Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign has said she no longer endorses a ban on fracking, but political strategists and energy experts say the sudden policy shift will do little to move the needle with key voters in November.
Harris said in 2020 there is “no question” she would end fracking if elected president, but her campaign recently told The Hill she no longer wants to outlaw the practice after videos of her endorsing a ban resurfaced following President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 race. The campaign can walk back Harris’ old fracking position as it pleases, but it likely won’t be enough to allay the concerns of crucial voting blocs — particularly more rural, blue-collar voters in Pennsylvania — that Harris may wage war on the industry or otherwise escalate Biden’s climate agenda to their detriment if elected, political strategists and energy experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“She is going to find herself between a rock and a hard place on the issue of fracking, and also other issues like Gaza, too. She has all of her past statements, and the Biden-Harris administration record, which is against fracking and exports of liquefied natural gas,” Jon McHenry, a GOP polling analyst and vice president at North Star Opinion Research, told the DCNF. “And that’s great for her base supporters, the people who were upset about Joe Biden representing Democrats a couple weeks ago and are excited about Kamala Harris, who want her to ban fracking, and they’re excited to have a younger, more liberal candidate running for president.” (RELATED: Trump Campaign’s Simple Plan To Destroy Kamala Harris: Get Her Off-Script)
‘Abhorrent To Business’: Billionaire Warns Kamala Harris ‘Further Left Than Biden’ pic.twitter.com/WPMznW9N4u
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) July 30, 2024
“The problem is she’s got to win independents in states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Michigan and Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona, who want to see more energy developed in this country and for us to be more energy independent,” McHenry continued. “She wants to have her energy and ban it too.”
However, Harris could find a politically viable solution to her public perception problem on fracking if she were to disavow her old position and explain to voters that experiences in the White House — such as seeing how global energy markets were impacted by the Ukraine war — led her to change her mind, McHenry explained to the DCNF.
Fracking is a technique for extracting oil and gas from certain underground rock formations, and it enabled a natural gas boom in the U.S., with American natural gas consumption increasing by approximately 40% between 2000 and 2023 as the U.S. became the global leader in liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The Biden administration decided in January to freeze approvals for new LNG export terminals, a move that critics say was meant to appease climate-focused voters and deep-pocketed environmental interests ahead of an election.
“Climate change and banning fracking were CENTRAL to her 2020 campaign! I mean, she went on the Tonight Show and performed a song about it! Nobody is going to believe anything other than she’s a climate cultist,” Scott Jennings, a political strategist and an on-air pundit for CNN, told the DCNF. “She’s the Greta of the U.S. government, and that ought to scare the bejeezus out of every energy worker in Pennsylvania and any American who would suffer under her obviously radical views.”
Harris has already racked up endorsements from major, deep-pocketed environmental organizations that oppose fracking just weeks after announcing her candidacy. Meanwhile, two of the more radical groups in the environmentalist movement — the Sunrise Movement and Climate Defiance — have so far withheld official endorsements.
“If I’m looking at the options around the election this November, there’s a lot of ways in which Kamala Harris will be immensely easier to pressure and change on that than a Donald Trump presidency would,” Aru Shiney-Ajay, the Sunrise Movement’s executive director, told reporters Monday, according to Politico.
Climate Defiance, which has protested against Harris with one of its disruptive demonstrations, has made demands for Harris to meet to demonstrate that she is a candidate who can “usher in an era of equity and sustainability.” The demands include ensuring that there is no more oil and gas infrastructure development and ending oil and gas leasing on federally-controlled lands and waters.
The political and electoral ramifications of Harris’ fracking flip-flop could be most visible in Pennsylvania, a huge natural gas producer and a crucial swing state in the 2024 cycle. Former President Donald Trump carried Pennsylvania in 2016 by a tight margin before losing it to Biden in 2020 in another close race; the state figures to be hotly-contested again in 2024, according to McHenry, with a new poll from Susquehanna Polling showing Harris up on Trump by four percentage points with 7% of respondents unsure who they will back in November.
Pennsylvania produced more natural gas than any state other than Texas in 2022, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and the natural gas industry directly or indirectly supported about 123,000 jobs in the state as of 2022, according to an August 2023 report prepared by FTI Consulting for the Marcellus Shale Coalition. (RELATED: Could Joe Biden’s Natural Gas Pause Cost Dems The Senate In November?)
‘Abhorrent To Business’: Billionaire Warns Kamala Harris ‘Further Left Than Biden’ pic.twitter.com/WPMznW9N4u
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) July 30, 2024
“Going back on her 2019 comments about banning fracking or abolishing the filibuster to pass the Green New Deal doesn’t change the facts that the Biden-Harris administration paused the expansion of LNG exports, exacerbated our looming reliability crisis with subsidized unreliable weather-dependent energy sources with the Inflation Reduction Act, and allowed federal agencies to over-regulate every coal and natural gas power plant in the nation providing reliable and affordable energy,” André Béliveau, senior manager of energy policy for the Commonwealth Foundation, told the DCNF. “Harris can backpedal on her 2019 comments all she wants, but her record from the last four years is clear.”
Dave McCormick, the GOP candidate for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, is already running an advertisement attacking Harris’ energy positions and tying together the vice president and his opponent, incumbent Democratic Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey.
Some pundits have suggested that Harris could mitigate risks she may face in Pennsylvania by picking Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as her running mate. However, selecting Shapiro could cause problems for Harris in other states and isolate voting blocs she needs to win due to his support of Israel and criticisms of pro-Palestinian activists, McHenry told the DCNF.
“Bob Casey and Kamala Harris have opposed Pennsylvania energy every step of the way, and their anti-fossil fuel agenda would be disastrous for our commonwealth and the 600,000 workers who rely on the energy sector for a paycheck,” McCormick said in a statement shared with the DCNF. “Banning fracking and abolishing the filibuster to pass a Green New Deal may be popular among the far-left, but here in Pennsylvania these radical proposals are radically out of step with the needs of working families.”
The Harris and Casey campaigns did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
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