At a town hall in Fond du Lac on the evening of September 17, 2026, Tom Tiffany said something nobody in Wisconsin would argue with.

"$5 gas is too high, there's no doubt about it," he told the room.

He is right. The question is what he has done about the thing making it $5.

His answer is a state law worth about 50 cents

Tiffany, the Republican nominee for governor, has pledged to "fully repeal the minimum markup law to help lower prices at the pump."

That law is Wisconsin's Unfair Sales Act. It bars retailers, gas stations included, from selling below cost. Sarah Godlewski — the Democratic secretary of state, and her party's candidate for lieutenant governor — says it "requires gas stations to increase the base cost by 9 percent," and that repealing it "can take off a lot, 50 cents." That is the other side's estimate of Tiffany's own proposal; Crowley's number for it is 40 cents a gallon.

It is a real policy, and his Democratic opponent David Crowley proposed it too. Both candidates for governor now want it gone.

So set it aside as a point of agreement and look at the rest of the price — because the state markup is not what moved.

What moved

Wisconsin's fuel prices in mid-September, per GasBuddy:

• Green Bay: $4.30 a gallon on September 16, up 13 cents from the day before
• Appleton: $4.24, up 22 cents in a day
• Diesel: about $6.11, an all-time record

Prices did not climb 20 cents a day because of a 9 percent state markup that has been on the books for decades. They climbed because of the war.

Even the Republican Party of Brown County said so in the same article, attributing the pressure to "Tehran's aggression" rattling oil markets.

That is the part Tiffany can be held to. Not as a governor — as a sitting member of Congress who has had the question in front of him six times.

The five votes

Since March, the House has voted six times on resolutions directing the president to remove U.S. forces from hostilities with Iran. Tiffany voted on five of them, and voted no every time.

On the sixth, September 15, he is recorded as not voting. That one deserves its context rather than a raised eyebrow: three days earlier, on September 12, the small plane Tiffany was riding in lost power and made an emergency landing on Lake Wausau. He escaped the sinking aircraft, swam to shallow water, and needed stitches above his right eye. The Fond du Lac town hall was his return to campaigning. We are not counting that absence against him.

Five is enough on its own.

Look at April 16 and May 14 again. The April resolution failed by one vote. The May resolution failed on a 212–212 tie, and a tie fails. On both, Tiffany was a no. Either vote, flipped, produces a different outcome for a war that is now showing up on every fuel pump in his state.

The two halves don't fit

Put his own positions side by side.

Tiffany says $5 gas is too high. He proposes removing a state markup worth roughly 50 cents. And he has voted five times to continue the military conflict that global oil markets are actually pricing in — the one his own party's Brown County organization blames for the spike.

A governor of Wisconsin genuinely cannot do much about world oil prices. That is true, and it is the strongest thing he could say in his own defense. But it is an argument about the office he is running for, not the one he currently holds. As a member of Congress he has had six chances at the lever that does reach this, and he has pulled it toward "keep going" every time he was in the building.

He is asking Wisconsin to promote him on an affordability platform, from a seat where he voted against the cheapest available fix five times.

What the record shows

Tom Tiffany told a Fond du Lac town hall on September 17 that "$5 gas is too high, there's no doubt about it," and has pledged to repeal Wisconsin's minimum markup law, which Democrats estimate is worth about 50 cents a gallon. In the same period, Green Bay gas hit $4.30 and Wisconsin diesel set a record at about $6.11, driven by the war in Iran. Tiffany has voted five times — March 5, April 16, May 14, June 3 and July 23, 2026 — against resolutions to remove U.S. forces from that war, including one that failed by a single vote and one that failed on a 212–212 tie.

Sources

WBAY on the Fond du Lac town hall and WBAY on the minimum markup law and price figures; roll-call records from the Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House; NBC News on the September 12 emergency landing.