The Left’s Hypocrisy Problem with Energy and Affordability

By Andrew Follett

Saturday, December 27, 2025

 

Democrats seem to have decided that beating the drum on “affordability” is the key to electoral success, and given their recent strong performances in New Jersey, Virginia, and New York City, who could blame them? Indeed, the affordability focus allows them to set aside their remarkably unpopular positions on immigration, crime, and certain social issues in favor of a more marketable focus.

 

But Republicans should have a straightforward response: Look at Democrats’ energy policies, and their so-called commitment to affordability suddenly becomes empty.

 

Republicans’ answer to the Democrats’ affordability push should be a full-throated endorsement of President Trump’s “Energy Dominance” agenda — an increased focus on domestic energy production — while highlighting Democratic hypocrisy. This is a winning political issue for the GOP, because while Democrats’ environmentalist base wants expensive energy for ideological reasons (President Obama once said that under progressive policies, “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket,” and Columbia University’s Climate School similarly claims that the energy transition has to be “expensive”), pricey power hurts lower-income Americans the most.

 

This month, Gallup polling found that more than a third of Americans believe that economic issues are the most important problem facing the country — up from about a quarter of Americans in September and October. Surveys show that nearly three in four Americans think their electricity bills are too high, and 81 percent think their local government should be doing more about it.

 

Energy prices are certainly a function of public policy more than anything else. And when you look at the costs of energy throughout the country, it becomes easier to put a finger on who’s responsible for high prices: Blue states pay far more than red states do.

 

According to a new report from Always on Energy Research and the Institute for Energy Research, U.S. electricity prices spiked 27 percent under the Biden administration, with the vast majority of this price increase affecting blue states. Even left-wing think tanks admit that blue states saw soaring power bills, with New York experiencing the largest price hikes in the country, according to a recent study by the Progressive Policy Institute. And this was despite deep-blue New York’s delaying various global warming cap-and-tax schemes because they would impose “extraordinary and damaging costs” on residents.

 

Looking at these findings, it becomes clear that Democrats’ embrace of the affordability issue is massively hypocritical, because the average blue state objectively pays almost 50 percent more per kilowatt hour of power than the average red state. And these numbers get more extreme in more partisan states: a resident of deep-blue California or Massachusetts pays 28 and 26 cents per kilowatt hour of power, double the 14 cents a Floridian pays and nearly triple the 10 cents an Idahoan pays.

 

A similar argument is true for gasoline prices. A Californian pays an average of $4.30 per gallon, while in red states like Texas, Arkansas, and Tennessee, the average is below $3 a gallon. The ten states with the lowest gasoline prices are all ruby red, largely because many blue states charge a variety of special taxes and fees. Blue California adds 71 cents per gallon in taxes, while red Oklahoma only adds 20 cents, according to the Institute for Energy Research.

 

Around the time of the presidential inauguration in January 2025, the average price was approximately $3.08 per gallon. It is now down to $2.86, below the major psychological threshold of $3 a gallon. This is largely the result of new drilling enabled by Trump’s Energy Dominance agenda of deregulation and permitting-simplification. Low prices at the pump are enormously beneficial to American households, as they use money not spent on gasoline to save more, pay down debt, or buy other goods.

 

Expensive energy in blue states means price hikes for all Americans, but the burden falls mostly on those with lower incomes — precisely the people Democrats claim to be helping. Energy costs account for 7 percent of the average American’s household budget, but this can exceed 20 percent for low-income families.

 

We’ve known for decades that expensive energy hurts poorer people more than it does the rich, since the poor tend to spend a higher proportion of their incomes on basic needs. A 2009 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that green, global-warming policies would increase the tax burden of the poorest households three times more than it would that of the richest households.

 

This means that when energy prices rise, the poor are hit disproportionately hard. Therefore, low energy prices are among the most effective anti-poverty measures in human history. There’s no such thing as a high-income and low-energy country — yet Democrats want the U.S. to become one. Democrats love to pretend to be defenders of poor Americans, so actively flipping this talking point by pointing to cheap energy in GOP-controlled states versus the immense expense of power in Democratic ones would be a political winner for Republicans.

 

Cheaper energy would lower the cost of every product that uses electricity as an input or as a means of transport — which is almost every product. Less expensive electricity and fuel reduce manufacturing, farming, and transportation costs, leading to lower prices for food, clothing, and consumer products. Affordable U.S. energy, especially from our abundant natural gas, which Trump has championed, gives American industries a global edge, supporting jobs and keeping imported goods competitive. All that remains is to sell these wins to voters.

 

Democrats’ record on affordability doesn’t live up to their soaring rhetoric, because their policies raise the price of everything and primarily serve to enrich politically connected environmentalist donors. Republicans will likely benefit at the polls if they point out that hypocrisy.