Christine Waugh-Fleischmann, an art teacher who said she spends up to $200 a week on gas driving to see her grandchildren, is a Democratic voter in Michigan’s 7th Congressional District. One of the most competitive seats in the country, it is currently held by Republican Representative Tom Barrett and she believes the seat can be flipped, partly due to the high price of gas. “I do see a lot of people in my conservative neighborhood here who are very upset,” she told Reuters.
It’s grocery prices, it’s health care costs.” The arithmetic of her frustration is easy to trace. After war broke out with Iran in late February, the average price of gas in Michigan jumped roughly 32 percent in three weeks, from $2.99 to $3.95 a gallon. Governor Gretchen Whitmer declared a formal energy emergency to let southeast Michigan stations sell cheaper summer-blend fuel, citing both the war and tariffs.
Prices kept climbing anyway — including a 90-cent spike in a single week, among the sharpest in any midterm battleground — briefly topping $4 before coming down in recent months. Read Next Why are so many Democrats going quiet on climate change? Kate Yoder Crisis, emergency orders, persistent pain heading into the fall: That is the narrative spine of Michigan’s midterms, and both parties know it.
A ground shift Republicans spent years circling Michigan as their best 2026 pickup opportunity. A Democrat won a special state Senate election in May by nearly 20 points in a district Kamala Harris carried by less than one, and President Donald Trump’s economic approval fell even among Republicans, from 74 percent to 62 percent, between March and April. In a Climate Power survey of 600 likely Michigan voters conducted in mid-June, 42 percent of those polled, including 44 percent of independents, said they would be less likely to vote for a congressional candidate who supports Trump’s energy policies, as opposed to 21 percent who said they’d be more likely.
And 58 percent said Trump has made energy prices more expensive, while 63 percent rejected his claim that high gas prices are a “small price to pay” for the war in Iran. Since the war began, 45 percent said they had grown more supportive of diversifying America’s energy sources, including solar and wind. “Trump’s energy agenda is costing Michigan families at the pump and on their power bills — an…
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