A diesel-powered panic for GOP in Iowa

The average price of a gallon of diesel fuel in the Des Moines, Iowa, metro area at the start of this week was $6.33. If you ran a business that relied on short-haul transportation — local deliveries, service, maintenance, etc. — and were buying 80 gallons, per truck, per tank, you would be paying about $224 more per fill-up than you were at this time two years ago.

Neither Iowa nor Des Moines are unique in this plight. The Midwest is getting it right in the chops these days as Exxon’s Joliet, Ill., refinery — one of the largest in the region — remained closed after a power outage apparently triggered a flood . But the story on diesel prices isn’t that much different in Boston ($6.03 average price per gallon) or Denver ($6.13) than it is in Des Moines. Prices are high — in some cases double what they were in 2024 — all over the country.

But some things do set Iowa and Des Moines apart. Even in the state’s largest metro area, agriculture is big business.

What they used to call “the golden circle” is 50 miles in all directions from Des Moines of colleges, rural service hubs and state facilities that are all, in some way, connected to farming. Gold, after all, is the color of corn. And there’s no sector of the economy, outside of transportation itself, that’s more dependent on diesel than farming .

It’s been a bad run for America’s agriculture communities of late. The cataclysm of the beef industry driven by drought, screwworm and the disruption of the flow of its migrant workforce has gotten a lot of attention as American consumers recoil from prices now double what they were prepandemic . But it’s been a bad run for farming all around. Aside from dry weather, farmers were already caught in the ongoing tariff fight before the double-whammy from the Iran war: expensive diesel and fertilizer .

The same can be said in a lot of communities across America, and in most places where it costs more than $500 to fill up a small commercial truck, there will be few political consequences.

But Iowa in general and the Des Moines metro in particular are what the egghead community call “politically elastic.” Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District, which takes in the capital city, most of the golden circle and then runs south and west down to the Missouri border, has flipped parties three times since 2012 and may flip again this year.

This can be explained by the composition of the district — which pretty well balances rural Republicans and Democratic-leaning affluent suburbanites — but also by the fact that Iowa’s electorate is unusually independent by national political standards.

About 39 percent of Iowa’s active, registered voters are Republicans. About 28 percent are Democrats. About 33 percent are the “no party” folks.

Republicans took the registration lead in 2020, but the trend suggests the GOP is headed back to second place before too long. While a plurality of American voters describe themselves as independents , that doesn’t necessarily translate into voting behavior. In most states where voters are forced to choose party affiliations in order to participate in primary elections — like Iowa does — the share of unaffiliated voters tends to be substantially lower .

To stubbornly refuse to choose, even when the system disadvantages you for abstaining, is something Meredith Willson would have appreciated .

Part of the problem for the current Republican plurality in Iowa is that their long track record of picking strong candidates is looking a little wobbly this year. A pair of Iowa’s GOP powerhouses — Sen. Joni Ernst and Gov. Kim Reynolds — both surprised race watchers this year by announcing their retirements. In a state that has been sending Chuck Grassley to Washington since Gerald Ford’s administration and where Terry Branstad served as governor for 22 years in all, you don’t usually get to see Republicans walk away from good gigs like Ernst and Reynolds did.

Iowa’s GOP did pretty well in picking a replacement for Ernst, tapping Rep. Ashley Hinson, who represents the northeastern corner of the state. She blew out a primary opponent most notable for his denunciations of Grassley for voting to certify the results of the 2020 election. So far, so good.

But state Republicans went the other way on the governorship, nominating Zach Lahn, who is getting Doug Mastriano-ed out there by Democratic state Auditor Rob Sand.

Given the overall climate, that’s not what Hinson needs. She’s doing pretty well in her own race, given Democrats picked a tough opponent for her. Josh Turek is proving much tougher to beat than Republicans had hoped.

Accordingly, Hinson is doing a little trailblazing, becoming the first Republican nominee in a competitive Senate race to publicly break with President Trump on the Iran war. She’s calling for export controls on diesel and the suspension of the federal gas tax and limits on — what else — ethanol. This is the kind of willfully obtuse populism one expects in close races. You get a Senate race within the margin of error, and you’ll hear promises for free ponies and ice cream sundaes.

More telling was her call that “the war needs to be brought to a successful and immediate end.” Those two things are obviously mutually exclusive, and Hinson wasn’t saying which of those two virtues should take priority. But, given the fact that she has voted six times against limiting the president’s war powers — once as recently as last week — we might guess.

We can’t know yet how Hinson’s effort at creating some rhetorical distance from Trump will work with voters. Nor do we know how it will play with Trump and his core voters, who do tend to punish disloyalty above all offenses. But if she’s seen as getting away with it, Hinson will certainly not be the last big-time Republican candidate to pull the rip cord on Iran in the closing six weeks of the campaign.

Chris Stirewalt is the politics editor for The Hill.