New Jerseyans Struggle With Rising Gas Prices, Poll Finds

Gas prices near $4 a gallon have become the defining squeeze on New Jersey drivers right now, and a fresh Rutgers-Eagleton poll backs up what anyone who’s pulled into a Wawa station lately can already feel in their wallet.

The survey ran from March 27 through March 30, covering 1,568 New Jersey adults. Here’s the headline number: 59% of residents say they can’t comfortably cover gasoline and transportation costs. That’s up from 54% back in October. Every other category the poll tracked actually improved since fall. Gas didn’t.

Ashley Koning runs the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling. She didn’t bury the lede. “New Jerseyans feel a slight relief on most everyday costs compared to last fall, but this relief does not extend to the gas pump,” she said. She also connected the pump prices directly to the U.S.-Iran conflict, calling the difficulty at the pump a rare kind of consensus across every demographic in the state.

That last part deserves a second read. Republicans and Democrats both feeling it. Suburbanites and city residents both feeling it. The gas pain doesn’t care about your party registration.

The rest of the data tells a complicated story. About 68% of New Jerseyans said education costs, including student loans, are hard to manage, which is actually down from 71% in October. Utility bills dropped from 71% to 63%. Housing difficulty fell from 68% to 62%. Food and grocery costs came down from 68% to roughly 60%. Those are real shifts, not noise.

But let’s be straight about what “improvement” means here.

Two-thirds of the state still struggling with education costs isn’t a recovery, it’s a slower bleed. Koning made sure the fine print got attention too. “Even though some of these everyday affordability pressures have eased slightly across all New Jerseyans, the burden is still far greater for some more than others,” she told reporters. Nonwhite residents, lower-income households, and those without a four-year degree consistently reported more trouble across all six spending categories. For some of those groups, there wasn’t any improvement at all compared to October.

The politics here aren’t subtle. Cost of living drove last year’s governor’s race hard enough to help put Mikie Sherrill in office. That same poll puts her approval at 45% favorable against 29% unfavorable among New Jersey adults right now, which is a reasonable place to be early in a term. But the gas numbers are the kind of thing that can reframe a political environment fast, and it’s not like Trenton can call up the U.S.-Iran conflict and ask them to dial it back.

What Sherrill’s team does control is the response to constituents already stretched across housing, utilities, and groceries, all while filling up at 3.2 dollars a gallon, which the poll period captured before any further spikes. Those residents aren’t waiting for a policy white paper. They’re watching the pump total tick past $30 on a half-empty tank and doing the math in their heads right there at the station.