America Is Still Stuck on Prius vs. Pickup

Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican political consultant, has spent much of the past year reminding members of his party just how much they should like electric cars. It’s nice to save money on gas and repairs, he told me, and a widening lineup makes these cars practical for all sorts of lifestyles. Plus, many of them are made in America. So take the wheel and let a few thousand pounds of torque finish the pitch. What’s not to love?

A lot, apparently. Donald Trump has referred to a “ridiculous all-electric-car hoax” and recently declared the rise of electric vehicles a “bloodbath” for American workers. Senate Republicans are attempting to roll back EV subsidies and, in one report, tied the cars to a “radical green agenda.” According to a Pew Research Center poll published yesterday, only 13 percent of Republicans consider themselves “somewhat” or “very” likely to go electric the next time they buy a car. EVs are not perfect, of course, but “the tribal position is that Biden’s EVs are a bad idea,” Murphy, who runs an advocacy group called the EV Politics Project, told me. (The group has received some funding pledges from automakers.)

The choice between a Prius and a pickup, as the political scientists Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler famously put it, has always been political—a matter of declaring both who you are and where you stand. (Just this month, the National Republican Senate Committee blasted Senator Jon Tester of Montana, a Democrat in a tight reelection race, for driving a Prius.) But it’s not just cars. Climate change remains as stubbornly polarized as ever in the United States: Democrats largely stand for climate action, and Republicans largely stand against it. During last night’s debate, Trump refused to name a single action he’d take to prevent climate change. (He instead focused on his perennial love of “immaculately clean” water and air.)

Trump and Biden met in Atlanta one day after the city hit 100 degrees for the first time in nearly five years. Summer has barely started, and America has already faced devastating floods and record-breaking heat—some of the many ways that the effects of climate change have become impossible to ignore. At this point, the only thing that doesn’t seem to be budging about the climate is the politics surrounding it.

Things weren’t always this way. Roughly 40 years ago, when pollsters first started asking about global warming, Americans largely agreed that it was a problem, if not an especially pressing one. There is a long history of bipartisanship on tackling problems such as species protection and air pollution; George H. W. Bush famously championed legislation that turned the tide against acid rain. But then Republican concern for the climate cratered, thanks to a host of factors, including doubts in climate science sowed by fossil-fuel companies and suspicion of the remedies.

It’s been nearly a decade since Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma held up a snowball on the Senate floor as proof that global warming wasn’t a crisis, but anti-climate political rhetoric has continued to thrive on the right. In one Republican primary debate last year, the eight candidates on stage were asked whether they believed that climate change was a human-caused phenomenon. Only Nikki Haley said that climate change is “real.” Republicans such as Representative John Curtis, who started the House Conservative Climate Caucus in 2021, have continued to warn their party that it needs a platform that is more pro-climate. Instead, Trump has reportedly attempted to solicit $1 billion from oil executives in exchange for climate deregulation.

The Inflation Reduction Act, the huge climate bill that passed in 2022 with zero Republican votes, was supposed to give environmental action a broader appeal. The IRA is essentially a giant cart of carrots for jobs and investment with a “beat China” subtext. On some levels that’s worked. A recent Bloomberg analysis found that 80 percent of more than $200 billion in clean-tech manufacturing investments are going to congressional districts represented by Republicans who opposed the law. Talk to officials in Georgia, where EV and battery factories are reshaping rural towns, or officials in Utah who are getting help procuring batteries and wind power, and they’ll praise aspects of the law, or at the very least what it aims to get done.

But it hasn’t blunted the GOP’s desire to roll it back. The Heritage Foundation’s plan for a second Trump presidency features a “whole-of-government unwinding” of the Biden administration’s “climate fanaticism.” Of course, there are plausible reasons for the party of small government to oppose EV subsidies and the IRA. Nick Loris, the vice president of public policy at the Conservative Coalition for Climate Solutions, considers himself an EV fan (he’d have bought one recently, he told me, if his apartment building had public chargers). He also happens to agree that the subsidies should be axed—in part, because he believes they’re inefficient, with the benefits largely going to wealthy, coastal Democrats who would buy EVs anyway.

That’s not the message around EVs that Loris is hearing the most on the right, however—“not at all whatsoever,” he said. The message he’s hearing is that the Democrats want to take away your gas car. It’s a familiar playbook that reframes climate action from a set of practical decisions—Do I want a better ride? A cheaper utility bill?—into coercion. As political leaders on the right attack everything from electric stoves to offshore wind farms to corporate climate pledges, support among Republican voters for expanding wind and solar power has fallen by about 20 points since 2020, according to Pew. “There are very few climate policies that haven’t been sucked into … the black hole of partisan polarization,” Keith Smith, who studies the sociopolitics of climate change at ETH Zürich in Switzerland, told me.

I was surprised when Megan Mullin, a political scientist at UCLA who studies partisan opinion on climate issues, told me she saw glimmers of hope in the survey data—“about Democrats,” she clarified. Until recently, the left evinced concern about climate change but ranked it low in terms of priorities for their elected leaders. Now it’s behind only education and health care. (For Republicans, it has consistently ranked dead last.)

To Mullin, the question is this: If Trump wins and undoes the IRA, how much does climate action keep hurtling forward? Possibly a lot. She hopes that bureaucrats implementing the law are writing up rules that can’t easily be unknotted by a new administration, and racing to get money out the door. That way, the benefits might stick. She points to Texas, which is the leader in wind and solar energy even after state leaders enacted policies aimed to hold those back. At some point, politics gives way to business logic, a perpetual green machine.

But the business case only works if people are willing to buy what’s being offered. When I spoke with Murphy, he was about to catch a flight to the Midwest to spread his pro-EV message. Instead of “sermons about the environment,” he said, he’d focus on the cars themselves—the cost savings, the 0–60 speeds, all the options. That was the way to convince people of what he believes: You should like this, actually.