- The DCCC, the House Democrats’ campaign arm, tweeted a wildly misleading chart Thursday.
- Celebrating a 2 cent decrease in the price of gas, the chart’s X-axis makes it look more dramatic.
- At proper scale, the change appears negligible.
In an attempt to tout President Joe Biden’s efforts at lowering gas prices, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee tweeted out a misleading chart on Thursday.
—DCCC (@dccc) December 2, 2021
As inflation and increased trust in the GOP to handle the economy have become major problems for Democrats, the Biden administration has responded by releasing 50 million barrels of oil from the US strategic reserves in November.
The Biden administration has also targeted “the cartel of shipping companies” that control the bulk of global trade in an effort to loosen the bottlenecks seen at major US ports.
In the DCCC chart, a 2 cent per gallon decrease is made to look more dramatic by stretching the X-axis of the graph out of scale.
By comparison, this is what an accurate chart of US gas prices over the past two years looks like:
The DCCC did not immediately return Insider’s request for comment.
Inflation spiked in October at a rate not seen since 1990, according to the latest Consumer Price Index figures. While November’s numbers are not available yet, consumer confidence continued to fall last month.
Biden’s approval ratings have been declined to historic lows for any president at this point in his first term. Those numbers have been correlated with public opinion on his pandemic response and handling of the economy.
An NBC/Marist survey from earlier in the fall found voters favor Republicans to handle the economy by an 18-percentage-point margin, one of the highest in any subset of questions about the two major parties on broad policy arenas and an unprecedented figure for this specific question on the economy.