Five days after he won the race for governor of Florida, Byron Donalds sat down with NBC's Kristen Welker on "Meet the Press." Donalds himself has acknowledged that voters had hit a breaking point over high living costs.

His answer came with a fact that wasn't true.

"There's more oil going through the Strait (of Hormuz) today than there was pre-war," Donalds said on November 8. On November 11, PolitiFact rated that claim Mostly False.

How the question came up

Welker played Donalds a clip of Florida's current governor, Ron DeSantis — a Republican — criticizing Republican candidates who blamed high gas prices on Joe Biden instead of on the Iran war.

Donalds pushed back. "I didn't really hear any Republicans trying to blame gas prices today on what the Biden team was doing," he said.

Then he turned to shipping. "I actually just read an article from the Wall Street Journal about this," he said. "The insurance costs of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz have gone up substantially, even though there's more oil going through the strait today than there was pre-war."

Notice what that answer does. The question was whether Republicans were being honest with voters about why gas costs so much. Donalds answered with a claim that the oil is flowing just fine — that the war isn't really choking supply at all.

What the numbers actually show

PolitiFact looked at the same Wall Street Journal story Donalds said he read. Here's what it found:

• The Journal's story was about a single week, the week ending October 18. In that week, oil leaving the whole Gulf region — through Hormuz and through other routes, like Saudi ports on the Red Sea — topped the pre-war level of about 23.3 million barrels a day.
• But the strait itself was still short. The same Journal story reported that oil through Hormuz came to "around 14 million barrels a day on average for the same period, or 82% of pre-war levels."
• Other trackers found it even lower. The analytics firm Vortexa counted 9.2 million barrels a day through the strait that same week.
• October as a whole went backward. Reuters, citing Vortexa, reported that Gulf flows averaged about 17.1 million barrels a day in October — down from 18.9 million in September.
• The newest numbers are still below pre-war levels. For the week ending November 5, Tanker Trackers counted 13.1 million barrels a day through Hormuz.

So Donalds took a story about one unusually busy week for the whole region, and turned it into a claim about the strait, today. PolitiFact's ruling: the region's flows have "occasionally" passed pre-war levels, "but it isn't happening consistently," and "the average amount of oil passing through the strait itself remains below pre-war levels."

The oil that does get through is running a gauntlet

The ships that are getting through are not a sign that things are back to normal. They're a sign of how much money is on the table.

Companies hiring tankers are paying around $1 million a day to make the run, PolitiFact reported, citing energy experts. Attacks on ships in the strait hit an all-time high in October. Skip York of Rice University's Center for Energy Studies told PolitiFact that "about half of the vessels hit since the conflict started in March happened in the month of October."

"It's the exact opposite of a success story," energy finance analyst Clark Williams-Derry told PolitiFact.

Those $1-million-a-day shipping bills don't vanish. PolitiFact noted that the expensive operation adds to high prices at the pump.

"I didn't really hear any Republicans" blame Biden

Donalds' other claim — that he hadn't heard Republicans blaming Biden for gas prices — was his answer to a clip of his own party's governor saying on camera that Republican candidates were doing exactly that.

We heard it too. In September, Virginia Republican John McGuire blamed Biden-era refinery closures for record diesel prices, while the government's own energy statisticians showed refining capacity was flat when Biden left office.

This isn't the first time Donalds has spun the war's gas prices

In August, right after he won the Republican nomination, Donalds told NBC that Trump "did not break that promise" to lower prices — and in the same interview defended $4 gas as the cost of the Iran war.

That was the summer version: gas is high because of the war, and the war is worth it. The November version is that the oil is flowing again. The fact-checkers found it isn't — not through the strait.

What the fact-check found

Byron Donalds, Florida's governor-elect, told a national TV audience on November 8 that more oil was moving through the Strait of Hormuz than before the Iran war. PolitiFact found that oil through the strait itself was still below pre-war levels — around 82% of them in the one week the Wall Street Journal measured, and lower still by other counts. It rated his claim Mostly False.

Source

• PolitiFact, Is more oil going through Hormuz than before the Iran war, as Byron Donalds said? No., November 11, 2026