It's not Iran. It's the gas prices.
The real worries about AI, Gen Z thinks the job market is a scam, Ok Boomer Democrats, the left-electability nexus, Black Dem conservatives, Governorships shift left, Monitoring the Situation-maxxing
No. 395 | March 20, 2026
⛽ Americans don’t hate the Iran strikes. They hate what comes next at the pump.
Military action against Iran isn’t especially unpopular: in our latest omnibus, approval of U.S. military operations against Iran runs at a net -6 (43% support, 49% oppose) — better than Trump’s overall job approval (net -16) and far better than his foreign policy numbers (net -21). We also found that actual support for the strikes outpaces support for a theoretical Iran strike from January, essentially the same thing we saw before and after the Venezuela operation.
Despite the MAGA base actually being united on Iran, and the not-terrible numbers on the strike itself, Trump’s approval is at a new low. And the reason why seems pretty clear: rising gas prices from the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz striking an affordability raw nerve. While Venezuela was a long-term net positive for U.S. energy supply, Iran is a short term net negative. Americans can be relatively deferential to a President’s foreign policy actions on their own but hopping mad the minute gas prices go up as a result.
It’s worth remembering the parallels to the opening days of the Ukraine war, when gas prices spiked up to $5 nationally. Prices eventually came down well in time for the midterms and it was not a deciding issue. But the current gas price spike is a complication for the GOP in the short term.
Flashback a story we first covered in May 2024: gas price coverage spikes only when prices hit $3.50 or more. Today’s price: $3.91.
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🤖 What people worry about when it comes to AI
Anthropic interviewed 80,508 Claude users across 159 countries in what it calls the largest qualitative study ever conducted — using, naturally, Claude itself as the interviewer. 67% express net positive sentiment toward AI, but the concerns are revealing. Unreliability tops the worry list at 27%, followed by jobs and the economy (22%) and fears about losing autonomy (22%). The regional pattern is striking: the most optimistic users are in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia; the most pessimistic are in Western Europe and North America. Educators report 2.5-3x higher concerns about cognitive atrophy than other groups.
At the bottom of the list is existential risk. That tracks with some recent polling we’ll be highlighting soon: concerns about job loss draw more worry than concerns that AI will eventually become so advanced that humans won’t be able to control it. In open ended responses about AI, those unfavorable primarily cite job loss concerns, distrust of AI output, and the fear that widespread AI use will mean people no longer being able to think for themselves.
David Shor is also out with new polling showing just how underwater public trust in AI messaging is. When leaders say “AI will not cause widespread job losses,” net trust is -41. When they say “AI will create economic productivity that benefits everyone,” it’s -20. Even among Trump voters, helping workers displaced by AI beats giving tech companies incentives to keep innovating, 50% to 24%. “Everything will be fine” messaging is dead on arrival. AI leaders need a different storyline to shift the conversation from where it is now.
And it’s a potential tinder box for a new populist backlash, this time potentially benefiting Democrats. The top message tested featured a job guarantee for displaced workers — not surprising that this tested well! And providing jobs tested far better than the idea of a universal basic income or payments to workers.
This ties into widespread Gen Z disquiet about the current state of the job market, something that includes but extends beyond AI. Echelon’s Kristen Soltis Anderson conducted a focus group with Gen Z job seekers for The New York Times. They see a bleak future, regardless of demographic, party affiliation, or location, pointing to a lack of entry-level positions and the declining usefulness of a college degree.
🫏 “Ok Boomer” is increasingly a diss of Democrats
Remember when it was Republicans who got tagged with being the party of older white Americans? Picking up on The Intersection’s analysis of the Texas primary results, Kyle Tharp at Chaotic Era argues that older, whiter, college-educated Americans are increasingly dominating the party’s money, media, and messaging — from “No Kings” rallies that skew geriatric, to Democratic YouTube channels where 29% of the audience is 65+, to an ActBlue median donor age of 68.
Meanwhile, Liam Kerr at Welcome Stack identifies four types of Democratic primary voters and argues that the “Strategic Left” now decides most primaries — a group of voters who are left leaning on policy but who still pay close attention to electability. These voters still aren’t going out of their way to seek out the most moderate candidates — e.g. Josh Shapiro — but the sharp age skew in 2028 Democratic primary polls shows they’re skeptical of the likes of AOC who they think would faceplant electorally. So you end up with the “middle of the party” likes of Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom as safe, middle-ground options.
🔵 Dems lead with Black Conservatives — and why that’s a problem.
Over at The Argument, Milan Singh looks at their latest polling showing Black conservatives favoring Democrats 61-39 in the midterms. As close readers of Party of the People will remember, that’s actually down from the 80%+ Democrats used to get with these voters. And a majority are still “misaligned” — in a perfectly ideologically sorted politics, Republicans would have lots of upside.
🏠 A majority of Americans still want the big house, even if the grocery store is a 15-minute drive
The YIMBY crowd won’t love this one: Pew finds that a majority of Americans prefer spread-out communities with bigger homes, even at the cost of proximity to amenities — 55% to 44%. The partisan gap is striking: 71% of Republicans want the McMansion sprawl while 60% of Democrats would rather walk to the coffee shop. The only age group that preferred walkable communities was 18-to-29-year-olds, who also happen to be the group least able to afford either option.
The number preferring spread out communities is down from a post-pandemic high of 60%, but it’s still a telling disconnect with the majority of the Abundance movement, which favors infill growth in cities over exurban sprawl — when the latter is logistically easier to build and favored by more people.
🗳️ Six governor’s races shift toward Democrats — but don’t break out the champagne yet
Sabato’s Crystal Ball just moved six gubernatorial ratings in Democrats’ favor: Arizona goes from toss-up to Leans Democratic, Georgia from Leans Republican to toss-up, and Ohio from Likely Republican to Leans Republican (Ohio is notoriously Fool’s Gold for Democrats, but Amy Acton now leads Vivek Ramaswamy in early polling). Minnesota, New York, and Rhode Island all shift from Likely to Safe Democratic. Despite all that, Republicans may still come out ahead on governorships, since they’re the majority in a majority of states, also telling in terms of the prospects for Senate control.
🔮 Monitoring the Situation-maxxing
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