditional party was offering. Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary, Donald Trump in that cycle’s general election, Joe Biden in 2020, Trump again in 2024. It’s not whiplash, he argues. It’s hunger. And that hunger reorganizes the whole map.

“If Michiganders wanted moderate[s], why would they have elected Donald Trump twice?” he asked. 

“The better way to think about our politics is top-down: people who are locked out versus people doing the locking out. And if you’re on the side of the people doing the locking out, you’re going to have a really hard time in our politics right now.”

With this framework, El-Sayed thinks he can create a greater contrast with Republican nominee Mike Rogers than his Democratic counterpart can. 

“Both Mike Rogers, the Republican, and Haley Stevens, my opponent in this primary, have been on the side of the people doing the locking out,” he said. “They take their money and do their bidding.”

3. The moderates are in hiding 

The Stevens campaign rejected multiple requests for comment — which is becoming a bit of a trend on the Democratic establishment side of the party’s civil war. If you want to bash the left, they’ll talk. But if you’re interested in their vision, they are much less willing to be forthright. In some cases, it seems like the moderate lane of Democrats is downright scared of its own shadow. 

But that’s also a political strategy. Stevens and her allies at groups like Third Way are making a bet: that if they can turn the race into a verdict on El-Sayed himself — the Hasan Piker streams, the old campaign clips, the loose-cannon caricature — voters will get nervous and retreat to the safe choice. 

El-Sayed said the approach was an insult to voters: “It’s interesting taking political advice from a shop that exists specifically to launder old ideas and make them seem new again — and then, like, fail miserably at that.” 

New episodes of America, Actually are in your feed every Saturday. Listen wherever you get your podcasts, or in the Today, Explained feed.

Two years after her whirlwind ascension to Democratic presidential nominee, former Vice President Kamala Harris is thinking about…running for president again. Not doing it — yet — but laying the groundwork in case she does.

She’s done the book tour through the early states. She’s taken the meeting with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and dialed up pro-Palestinian organizers to feel out the room. And she’s leading many 2028 polls — ahead of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, ahead of former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg or Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, ahead of the field. But she remains noncommittal to the prospect about running in 2028 and is yet to weigh in on the Democratic party’s most pressing ideological fights.

It’s an odd situation: The candidate is unclear if she wants to run — and the party seems unclear if they want her to.

So last week, I talked with Democratic Party officials, donors, and South Carolina voters for our last episode of America, Actually to figure out whether Harris has a lane for another presidential bid — and whether it’s one she actually wants.

Here’s what I learned:

The Harris camp treats 2024 as an anomaly

The case from her inner circle is that the 2024 presidential election against President Donald Trump simply doesn’t count. To start, President Joe Biden dropped out in July — under pressure from virtually the entire Democratic Party — and left her just 107 days to mount a campaign.

And, then, there were the multiple assassination attempts against Trump, including one that resulted in an indelible image of the bloodied candidate pumping his fist in a knot of Secret Service agents. As one Harris surrogate put it to me: “I think Jesus Christ would’ve lost in 2024 after the assassination attempt.”

It’s a real argument, but it’s also exactly the argument a team makes once it has decided the loss wasn’t about the candidate. I’m not sure the rest of the party agree. (Also, she did run for the nomination in 2020 and dropped out in late 2019, before the first primary contest.)

The donor class may be ready to turn the page

I called John Morgan, a Florida mega-donor who’s raised tens of millions for Democrats going back to the Clinton years. He doesn’t want Harris to run, but, even more, he said that he thinks the money won’t materialize and that she and Newsom would be cannibalizing the same California checkbooks. He also raised her ties to the Biden administration. According to Morgan, the entire Biden era needs what he called — and I’m quoting the man — a “Bye Bye Biden” sendoff.

Morgan also added plenty of donors feel this way, and almost none will say it out loud, because “people think to say no to her, they could be labeled racist, and they don’t want that, ’cause they’re Democrats,” he said. 

Oof.

Nobody has actually replaced her — and that’s the real story

Here’s one where the Harris team has a point. No one has yet supplanted her with the two groups that anchor the Democratic base: Black voters and women. To this moment, that bond holds. I felt it at a Juneteenth picnic in North Charleston, where “Yes, she should run” won our little yes-bucket, no-bucket poll. A few other responses we got: “Third time’s a charm.” “We need women.” “It was stolen from her the first time.”

But the fuller conversations were more nuanced than any topline number. There’s a generational split — younger voters are raising her prosecutor record and her posture on Gaza, with one telling me she “was locking us up until she needed our vote.” There’s a gender split — men at the picnic were ready to run back “a competent white man” before another woman, and women insisted that the door just needs one more good push.

Beneath nearly all of it, one word kept surfacing, from the yeses and the nos alike: fresh. People want a fresh face. Some want a fresher Harris. Some just want somebody new.

The Black vote — particularly in the South — has been the great consolidating force in modern Democratic primaries: the firewall that lined up behind Hillary Clinton in 2016, that rescued Joe Biden in South Carolina in 2020, that ultimately made Obama.

Democrats run orderly primaries when that group decides early and moves together. A Black electorate that’s split by age, split by gender, and openly shopping for a new face isn’t just a headache for Harris; it’s a break from decades of how this party has chosen a nominee. That’s not really a story about Kamala Harris. It’s a story about a party that doesn’t know what it wants — and a 2028 presidential cycle that’s going to be a good deal messier than the polling makes it look.

As always, there’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.