Two weeks before Election Day, I wrote here that the 2026 midterm elections would turn out to be the “gasoline prices are too damn high” election, not the data center election. Despite punditry still pointing to data centers today as the big issue, the polls show that far more voters all over the country had the economy on their minds, with prices for gas and diesel atop their list of economic issues when they went to the polls.
It’s always the economy, stupid, as James Carville became famous for saying.
The problem for Republicans — and for President Donald Trump — was the crystal clear cause-and-effect relationship between the Iran Conflict and the prices at the pump. There was simply no denying that the extra $15 to $20 bucks drivers were paying every time they filled up was a direct consequence of the war Mr. Trump kicked off on Feb. 28.
The President’s rhetoric on the subject — constantly stating that higher gas prices were no big deal when compared to preventing the Iranian regime from getting a nuclear bomb — was not helpful, whether one agreed with it or not. It showed the leader of the Republican Party to be completely out of touch with the struggles of working families on the matter.
For Americans living paycheck to paycheck, as most Americans still do, the price of gasoline is more than an economic issue: It’s also an emotional one because they have no choice but to pay the price, no matter how high it goes.
President Trump and his party lost sight of that reality in this election, just as President Barack Obama and the Democrat Party lost sight of the average American’s emotional feelings related to rising medical costs and suffered a similar wipeout in the 2010 midterms.
To be fair, the data center issue did show up big in some key races. In Ohio, Sherrod Brown beat incumbent Sen. John Husted after branding him “the face of data centers,” according to Fortune, which also noted that Husted had been “basically at every single ribbon cutting for data centers across the state.”
In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed held a rally in front of the OpenAI-Oracle campus site in Saline Township and ran on a “no rate hikes” promise. In Iowa, Democrat Rob Sand won the governor’s race promising to make data centers “pay their own way,” as reported by NewsNation.
But then, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Senate candidate Ken Paxton, and other Texas Republicans running for statewide offices made exactly the same pledge related to data centers. Every one of those Republicans were defeated by big margins. Why? Because the prices for gasoline and diesel overshadowed everything. The AP put it bluntly in its post-election analysis: “Voters could see it clearly in their receipts from grocery stores and gasoline stations.”
It’s always the economy, stupid, and gas and diesel prices are the biggest issue facing voters in an economy that is strong overall.
Let’s look at the receipts. On Election Day, AAA reported the national average for regular gasoline was $4.15 per gallon, with Diesel sitting at a whopping $6.29 — the highest prices ever recorded on a national general election day. That’s about a 35% increase year-over-year on gas and a 70% rise in diesel from a year before. That’s an emotional thing for most voters.
As stated above, the cause of those price shocks was no mystery. Crude oil prices quickly spiked after the start of the Iran Conflict, taking gasoline prices along for the leap. Ukraine’s highly effective drone attacks on Russian refineries played a major role in causing the even bigger blowout in diesel prices over the same time period.
Taken together, American consumers find themselves paying higher prices not just to fill up their tanks, but for all consumers goods that are transported on ships, trucks and trains that run on diesel.
This isn’t complicated. Data centers made headlines and dominated specific campaigns in specific parts of the country. But the high costs for gasoline and diesel were the deciders nationwide. It’s always the economy, stupid, the price for gas was too damn high, and the cause-and-effect too crystal clear to hide.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
Imagine that the federal government prohibits you from exercising a constitutional right. Your neighbor challenges the prohibition and wins; a federal court holds that the government may not enforce it.
Now imagine that you want to engage in the very same conduct as your neighbor, inside the same judicial district where the government’s prohibition was just enjoined. The government would rely on the same law and the same legal arguments to prevent you from doing so.
You might reasonably think the government has already had its chance in court and lost — and that the matter has therefore been resolved in your favor.
Under current Supreme Court precedent, however, the federal government gets another chance. In fact, it gets a new chance each and every time someone wants to vindicate the same right under the same unconstitutional law.
Our firm, the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Center for the American Future, represents two Texans, David McCann and Kirk Launius, in a case challenging that extraordinary privilege.
