Democrats have chosen to make “affordability” their theme for the 2026 midterm elections. This is ironic, since the big jump in the cost of living, around 10%, happened during the Biden administration and was the direct result of Biden administration policies. Nothing much has happened since Donald Trump took office 11 months ago; price increases have been modest, in keeping with historic levels. Some prices, like gasoline, have fallen. The problem is the big decline in the purchasing power of the dollar that we saw under Joe Biden.
Energy prices are a key element in the cost of living, since they affect the price of everything else. Here, the verdict is in: expensive electricity is a blue state problem. Check out this article by the Institute for Energy Research and our friends at Always On Energy, an American Experiment spinoff. This map tells the story:
Why does electricity cost more in blue states? It’s no mystery. They have adopted anti-consumer mandates requiring the use of expensive and unreliable wind and solar electricity, which need natural gas backup to avoid blackouts. So residents of blue states pay twice.
According to Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, each of the top five most expensive states for electricity have mandates requiring 100% of their power to come from renewable or carbon-free sources, making their electricity unnecessarily more expensive. These, and other mandates, such as net metering requirements, are driving up prices across America (see Figure 2).7
In contrast, eight out of 10 states with the lowest electricity prices are reliably red, and seven of these states have no 100% carbon-free mandates. Additionally, 20 of 25 states with the lowest electricity prices are Red states; only four are blue, and one is purple (see Table 1, Appendix).
There is much more at the link, but the conclusion is obvious: blue states are needlessly unaffordable because of dumb, anti-consumer energy policies. The worst thing we could do is adopt these failing policies at the national level.
