The cost of living is soaring in real time across North Carolina as President Donald Trump’s war with Iran shows no signs of ending, and rising fuel prices ripple across huge swaths of the economy.
The cost of gasoline and diesel has made commutes more expensive, strained small-businesses, pummeled North Carolina farmers, and further increased the price of groceries and other consumer goods that were already rising because of Trump’s tariff policies.
Trump, however, has said repeatedly over the last few weeks he has little interest in how the war is affecting household budgets.
“I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation,” he told reporters this month when asked about the war’s economic collateral damage.
“Not even a little bit.”
Trump says preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons is his only concern, despite several analyses showing Iran was not close to developing nuclear weapons before the war began.
Trump may not think about the rising cost of living, but it is one of the biggest concerns for North Carolina residents, as more than 75% of North Carolinians say they are stressed about their everyday expenses.
Costs are also among the biggest concerns for voters.
The issue has moved center stage for several high-profile races in North Carolina’s 2026 midterm elections, including the pivotal US Senate race between Democrat Roy Cooper and Michael Whatley, a Republican insider who has championed Trump’s policies.
Rising costs are ‘just peanuts,’ Trump says
Trump dismissed concerns about rising prices again this week, telling reporters at the site of his new multibillion-dollar ballroom project that the extra burden at the gas pump “is just peanuts.”
He added: “I don’t even think about it.”
Trump’s comments come as a new report by Defend America Action, an advocacy group aligned with Democrats, shows his administration’s economic actions and policies, including tariffs, and cuts to Medicaid, are “obliterating the economic security” of North Carolinians.
The report compiled all the effects into one document, highlighting how gas prices climbed to their highest point in more than four years, how household utilities are skyrocketing, how more than 70% of North Carolinians say their housing is unaffordable, and how more than 500,000 North Carolinians could lose their health insurance when federal Medicaid cuts go into effect next year.
Each price increase strains budgets. Added together they are potentially ruinous.
“The Trump administration has been taking actions that make all these different sectors more expensive at the same time,” US Rep. Deborah Ross (D-Wake County) told Cardinal & Pine in a recent interview, “and that effect is devastating, particularly for seniors on fixed incomes and for families who have unexpected expenses.”
“This isn’t just a little thing that’s happening,” she said.
The report adds to already ample evidence that affordability has become the biggest issue in the 2026 election: Prices are rising fast, but wages aren’t; household debt is at a record-high; small businesses are red-lining, and the damage is hitting red counties and blue counties alike.
And The New York Times reported on Friday that the average household has spent an extra $190.47 on gasoline since the war began.
“That is the equivalent of a month’s electricity bill. Or a week’s worth of groceries,” The Times wrote.
The growing public outrage over costs shows some signs of breaching far-right echo-chambers, and some Congressional Republicans have suggested they realize the economic landscape under Trump’s second term is buckling.
Polls show Trump’s approval rating is historically low, and the majority of Americans-and North Carolinians-disapprove of his handling of the economy and of the war.
All eyes on North Carolina
For yet another election cycle, North Carolina is perhaps the most important swing state in the country.
The US Senate race in North Carolina between Cooper, the popular Democratic former governor who has never lost a statewide election, and Whatley, a Trump ally who has never held elected office, could help determine whether Democrats regain control of the Senate. And the race between incumbent US Rep. Don Davis, a Democrat, and Republican Laurie Buckhout, a retired Army colonel, could have a similar effect in the US House.
Both Cooper and Davis have made rising costs central to their campaigns, while Whatley and Buckhout have blamed inflation on the Biden administration and limited their economic pitches to cutting taxes and praising the Trump policies behind the rising costs.
On Feb. 24th, four days before the start of the Iran war, Cooper launched a “Make Stuff Cost Less” tour of the state, highlighting affordability as “the defining issue for working families,” and pledging to “[center] his campaign on cost-of-living concerns.”
Whatley has so far centered his campaign elsewhere.
A far-right Super PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), has pledged to spend $71 million on the Whatley campaign to help Whatley beat Cooper, focusing their message on disproven, misleading, and false claims about Cooper’s record on crime.
The SLF and several state Republicans have accused Cooper of deliberately releasing several people with violent criminal records from prison during the COVID-19 pandemic, including the repeat offender who fatally stabbed a young woman on a Charlotte light rail last year. The claim has been repeatedly debunked by WRAL and other publications.
But despite the money spent and the repeated falsehoods, there are no signs any other issue in the Senate race is threatening to knock costs off the pedestal of concerns for most North Carolinians.
Cooper has always held a sizable lead over Whatley in state polls, and that lead has only grown since the crime-related attack ads began.
Cooper campaign highlights Whatley’s Iran war ‘windfall’
Despite Trump’s stated disinterest in the economics of warfare, some of his allies and wealthiest supporters have made money off the war that is driving up costs.
Whatley, Democrats are increasingly pointing out in press releases and sound bytes, owns stock in several oil and energy companies that have benefitted from the market turmoil the war has caused.
These investments have made Whatley $219,000 in profit since the war began, the American Journal News reported.
“When North Carolinians pay more at the gas pump, Michael Whatley makes money,” Anderson Clayton, the chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party, recently wrote in an oped for the Fayetteville Observer.
Whatley recently told The Wall Street Journals’ Kim Strassel he expected gas prices to go down soon. That’s not going to happen, economists say.
He also told Strassel gas prices now are lower than under the Biden administration. That’s misleading.
Gas prices in North Carolina have risen more than $1.30 per gallon on average since before the war. And while gas topped $5 during the pandemic under the Biden administration, the price was a direct result of the COVID-19 disruption, when demand for gas first plummeted during lockdown, then rebounded faster than supply and the global infrastructure could match.
But gas prices had fallen well below their current price before the 2024 election, and the average price per gallon for regular in the state is $1.40 higher now than it was before Trump began his second term.
Davis and Buckhout in a dead heat
State and National Republicans were so concerned about their ability to defeat Davis in his district, they re-drew it, pushing many Democratic and Black voters into a new deeper red district. That plan now looks less certain than it did a few months ago, and rising costs are a big reason why.
Davis has campaigned, and governed, extensively on the issue, especially for farmers.
A farmer from Dunn, NC, which is not in Davis’s district but reflects the issues facing farmers across the state, told the News & Observer it now costs him $500 to fill one tractor with diesel. The strain is making life difficult even for farms that have been operating for generations.
Davis recently co-sponsored a federal bill that would suspend the federal diesel tax until 2027.
And he frequently cites the damage rising costs bring to eastern North Carolina.
Despite the gerrymandered map, which was meant to ensure a substantial Republican victory, recent polling shows Davis and Buckhout are virtually tied, with 17% of respondents still undecided. In the final sprint before an election, economic issues are often the biggest motivators for undecided voters.
