In California, drivers are paying north of $6 a gallon for regular unleaded. Seventy-five cents of every single gallon goes straight to state taxes. That's not a market failure. That's a policy choice made by people who will never have to choose between a full tank and a full grocery cart.
And California isn't the outlier. It's the model.
A new analysis from Unleash Prosperity crunched gas prices against the 2024 election map and found something that should surprise exactly nobody: the more Democratic a state voted, the higher the price at the pump. Specifically, for every additional percentage point of Kamala Harris votes a state recorded, gas prices climbed 2 cents per gallon. Eight of the ten most expensive states for gas are run by Democrats. Eight of the ten cheapest are run by Republicans.
Twenty-five cents per gallon. That's the blue-state tax you pay just for living somewhere that thinks "net zero" carbon emissions are more important than your commute.
Stephen Moore, a former senior economic advisor to President Trump, co-authored the analysis. His summary was blunt: "The more Democratic a state, the higher the price of gas." Moore pointed to state-level climate regulations, refinery restrictions, and gas tax add-ons as the primary drivers. California alone tacks on $1.25 more per gallon than the average state — a number that has nothing to do with OPEC and everything to do with Sacramento.
Governor Gavin Newsom has spent years blaming oil companies for the prices his own policies created. The state's regulatory stack — boutique fuel blends, cap-and-trade surcharges, underground storage tank fees — functions as a series of tollbooths between the refinery and your gas cap. Each one was enacted in the name of the environment. Each one lands on the person filling up a Honda Civic to get to work.
The counterargument from the green-energy crowd is that high gas prices are a feature, not a bug — that expensive fuel pushes consumers toward electric vehicles and public transit. Which would be a fascinating social experiment if the people designing it had to participate. Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco district has some of the highest gas prices in the country. Her garage has a Tesla in it. The guy driving a 2011 F-150 to a job site in Bakersfield doesn't have that option.
Moore put it more directly: "You don't send an arsonist to put out a fire." He was talking about the Democratic push to nominate another climate-first candidate for 2028 — someone who would presumably look at $6 gas in California and conclude the rest of the country needs to catch up.
President Trump's "drill, baby, drill" energy dominance strategy moved in the opposite direction. Restarting the Keystone XL pipeline, rolling back refinery regulations, and unleashing domestic production didn't just lower prices — it broke the argument that American energy independence was a fantasy. Red states that followed that lead are now the cheapest places in the country to fill a tank.
The map tells the story without editorializing. Vote blue, pay more at the pump. Vote red, pay less. The correlation isn't loose — it's 2 cents per percentage point, straight line, exposed by the same election data Democrats spent two years celebrating.
Eight of the ten most expensive. Eight of the ten cheapest. Same country, same oil market, different policies.