The underlying dispute involves whether law-abiding citizens may carry otherwise lawful firearms with them when they visit a post office. Federal law and Postal Service regulations prohibit carrying firearms on postal property, including by people lawfully carrying them for self-defense — a recognized constitutional right.
In 2025, several plaintiffs challenged those restrictions in the Northern District of Texas. They succeeded, and a federal judge held that the government could not enforce the restrictions upon ordinary, lawful firearm possession at post offices.
Regardless of what one thinks of the specific firearms ruling, the case exposed a broader procedural problem. Under current case law, the judgment protected only the plaintiffs who brought that particular lawsuit. So even after the Northern District of Texas held the challenged rules unconstitutional, others in the very same district still faced the same restrictions.
McCann and Launius were among those still affected. So, we filed a second lawsuit on their behalf in the same federal district. We raised a question far beyond firearms: How many times should the federal government get to litigate the same issue after it loses?
Ordinarily, our legal system has an answer. The doctrine of collateral estoppel, also called issue preclusion, prevents a party from repeatedly litigating an issue that has already been fully and fairly decided against it.
The principle is straightforward: litigation must eventually end. A losing party generally cannot keep demanding a new adjudication of the same issue in hopes that a different judge will give it a better answer.
But in 1984, the Supreme Court created a special exception to this doctrine for the federal government.
In United States v. Mendoza, the Court held that the federal government generally cannot be subjected to what lawyers, in a mouthful, call “nonmutual offensive collateral estoppel.” In other words, someone who was not a party to the first case normally cannot use the government’s previous loss to prevent it from relitigating the same issue against him or her.
The Court offered practical reasons for creating this exception for the federal government. Federal litigation occurs across the country, and important legal questions should be allowed to develop as the government defends its position in multiple courts. The government also should not feel compelled, the Court thought, to appeal every adverse district-court ruling for fear that one loss will bind it forever nationwide.
Those concerns may explain the Court’s reasoning, but they come at a real cost: they allow the federal government to keep relitigating issues it has already lost, forcing Americans into the uphill battle of perennially fighting for the same recognized rights. In this way, the federal government effectively holds a Sword of Damocles over the nation even after judges rule against it.
That problem has become more serious after the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Trump v. CASA. Whereas Mendoza limits a plaintiff’s ability to avoid redundant litigation, CASA limits the relief a plaintiff can obtain after winning it. In CASA, the Court held that, in general, one judge may not simply block a federal policy throughout the whole country, because relief usually extends only to the parties who actually brought the case. The result is that one person can defeat an unlawful government action, and yet everyone else remains subject to its force — and under Mendoza, if prosecuted, must litigate the same issue in its entirety.
Our case is about whether Mendoza should really require that result for everyone else within the same federal district.
McCann and Launius are not trying to take one district judge’s decision and impose it nationwide. They sued in the very same federal district in which the government had already litigated and lost the issue. Yet the district court concluded that Mendoza categorically foreclosed our collateral-estoppel argument.
We are appealing that ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
And events since these cases were filed have made the problem even clearer.
The government has since dropped its appeal of the original post office ruling, leaving that decision in place. And the Trump administration’s own Office of Legal Counsel has concluded that the challenged restrictions are indeed unlawful as applied.
So the government lost the underlying issue in court, abandoned its appeal, and has now itself concluded that the challenged regulatory prohibition violates the law. Yet under the district court’s reading of Mendoza, another citizen in the same district still cannot invoke that earlier judgment to protect himself from litigating the issue all over again.
That result is not necessary to preserve healthy disagreement among courts. It is disorder within the same court system.
And after CASA, the problem extends far beyond this case. If judicial relief ordinarily protects only the parties who sue, while Mendoza permits the federal government to relitigate the same issue against every new plaintiff, then constitutional rights are effectively dispensed by the government at sufferance — even within the same federal district.
The alternative does not have to mean that one district judge dictates federal law to the entire country. Different courts may remain free to disagree, legal questions may develop through the judicial system, and appellate courts may establish binding precedent for broader jurisdictions, as CASA contemplated.
But there is a vast difference between allowing different courts to disagree and requiring the same court system to reconsider the same issue every time a new citizen walks through the courthouse door.
