That is typically not a winning message for politicians heading into an election year.

Yet when it comes to energy prices, Pennsylvanians have never had it this good. After all, nearly all Pennsylvanians pay less for energy than they did thirty years ago. Accounting for inflation, Pennsylvanians’ electric bills are 46% cheaper than they were in 1996.

What are legislators to do when the top issue on the minds of voters is their electric bill despite the cost declining by nearly half?

Let’s start with how we got here.

Over 30 years ago, rolling blackouts in Pennsylvania were a thing. The last one happened in 1994. Legislators decided something needed to change, which resulted in electric deregulation.

In 1996, Pennsylvania passed landmark legislation to break up the electric monopolies. The idea was simple: let utilities focus on delivering power, and let the private sector compete to generate and sell it.

What followed was one of the most underappreciated victories in modern public policy.

While other states clung to utility monopolies — and are now struggling to keep up with exploding demand from data centers and AI infrastructure — Pennsylvania built a competitive marketplace that works.

Today, more than 150 companies make electricity in Pennsylvania, while over 450 companies sell electricity. The system has worked so well that Pennsylvania exports nearly a third of the energy it produces. In fact, Pennsylvania is responsible for bailing out many other states’ poor energy policy decisions.

Competition worked better than any policymaker could have possibly imagined. Amid a push to reconstitute electric monopolies, going back to the bad old days should be off the table.

However, where policymakers go from here is complicated.

With prices this cheap compared to when Boyz II Men topped the charts, it pours cold water on the theory that renewable energy somehow makes energy more expensive as most of those sources had not yet been adopted.

“All of the Above” on energy is clearly the right direction. But things get fuzzy after that.

On the one hand, the managers of Pennsylvania’s electric grid believe we will not have enough electricity to meet pending demand due to the exponential growth of data centers driven by artificial intelligence and electrification.

On the other hand, it recently came to light that the antiquated means of tracking future electricity usage may have double- and even triple-counted pending electricity demand.

Currently, it’s unclear how much electricity Pennsylvania may need.

The first step legislators can take is to fix the process used to track new electricity demand.

Today’s system is based on utilities calling the grid operator, essentially saying a guy called them last week, who seemed legitimate, and wants to use a bunch of energy. Incredulously, that is how it’s done. But there needs to be a better way.

The second step is painfully obvious to those seeing the forest through the trees: deregulation works.

Electric deregulation should serve as a beacon for policymakers trying to figure out how to put money directly back into the pockets of taxpayers.

Few things are more essential than electricity. Policymakers were able to dismantle 100-year-old monopolies in a manner that didn’t create chaos, interrupt power supply, or cause critical systems to fail.

If comparison is the thief of joy, then Pennsylvanians are right to be unhappy.

Thirty years ago, the state’s population was a little over 12 million people while the state budget was a little over $16 billion. Since then, the state’s population has grown just under 10% while the state budget, adjusted for inflation, has grown by over 50%.

Like energy deregulation, government services are a monopoly in desperate need of reform. The right message for policymakers is to detail a plan that will provide better government services at half the price.

Voters pick electoral winners based on how uncertain things feel right now and whether anyone is fighting to keep it from getting worse. So yes, when it comes to electricity bills, people today really don’t know how good they have it.

But if you’re a policymaker, saying that won’t win many votes because no one votes based on how bad things used to be.

It’s not about cutting. It’s about delivering more value to taxpayers for every dollar spent.

(Athan Koutsiouroumbas is a managing director at Long Nyquist and Associates and a former congressional chief of staff.)