Good news to anyone watching events in Brazil this evening as their experiment in socialism is heading towards collapse, with Bolsonaro looking to roundly trounce Lula in the first round of voting.

Folks may temporarily forget what free markets accomplish, but they always come back to free minds, free markets, and a free society.

So How Is It Looking In Virginia?

Depends.

A couple of graphs for folks to bear in mind as gasoline prices hover at the $3.99 per gallon mark. We can start with the obvious for anyone wondering where things stand:

• The national generic congressional ballot is D+9.
• Which means it is about D+12 in Virginia.
• This is a regionalized effect. More pronounced in the commuting suburbs and eastern parts of Virginia; less pronounced points west.
• Grocery prices, housing, and fuel prices are sticking household budgets despite the improving economy. 41% believe their personal economic situation is getting worse. Virginia’s GDP grew by only 0.7% in the first half of 2026 — not good.

National real GDP is up 2.5%, business investment is up 9%, retirement funds such as 401(k)s are up 19% since January 2026, income tax receipts are up 8% — the fundamentals are fantastic, but it’s the hangover from Bidenflation and the stickiness of higher prices that are frustrating American voters 18 months after Trump’s inauguration.

Despite consumer sentiment, consumer spending? Steadily going up:

So why is everyone so glum? Well — has a lot to do with the price of a gallon of gasoline — a Main Street phenomenon, not precisely a Wall Street concern.

As with most things: “It’s the economy stupid!”

Straits of Hormuz: Where Things Actually Stand

First and foremost, claims that transits through the Straits of Hormuz are at 94% of pre-war levels are indeed true, measurable, and working. This is a pretty neat infographic as to how this is being achieved:

What the heck is that blue column, you ask? It’s what is called a “ship to ship” transfer where a VLCC — that’s a Very Large Crude Carrier — transfers its oil or natural gas to smaller vessels able to transit the Oman side of the Straits of Hormuz. Then they load back up onto VLCCs outside of the combat zone, which then travel the open seas to markets across the world.

Meanwhile, the amount of oil Iran has on the open seas in container vessels has officially run out. Kharg Island hasn’t exported oil for weeks.

This is putting tremendous pressure on the Iranian rial, whose exchange rate at present is 2.8 million rial to the U.S. dollar — effectively rendering it worthless:

At present, the reaction of the IRGC (Iranian Republican Guard Corps) is to increase the targeting of tankers transiting the Straits of Hormuz, with the Wall Street Journal commenting that seven vessels have been targeted over the weekend:

Which gets us to Crude Oil Futures, which as of Sunday morning on the East Coast was as low as $88 a barrel only to see those prices inch north to $91 a barrel, down from a high of $105 a barrel on September 15th, 2026.

In Virginia, average gasoline prices are at $4.13 per gallon, up from $3.95 a month ago and $2.95 a year ago and before the conflict with Iran began. From my own personal barometer at a non-descript crossroads in Central Virginia, gasoline prices have gone down 10 cents to $4.19 per gallon.

Prices were $3.79 in January 2025 and were as low as $2.89 a gallon before the conflict began. The highest recorded gasoline price? $4.86 in June 2022 in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of the Ukraine.

Diesel prices remain at all-time highs due to both the Iranian conflict and recent Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil refineries as Russia restricts energy exports in the lead up to their expected winter offensive. All of this puts additional pressures on heating bills, agriculture, and food prices.

National averages aren’t much better. Just in time for the mid-terms, of course.

Rockets and Feathers: Why Prices Go Up and Take Forever to Come Down

The short version of this is that America is indeed winning the war against the Islamic Republic of Iran.

This week will be a perilous one. Iran’s economy is buckling, there is no more oil on the open seas for China to purchase from Iran, Ukrainian efforts to impede the upcoming Russian offensive have sent diesel prices skyrocketing, and Iran no longer has within reach its nuclear option.

The longer version of this is twofold: (1) when will gasoline prices ease and (2) will it do so in time to “save” the elections for Republicans?

Americans have seen the “rockets and feathers” effect before, the result being much more pronounced during COVID and after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Here’s how the press caged it back then:

For one thing, retailers are reluctant to lower prices on inventory they ordered when wholesale prices were high, said Jared Bernstein, a senior policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy who served as chair of President Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers.

