New polling of battleground states shows voters want to know more about where the presidential candidates stand on domestic energy production.
Certainly, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have both suggested they won’t stop it.
The GOP nominee has promised “pumping, fracking, drilling and producing like never before,” while the Democratic nominee has been more reserved, promising not to ban fracking and offshore drilling (reversing her 2019 campaign stance) and extolling “the largest increase in domestic oil production in history” from the Biden administration — though leaving out the president’s willful depletion of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for short-term political gain during his aborted re-election bid.
But despite the candidates’ rhetorical reassurances, late-September American Petroleum Institute polling conducted by Morning Consult finds voters in the seven states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) that will decide the presidential election want answers on specifics almost without exception.
Eighty-six percent of the 3,907 battleground-state voters polled, including 88% of Republicans and independents and 84% of Democrats, want details from Trump and Harris about their energy positions beyond the broad strokes already provided.
And these voters want more energy production domestically as well, an especially salient consideration in light of ongoing tensions in the oil-rich Middle East driving up crude-oil prices nearly 5% intraday at this writing.
In all seven states surveyed, at least 83% of voters believe more domestic oil and natural-gas production would lower inflation. That number is highest in Georgia, where 89% want more to be done.
These voters also draw parallels between domestic energy production and national security in an increasingly dangerous and polarized world.
And as with the other questions, there is scant daylight in the swing states between Democrats and Republicans on the need to counter China’s and Russia’s malign influence by doing so, as 92% of GOP voters and 87% from the other side agree, as do 84% of independents.
Leveraging American resources to this end is likewise widely popular, particularly in Georgia and Nevada, where 87% of voters take this position. Overall, 80% of Democrats, 84% of indys and 91% of Republicans feel this way.
Voters are already casting ballots in a number of swing states, so the candidates have little time to sharpen their arguments on energy matters.
But this survey clarifies that voters across the political spectrum are clamoring for clarity — and reassurances the next president will be unambiguously committed to onshoring energy production and disempower countries that would hold American families hostage.
