Filling the tank of his Honda Accord, Daniel Carmolinga eyed the blinking numbers on the gasoline pump with a mixture of relief and suspicion -- relief that the total was significantly lower than it would have been a few months ago, but suspicion that Tuesday's election might have something to do with it.
"It seems that always right before election time, prices go down. It may not be a coincidence," Carmolinga said on a recent Friday as he paid $2.47 a gallon at a Shell station in Long Beach. In mid-July, the car dealership employee would have paid nearly $1 more per gallon.
Compton resident Tanaya Jordan has doubts too. Jordan is a security guard who patrols in her own car and foots the gasoline bill.
"I think it may be political, and a lot of people are catching on," she said of the unusually steep drop in pump prices. Still, added Jordan, "it's not going down fast enough for me."
The Bush administration, many oil analysts and the industry's primary trade group have dismissed the public skepticism as conspiracy theory run amok.
"These accusations are just silly," said John Felmy, chief economist for the American Petroleum Institute. The cost of gas fell, he said, because "those things that caused the price to rise reversed."
But like the two California motorists, a notable percentage of Americans believe that the recent plunge in gasoline prices has more to do with November voting than with the price of oil and other market forces, two recent polls found.
Last month, a Gallup Poll of 1,000 adults found that although a majority of those surveyed rejected the suggestion that gasoline prices were being manipulated by the Bush administration for election purposes, 42% -- mostly Democrats -- believed that the president was doing just that.
"It is not unusual for people to think there are conspiracies," said Gallup Poll Editor in Chief Frank Newport, whose past polls have asked about the Kennedy assassination and whether astronauts really walked on the moon. "But we did know from previous work that Americans perceived that the administration did have, could have, some impact on the price of gas in both directions."
In early October, a Washington Post-ABC News poll also got a significant response, and not just from Democrats and liberals. The survey asked more than 1,200 Americans why they thought gasoline prices had fallen, and 3 in 10 cited "upcoming election/political reasons" or "Bush/Republican efforts to affect the election." They included 16% of the Republicans polled and 26% of white evangelical Protestants.