Stores and food companies also want to maximize their profits and were reluctant to give up some of the sales gains they saw after the pandemic, Bernstein said. PepsiCo hiked its prices by double-digit percentages for eight straight quarters in 2022 and 2023, for example, citing higher ingredient and packaging costs. After customer demand faltered, the company began lowering prices on some snacks last year.

“There’s less competitive force on the feather side of the mountain,” Bernstein said.

There you have it, ladies and gentlemen. When scarcity is introduced to the market, prices go up. When prices go up, businesses tend to want to recuperate their costs by selling high — and will continue to sell high unless demand is alleviated either by consumers simply refusing to buy at higher prices or competition is unleashed on the market.

What makes it worse? Uncertainty in the market — Iran throwing drones at tankers, Ukraine targeting oil refineries, consumers who keep buying potato chips at $7 a bag, data centers driving up the cost of RAM, pandemics in Russia — anything that drives up uncertainty impacts efficiency and stability, which in turn increases the cost of doing business.

When the price per barrel goes to $100, gas prices skyrocket accordingly. When the price sinks to $88, why don’t we see a corresponding 12% reduction in gas prices? Two reasons — one, recuperation of costs when oil prices were high, and two, there are indeed fixed costs that will always be embedded in the production of any one thing.

The problem is that increased energy costs ripple throughout an economy. It’s not just the price of gasoline at the pump. The petrochemicals used to make plastics, medicines, kerosene, diesel, lubricants for machinery, transportation costs, the cost of heating fuel and powering electric plants — all of this feeds into a similar effect across so many sectors of the economy that it has an exponential rather than a merely cumulative effect.

Memories of Goldfish? Or Just Good Memories?

Voters can be fickle, but the old Jeffersonian confidence in the will of the people is difficult to ignore. What sounds good over a taco bowl at Mar-a-lago doesn’t exactly make sense over tacos at the kitchen table. Going out to eat is an expensive proposition, getting to the restaurant is an expensive proposition, eating at home is an expensive proposition.

Gasoline prices at the pump? By the math, an extra $15-30 a week when people understand the reasons for the cost isn’t terrible. Yet when those costs are piled on to the cost of food, clothing, housing, energy, and gasoline? When the investment in artificial intelligence combined with reasonably strong economic indicators make credit a more costly proposition? Buying the new car, the home, springing for that vacation all becomes a bit more cost prohibitive. Artificial wage increases translate into an artificial increase in the price of stuff at the gas station or supermarket — consumers foot that bill as well.

Toss into the fact that in Virginia, it is a comedy of errors from the Virginia Clean Energy Act to Spanberger’s reintroduction of the commonwealth into RGGI and a muti-decade neglect of our energy infrastructure spiking energy costs — government revenues grow, profits grow, tariffs squeeze consumers and payouts go to businesses (and not consumers) while prices remain high. Local governments are asking for sales tax referenda, state taxes inch north, the cost of doing business becomes more expensive and the costs are passed on to consumers and ratepayers and taxpayers alike.

If voters feel as if they are suffering from a death of a thousand price increases and taxes, it’s because they are.

Of course, I don’t think this means we should simply yield the contest to the pessimists. Long term? The outlook for both the United States economy and national security look outstanding to off the page. The White House could have backtracked and chose not to — Venezuela tamed, Cuba on the brink, Iran humbled, Russia throwing the dice in one last gamble, and China reading the tea leaves. If successful, the 21st century will be another American century.

Voters at present disagree.

Sometimes people just have to touch the stove to get burned. Case point: Brazil, where the Brazilian Main Street is learning from Argentina that free markets really are the path forward and that socialism doesn’t get improve when cloaked with the word democracy.

Brazil is showing us the long game in a world of constants and variables. Rest assured, whatever answers the Democrats think they have in this environment, they are unfathomably worse than the answers we are getting today.

For conservatives, we can enjoy a momentary see-I-told-you-so moment with regard to tariffs and economic orthodoxy in the tradition of Friedman and Hayek. Markets want to be free. Should Kiggans and Wittman (and McGuire) survive the present discontent — and I strongly suspect they will — here’s hoping that the conservative movement doubles down on the values which got us here rather than the experiments which make life more expensive for working class everyone.

SHAUN KENNEY is senior editor of The Republican Standard.