As soon as the media started saying that the gas price trends seemed to have to connection to the current market forces, I had an idea as to what they were connected to: If gas prices cross the $3.00 pain threshold just as people are voting, they will have an involuntary warm and fuzzy feeling for the people in power (G Bush) and those connected to them (J Mccain). So I plotted the government statistics for the average US price of the average gas formulation (Mid-grade) which is what gets reported on the news. I then projected the slope to achieve <$3.00 by election day and then have added the weekly data points as we get closer to the election:

http://www.tayloredge.com/linkpages/GasTrend.pdf

For a moment there it appeared that the line was trending the wrong way but the slope just got steeper and is still pointing at election day! Note that there was no fancy math used in the plotting of this data.