Racism, sexism, misogyny, wokeism and other culture-war issues have all being assigned as reasons for Vice President Kamala Harris’s devastating loss in the Nov. 5 presidential election. Most likely, there is quite a bit of truth to all that. But, as Democrats sift through the wreckage, it is crucially important that they do so with clear eyes, so they can learn the right lessons from their defeat. If they look carefully, they should find that inflation was the predominant cause of their downfall.

A Gallup poll result released about a month before the election revealed that 52 percent of voters rated the economy as “extremely important” when asked about what factor would most influence their candidate choice. According to Gallup, that was the highest since October 2008 during the Great Recession. Back then, 55 percent of voters ranked the economy at the very top of their issue list.

In mid-October, about three weeks before the election, Bankrate, a consumer financial services company, published results of its own survey showing that under the economic umbrella, 41 percent of Americans considered inflation as their top concern. That number dwarfed those of the next two main worries, health care costs and affordable housing, which were chosen by 14 percent and 11 percent, respectively.

In light of these findings, one has to wonder whether Democrats would have suffered an even worse defeat had retiring West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin not blocked President Biden’s Build Back Better Act (BBBA) in 2021. My guess is that they would have. That is why a closer inspection of the root causes of the recent high inflation is so crucial.

It is universally acknowledged that pandemic-related supply-chain disruptions were primarily responsible for the rise in inflation globally over the past three years. However, there is also fairly broad consensus now that excessive U.S. government spending, especially during the first two years of the pandemic, is partly to blame for the stubbornly high inflation in America. In the statement he issued to explain his opposition to the BBBA, Senator Manchin specifically pointed to inflation, and his concern that the bill would make it much worse. He also referenced analysis by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimating that the BBBA would cost upwards of $4.5 trillion. That level of spending without concrete revenue offsets, to be added to the already staggering $29 trillion of national debt at the time, was simply too much for him to bear.

Some people have sought to downplay the effects of the outsized pandemic-related government spending on inflation in the U.S. They say that every other major economy has equally struggled with high inflation and so the culprit has to be the supply-chain issues. There is one big problem with that argument. It almost completely ignores the role that America’s energy independence plays in helping to contain inflation in our nation.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) publishes data that show that in January 2010, the U.S. produced 5.4 million barrels of oil per day on average. Production in August 2024, the last month for which published data are available, averaged 13.4 million barrels per day. The U.S. currently consumes about 21 million barrels of oil per day. We import much of our additional oil needs from Canada, our friendly neighbor. The story is even better in the case of natural gas. The EIA tracks a different set of data that show that in January 2010, U.S. natural gas production averaged 56 billion cubic feet (Bcf) per day. Published records by S&P Global Commodity Insights, a data analytics firm, show that the U.S. has produced an average of 102 Bcf per day year-to-date, with consumption averaging just shy of 87 Bcf per day. That makes the U.S. a net exporter of natural gas. Coal is increasingly out of favor now, but America also produces more of that fuel than it needs.

Energy prices constitute one of the most important components of the consumer price index (CPI). None of the other major economies produce any meaningful amounts of energy domestically so they import almost all of their needs. During the second half of 2022, supply disruptions due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused European natural gas prices to rise to nearly ten times what American consumers were paying. Because energy costs feed into the prices of most goods and services within an economy, a good part of the overall inflation in Europe and elsewhere could be attributed to the rise in fuel import expenses.

No other nation on the planet, including the other advanced economies, spent anything remotely close to the trillions in U.S. government outlays during the pandemic. In February 2022 when the war in Ukraine began, U.S. inflation was already at 7.9 percent. It reached a peak of 9.1 percent in June that year before starting to decline. In contrast, EU inflation was 6.2 percent in February 2022, climbing to a high of 11.5 percent eight months later in October when the continent was facing the full-blown energy crisis precipitated by the war.

Those numbers clearly show the tremendous benefit that America derived from being energy independent. Our national inflation would surely have peaked at a level much higher than 9.1 percent if we had imported energy the way the Europeans did. And looking at the difficulty the Federal Reserve is having with the fight against the last inflation mile, we should be enormously grateful to America’s energy producers for that crucial assist. The other point to note is that given how much the other leading energy producing countries of the world, such as Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, would love to use energy as a weapon against us, our economy would most likely be wrecked by now if we had to depend on those adversaries for our needs.

It is not only Americans who must show gratitude to our domestic energy producers. The entire world should as well. Because of the humongous amounts of oil, natural gas, and other fuels we consume, global prices for those products would have gone through the roof if we had competed with other countries for scarce supplies at the height of the energy crisis. Particularly, poorer nations would have been badly hurt since a major cause of their perennial economic woes is the cost of energy imports.

The important lesson we should all learn from our frustration with the high inflation of recent years is that big government spending, while necessary at times, often has a cost associated with it. Those costs should always be weighed heavily against the benefits. Many people argued that insufficient fiscal stimulus introduced by the Obama administration after the Great Recession led to multi-year sluggish economic growth and high unemployment. Some pundits now say that voters appear to prefer that environment to the current inflationary one.

By voting to elect Trump so decisively, the public indeed seems to have concluded that those excessive pandemic-related outlays did more harm than good. It is not only Democrats who must thank Senator Manchin for saving them from a potentially more crushing defeat, but also Republicans and all other Americans. Had it not been for his opposition to the BBBA, our nation would most likely find itself in a much worse inflationary environment now.