Mendoza described itself as protecting the legitimate development of federal law. In the post-CASA world, it should not become a rule of perpetual relitigation.
When the government loses, it should have the same basic choices other litigants have: accept the result or appeal it.
It should not have an endless supply of second chances.
Clayton Calvin is a contributor to the Daily Caller News Foundation and an attorney for the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Center for the American Future.
In the insurance business, they price the loss before they sell the policy. Nobody writes coverage, leaves the deductible blank and doesn’t account for possible losses.
Yet that is how Democrats’ climate policies plan the grid. Every wind-and-solar plan prices building wind and solar, not the other costs they create: battery backup, transmission wires, substations, infrastructure and dispatchable power to keep the lights on when they don’t. They also don’t price what happens when our grids fail.
Economists do have a number. It is called the value of lost load: the cost to families and businesses of power that isn’t there when they need it. A 2024 study for the Texas grid operator put it at roughly $35,000 per megawatt-hour for a one-hour outage.
Wind can sell power for around $30 a megawatt-hour. Failing to deliver it can cost more than a thousand times that.
Texas learned the lesson in February 2021. Winter Storm Uri caused at least 246 deaths and the state comptroller estimated the economic loss at $80 billion to $130 billion. Civil engineers put it as high as $300 billion.
Uri was not just a wind and solar failure; their output dropped dramatically. The storm froze gas fields and coal plants, which increased their output by 500% because wind and solar weren’t there before tripping off. The more a grid leans on weather, the less room it has when the weather turns.
Now run the numbers on a real project. Microsoft says the first phase of its Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, data center needs about 450 megawatts around the clock. The nearby Paris Solar-Battery Park has a battery that holds 440 megawatt-hours, less than one hour of that load.
At the Texas figure, one hour of 450 megawatts going unserved is about $15.8 million. That is an illustration, not a forecast and the value per megawatt-hour falls as outages lengthen. But it shows the scale of what a plan leaves off the ledger.
Carrying that load through five gray January days on batteries would take roughly 54,000 megawatt-hours, more than 120 Paris-sized batteries. The federal energy laboratory puts a four-hour battery system at $334 per kilowatt-hour in 2024 and $366 in 2026 in its high case. At those prices, the batteries alone total nearly $20 billion, before transmission, charging losses and replacement. The estimate predates the 2025 tariff changes.
Germany shows how a dry spell plays out. A week-long Dunkelflaute, German for dark doldrums, hit in November 2024. Renewables fell to about 30 percent of supply and baseload power reached 145 euros per megawatt-hour, up from a typical 40, because electricity was in short supply.
Germany kept the lights on by firing up natural gas and coal plants and importing an average of 10.5 gigawatts. The Midwest grid won’t get the same relief. When a cold, still week depresses wind and solar output across the region, its neighbors will be just as short of power.
Because of climate ideology, we have been closing reliable, on-demand coal plants before their useful lives end and replacing them with intermittent wind and solar. This is leaving us short of electricity and driving up prices for everyone. This is the Democrats’ policies and they want to impose more climate policies on us forever.
Then there are the wires. A Texas Public Policy Foundation analysis estimates Texans pay about $1 billion a year for transmission built to support wind and solar, nearly $15 billion since 2010.
In the Midwest, Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) approved a $21.8 billion transmission package with regional cost sharing (socialization) to move wind power. Five state utility commissions challenged it in a federal complaint and their consultant put the benefits at $4.3 billion to $7.2 billion, well below MISO’s claim of up to $72 billion.
The fix starts with a simple rule. Any plan that mandates a share of wind and solar, or retires a dispatchable plant, should show the cost of the whole system, not just the new wind and solar generation.
It should also show the cost of failure when wind and solar don’t deliver, alongside the cost of building.
A plan that prices the build without all the costs and the grid failures that become more likely with intermittency, is not a plan. It is a policy with a blank deductible and very high costs.
Price the outage and the true costs first. Then build.
Democrats complain about the “very high costs of gas,” but building out wind and solar won’t lower the price at the pump or reduce your electricity bills.
