Calling the election results in November, “nothing short of seismic,” Robert Bryce in a substack.com opinion piece, stated, “While this race was about many things, one issue lurked throughout: climate policy.”
Election results “show that the Democratic Party is woefully out of step with mainstream voters on energy and climate policy,” he said. There was also the decisive failure of ballot initiatives on taxing or restricting natural gas use that further repudiated the Left’s climate policies.
Bryce pointed out that Biden’s restrictions on the use of natural gas in homes and buildings were “marching to the tune of a phalanx of dark-money NGOs, including Rewiring America, Rocky Mountain Institute, Sierra Club, and others. The NGOs are pushing their agenda despite consumers across the country consistently showing their desire to continue using gas, which, as the Department of Energy’s own numbers have shown, is the cheapest form of residential energy.”
In Berkeley, one of the most liberal cities in America, Initiative GG, which would have levied a massive tax on buildings that use natural gas, was rejected by a whopping margin of 69 to 31. In 2019, Berkeley became the first city in the US to ban new natural gas connections. Dozens of other cities in California and other states soon followed it. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled twice that Berkeley’s ban and others like it, are illegal under the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975.
Berkeley, of course, is part of Alameda County, where Harris thrashed Trump by a margin of 72 to 25. Thus, it’s clear that even the most-liberal voters in America want to be able to use the fuels that they like.
In Washington, Initiative 2066 also prevailed. The measure repeals provisions of a state law that was designed to force Puget Sound Energy to speed up its transition away from natural gas. The initiative, which was backed by a host of business groups, prohibits cities and counties from barring or penalizing the use of gas in homes and businesses. It passed by a margin of 51 to 49, or about 60,000 votes. A majority of voters in Washington said they want to keep using natural gas. At the same time, they voted for Harris over Trump by a margin of 58 to 39.
Harris tried to distance herself from the extremist climate policies enacted by the Biden Administration. She also backtracked on her statements about banning hydraulic fracturing. Why? She knew she had to carry Pennsylvania, America’s second-largest gas producer.
But she couldn’t distance herself from her history, or the Democratic Party’s platform, released over the summer, which declared “there is nothing more important than addressing the climate crisis.”
Instead of winning Pennsylvania, Harris lost it by two points, and with it, any chance of winning the White House.
Polls have consistently shown that voters care about energy prices, and few are willing to spend more out of concern for climate change.
As noted by Grid Brief, exit polls in Pennsylvania found that “65% of voters supported expanding natural gas production, seeing it as vital to job security and energy independence.” In Michigan — another swing state that Harris had to win — 60% of voters “expressed support for increasing domestic oil drilling. Many saw the push for local energy production as essential to addressing economic stagnation, with high energy costs ranking among voters’ top concerns.”
Last year, a survey by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago found that just 38% of Americans were willing to pay $1 per month to pay for climate change policies and only 21% were will to pay $100 per month. The key passage from the survey deserves to be quoted at length:
Americans are less willing to pay for a carbon fee than they were just a year ago. In fact, nearly two-thirds of Americans are unwilling to pay any amount of money to combat climate change. Those willing to pay a $1 carbon fee decreased by 14 percentage points in two years. Their support for the fee decreases as the impact on their energy bill grows.
A year ago, Teixeira and John Judis explained in an essay (and a book titled, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?) that the Democrats “have steadily lost the allegiance of ‘everyday Americans’— the working- and middle-class voters that were at the core of the older New Deal coalition.” And a key reason for that, they concluded, is the “Democrats’ insistence on eliminating fossil fuels.”
Pundits and political scientists will scrutinize Trump’s victory for years to come as they try to explain why he won so decisively. There are, of course, many reasons. But a key one is that the Democrats lost the allegiance of millions of everyday Americans because they were too willing to prostrate themselves in front of the climate activists who dominate their party and who have promoted ruinously regressive energy policies.
Over the next few months, the Democratic Party will have to come to grips with a bitter loss to a candidate they loathe. Eventually, the party will have to correct course if it wants the support of working-class voters. And that will require correcting course on energy policy.
