Biden energy policies impacting Pennsylvania voters
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In Pennsylvania, the largest 2024 battleground state, President Biden’s victory four years ago depended in large part on big gains among voters such as Thieler, a software company manager and former Republican who is now part of the city’s heavily Democratic professional class. But those gains have been overtaken by opposition from voters like Sabo, who works in the natural-gas industry, a sector that has given a boost to blue-collar workers in rural counties.
These energy-economy voters see Biden as hostile to fracking, which taps natural gas trapped in sedimentary rock deep underground. The sector has drawn billions of dollars in new investment in Pennsylvania, much of it in the state’s southwest corner.
Biden has been particularly hurt by his decision to cancel the Keystone XL oil pipeline, which local companies say cut into demand for their services; and his order this year to pause new permits to export liquefied natural gas, which could deprive drillers of new markets. Many of these voters also believe the president’s push for Americans to adopt electric vehicles will undercut jobs tied to fossil fuels.
The area’s reliance on energy jobs helps explain why Democrats look to be losing more voters than they have gained here despite a Biden agenda that’s pumping billions of dollars into infrastructure and manufacturing.
“Everyone here is aware that it’s better for oil and gas if Republicans get elected,” said Adam Kress, who works with Sabo in Zelienople, 30 miles north of Pittsburgh.
There is little sign that Biden can regain substantial support in seven largely working-class and rural counties that surround the city, every one of which produced a larger vote margin for Trump in 2020 than in 2016. The resistance to Biden’s energy policies is making it harder for the incumbent to stop his party’s decline among noncollege voters there, forcing the party to wring more votes out of a Democratic base elsewhere that, so far, seems dispirited.
Sabo, 45, is a manager in the natural-gas fracking industry, which started booming about 15 years ago. He grew up in a Democratic family but abandoned the party and backed Donald Trump twice, due in large part to what he believes is an antagonistic Democratic approach to fossil fuels. “I will never vote Democrat again. Ever,” he says. “It’s just not going to happen.”
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Biden's anti-energy agenda should be a problem for him in places like Pennsylvania, Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. He also has to worry about high prices in places like California. The Trump energy policy was more supportive of fossil fuels and the cost to consumers dropped under Trump.
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