Frank Lasee is a contributor to the Daily Caller News Foundationanda senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that champions free markets, property rights andinnovation as the keys to protecting both people and the environment.
Student safety is my plumb line for Peoria Unified School District (PUSD). It is the standard by which I judge its leadership, spending, policies, and governing board.
I began paying closer attention during the Sun Valley Elementary/Ricky Ordway situation. I wanted to understand why the community was not receiving a clear public accounting at governing board meetings. Allegations involving Liberty High School wrestling deepened my concerns. The events at Centennial convinced me to become more involved.
Since then, I have examined hundreds of documents, including records obtained through public records requests, police reports, court documents, news reports, and media releases. I have spoken with parents, advocates, journalists, and people with firsthand knowledge of district operations. Throughout that work, I seek to distinguish documented findings from allegations and unanswered questions.
What I have learned has strengthened my conviction that Peoria Unified needs sustained, independent scrutiny. Families deserve to understand how concerns are reported, how investigations are handled, and what changes follow when students are harmed.
Voters deserve the same clarity about the people asking to govern their schools.
Leadership Decisions Deserve Public Examination
Board Member Melissa Ewing’s votes, public statements, and interviews are legitimate subjects for voters to examine. The same standard applies to every board member.
The decisions surrounding Centennial deserve particular attention. Heather Rooks and Janelle Bowles sought an independent third-party investigation. How did district leadership and the board respond? What independent examination, if any, followed? What findings and corrective actions can be shared with families?
The circumstances surrounding Rooks’s removal as board president also deserve a clear explanation, including the roles of then-superintendent KC Somers and board members Jeff Tobey, Becky Proudfit, and Melissa Ewing. The sequence warrants examination, while timing alone cannot establish anyone’s motive.
Tahlya Visintainer’s appointment as interim superintendent raises questions about the board’s selection standards. What qualifications did members consider? How did they assess her preparation to lead a district facing serious student safety concerns? Her human resources background makes questions about employee oversight, investigations, and administrative leave especially relevant.
The district should explain how many employees have been placed on paid administrative leave in connection with student safety concerns, how long those cases remained open, and what they cost, while protecting confidential information. Administrative leave does not establish guilt, but the public deserves to understand how the process works.
Darian Schoolcraft’s appointment as Centennial principal also deserves an explanation. My review raises questions about references to him in police records, whether administrative leave was considered, and how his appointment was evaluated. Being named in a police report does not, itself, establish wrongdoing. The question is whether the district applied consistent standards at Centennial, Liberty, and Peoria High—and can explain those standards publicly.
Students and Parents Must Be Able to Speak Safely
Policies have value when people understand them, follow them, and can show that they work.
Families deserve to know who receives a report of suspected abuse, when outside authorities are contacted, and how the district determines whether reporting procedures were followed. Students need a safe way to raise concerns about an adult without fearing consequences for their grades, activities, or relationships at school.
Parents have raised concerns about retaliation against their children. Those concerns deserve a serious response. The accounts involving Timothy Seaman also raise questions about whether students felt safe reporting alleged inappropriate touching. The district should explain how it identifies barriers to reporting and protects students who come forward.
The same expectation of respectful discussion applies to policy disagreements.
I believe girls deserve privacy in restrooms, locker rooms, and showers. I also believe every student—including LGBTQ+ students—deserves protection from harassment, abuse, and humiliation. District leaders must address those needs through clear policies and practical safeguards.
Parents should be able to question those policies without having their concerns reduced to slogans or assumptions about their motives. Board members should explain their votes and how they expect the policies they support to protect students.
The Secular AZ Interview Deserves an Accurate Reading
This video excerpt featuring Ewing and Jeanne Casteen of Secular AZ deserves careful examination.
Casteen expresses concern about “the growing threat of white Christian nationalism in our state and country.” She then introduces Ewing, who thanks her for the invitation. The excerpt does not show Ewing calling white Christians a threat, but Casteen refers to white Christian nationalism, and shortening that phrase changes its meaning.
Voters can still reasonably ask Ewing to explain the views she expressed during the full interview. How does she define Christian nationalism? How does she distinguish it from Christians expressing their convictions, seeking office, or participating in school governance?
