Democrats Are Treating a Big Win as a Liability
They don’t want to talk about how President Biden’s policies have created an EV-manufacturing boom.
Representative Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat in a tight race for a Senate seat, has been on the defensive about a manufacturing renaissance happening in her own backyard.
Thanks to incentives that President Joe Biden's administration has championed in the Inflation Reduction Act and other legislation, Michigan alone could see 50,000 or more new jobs by 2030 brought on by the boom in electric vehicles. And yet, in a new ad, Slotkin all but disavows EVs, telling voters, “I live on a dirt road, nowhere near a charging station, so I don’t own an electric car.”
Normally, an economic explosion of this magnitude would be the kind of win that any politician would fight for and hinge reelections on. But Slotkin’s party is clearly not winning the information war over electric vehicles. The IRA is spurring General Motors, Ford, Volvo, BMW, and many others to retrofit old car plants and build new battery factories across the U.S., challenging China for control over the technology of the future. Economic stories like Michigan’s are playing out in Georgia, Nevada, North and South Carolina, and Tennessee, too. Yet, according to recent data from the nonprofit advocacy group American EV Jobs Alliance, more than 75 percent of the political messaging about EVs this election cycle has been negative. Donald Trump has been railing against what he and critics falsely call electric-vehicle “mandates” for drivers; Vice President Kamala Harris hasn’t exactly been on camera ripping hard launches in an electric Hummer the way Biden did in 2021. Instead, she too has been reassuring crowds that “I will never tell you what car you have to drive.” Democrats have decided to treat what should have been one of the biggest manufacturing and job wins of the past century as a political liability.