As a Christian and an ordained minister, I want those distinctions made clearly. My faith shapes my commitment to children, truth, and public service. Families of every faith—and families with no religious affiliation—deserve fair treatment and a voice in their public schools.
Ewing should explain her position. Voters should examine the complete interview and judge her words for themselves.
Curriculum and Programs Require Meaningful Oversight
Parents should be able to inspect the lessons their children receive and understand what the governing board approved.
Earlier concerns in PUSD involved EVERFI’s online materials addressing identity, bias, power, privilege, and oppression. I am seeking the complete approval record for a computer-based program considered in 2023, including the specific program, exact motion, and Ewing’s recorded vote. Those records are necessary to establish precisely what was approved.
Online programs raise ongoing oversight questions. What student information do they collect? Can lessons change after approval? Who reviews those changes? How can parents inspect the content their children actually encounter?
Programs such as Bloom365 deserve the same examination. How many students did the program reach? What measurable benefits did it provide? What safeguards and reporting procedures governed its work? What did it cost?
These are basic questions about educational services, student protection, and public spending.
Financial Accountability Belongs in the Discussion
Patrick Mannion’s recent post raises a serious concern: Has Peoria Unified adequately explained the human and financial consequences of the failures families have brought forward?
I share his concern about public trust. Parents should not have to become investigators to understand whether their children are protected. Victims should not have to struggle to be heard. Taxpayers should be able to understand the district’s financial exposure without assembling scattered records themselves.
Mannion cites a $10 million insurance limit per incident. The district should explain what that figure means: which coverage applies, what exclusions or aggregate limits affect it, when excess insurance or reinsurance becomes available, and how obligations beyond available coverage would be paid. A stated limit does not, by itself, establish that coverage has been exhausted or that every claim is covered. That is why a complete explanation matters.
I filed a public records request concerning the Trust and reinsurance procedures. Three months later, I still have not received the requested information.
Peoria Unified should provide an understandable accounting of legal expenses, insurance protections, and potential district obligations to the extent those details can be disclosed. Protecting students’ identities and confidential information should remain part of that process.
Accountability Continues After the Election
I continue to support an independent forensic audit to examine spending and financial controls. A clearly defined examination, with findings made public to the extent permitted, could help rebuild community confidence.
The governing board must demand answers, examine leadership’s decisions, and support independent scrutiny when warranted. Administrators should explain the decisions and events that have unfolded in the boardroom since May 2026. Candidates should be prepared to say what they will do about the questions that remain.
An election determines who holds office. The work of protecting children, producing records, and demonstrating that corrective measures are effective continues after the ballots are counted.
My purpose is to help ensure that children are protected and that families can trust the institutions responsible for them. That requires accurate statements, accessible records, consistent standards, and leadership willing to answer difficult questions.
Student safety is the plumb line. Every vote, expenditure, and leadership decision should be measured against it.
Truth withstands scrutiny. Peoria Unified’s leadership should, too.
Laura Campbell is a longtime Peoria resident, mother of four, grandmother, retired business owner, and ordained minister since 1992. She became president of Raspberry Cottage Inc., a nonprofit serving women and children, in 2017. Her decades of ministry and community service inform her advocacy for student safety, mandatory reporting, transparency, and accountability in Peoria Unified School District. She examines public records, police reports, court documents, and news coverage to ask informed questions and seek answers for families. Her guiding convictions are simple: “Student safety is the plumb line” and “Truth withstands scrutiny.”
Before giving a politician four years in office, voters deserve answers to a few basic questions: Where do you stand? What do you plan to do? And how will it make their lives better?
Katie Hobbs has already had four as Governor and now wants four more. Apparently, explaining what she intends to do with them is asking too much.
Hobbs is the only major statewide nominee who refused to take the debate stage this election cycle, but her reluctance to lay out a second-term agenda does not end there. Voters looking for one on her campaign website will come up empty, too. Even her 2022 website featured a section outlining her plans for Arizona. This time, visitors get “Meet Katie,” a biography touting her supposed “accomplishments,” with plenty about why she thinks she deserves another term, and very little about what she intends to do with it.
Andy Biggs has taken the opposite approach, making his policy positions, priorities, and agenda easy to find and easy to read. On taxes, housing, water, energy, and school choice, voters can examine what he proposes and decide for themselves.
But Hobbs’ refusal to lay out a second-term agenda does not mean voters have to guess what another four years would look like. She has a record, and Arizonans have been living with the consequences…
Democrats have made affordability a central theme of their midterm campaign. In these closing weeks before the election, Republicans should hold them to account for the unsustainable costs of the Medicare prescription drug overhaul they passed in 2022 without a single Republican vote.
The Inflation Reduction Act promised lower prescription costs and savings for taxpayers. Its cap on seniors’ out-of-pocket spending helped patients with expensive medicines. But the remaining costs did not disappear. They landed elsewhere in the program, and the promised federal savings have turned into projected losses.
The Trump administration can correct flaws in how the law is being implemented. Congress must address the financing problems written into the statute. Democrats should not be left to campaign on affordability unopposed while refusing to address the higher costs their own law helped create.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) originally estimated that the law’s drug-price negotiations, inflation rebates and benefit redesign would reduce federal deficits by $129 billion between 2022 and 2031. It now projects that those same provisions will increase deficits over that period. The promised savings from negotiation and rebates fell short, while the cost of Democrats’ changes to Part D’s coverage and financing blew past projections. Democrats promised to reduce federal deficits. Their overhaul is now projected to increase them.
The spending forecast is worse. CBO now projects that Part D will cost about $700 billion more from 2026 through 2035 than previously estimated. Roughly $550 billion of that increase reflected new information from insurers’ 2026 bids. CBO identified Democrats’ benefit overhaul as the leading driver of those higher bids, although it could not isolate the overhaul’s share of the overall spending increase.
Seniors are also losing choices. The number of stand-alone prescription drug plans, which serve beneficiaries in traditional Medicare, fell from 766 in 2022 to 360 in 2026. More than half disappeared in four years. Low-income beneficiaries in Florida and Texas had just one benchmark plan available without a premium in 2026. For seniors trying to find affordable coverage for their prescriptions, fewer plans mean fewer places to turn.
The remaining plans are also covering fewer medicines in some drug classes. A study of 59 brand-name drugs in competitive classes found that the average share of stand-alone plan enrollees with coverage for those medicines fell from about 47% in 2024 to 36% in 2026. Seniors face fewer plan choices and narrower drug coverage. They are also being asked to pay more before their plans pick up the tab.
The average stand-alone plan deductible rose from $425 in 2024 to $544 in 2026. Seniors subject to those deductibles must pay more at the pharmacy counter before their plans begin sharing the cost.
Washington, meanwhile, has helped stave off premium increases by sending more of the bill to taxpayers. Before offsets, the law’s premium-growth cap increased direct subsidy costs by $33 billion during 2024–2026. A separate stabilization program added $10.7 billion during 2025–2026.
Those subsidies buy time but leave taxpayers footing a bigger bill. Repairing Part D will require action from both the Trump administration and Congress.
The Trump administration should start by using its rulemaking authority to change how the Drug Price Negotiation Program sets prices, including excluding generic prices from the calculation of negotiated drugs’ Maximum Fair Prices.
But the administration cannot rewrite the statute through rulemaking. Congress must address how Part D divides costs among the government, insurers and manufacturers. The goal should be to protect seniors from catastrophic prescription expenses while preserving competing plans and limiting taxpayers’ exposure.
Getting that done in a lame-duck session is a long shot. Democrats would have to help change a law they are still selling as a success. Republicans should make Democrats explain that refusal to voters.
Republicans should put Part D’s higher costs and shrinking plan choices before voters now, while ballots are being cast, and demand that every Democrat campaigning on affordability commit to helping repair the program when Congress returns.
Democrats sought the credit for overhauling Part D. They should help provide the votes to repair it.
John Czwartackiis a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, former senior advisor at the White House Office of Management and Budget, and co-founder and principal of Public Policy Solutions.
