Democrats Lost the Plot on Electric Cars

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.”

“No one should tell us what to buy, and no one is going to mandate anything,” she says in the ad. “What you drive is your call—no one else’s.” Only in between such assurances does Slotkin allow that if an EV boom is happening, she’d rather those cars be built in Michigan than in China.

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.

“I think the great, irritating tragedy to all this is the actual story of EVs and auto jobs is a very good one,” says Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican political consultant who co-founded the American EV Jobs Alliance and also runs the EV Politics Project, which is dedicated to pushing Republicans towards EV adoption. His group found that most political messaging about EVs references people being forced to drive electric someday under some kind of “gas car ban” that starts with layoffs now and will ultimately kill the American auto industry. None of that is true; nowhere in the U.S. has “mandates” that every person must drive an electric car. Trump has also repeatedly and misleadingly said that EVs “don’t go far” (their ranges can rival gas vehicles) and are “all going to be made in China” while comically overstating the cost of building electric-vehicle chargers. Somehow, it seems to be working. During this election, the narrative has spun out of control, particularly in Michigan, Murphy told me. Tens of thousands of new manufacturing jobs are coming to Michigan because of EVs, Murphy said. “The problem is that it’s the biggest secret of the campaign.”

The Biden administration did set a goal of increased EV sales—that 50 percent of all new cars sold in 2030 would have zero tailpipe emissions. Functionally, that means developing a robust local battery-manufacturing ecosystem after America and the rest of the world spent decades outsourcing it to China. And the IRA was meant to give carmakers and parts suppliers the teeth to actually do that work. Ample evidence suggests that the act’s plans are working as intended—especially in red and swing states. The Hyundai Motor Group has sped up the opening of Georgia’s biggest-ever economic-development project, its new $7.6 billion EV-making “Metaplant.” Last week, Scout Motors—a classic American brand revived by the Volkswagen Group—unveiled an electric truck and SUV that it aims to manufacture in South Carolina at a new $2 billion factory by 2027. Tennessee is becoming an epicenter for battery-making, thanks to some $15 billion invested for various EV projects. And Kentucky is also seeing billions in job-creating investments from Toyota, Rivian, and other companies as it seeks to become what Governor Andy Beshear has called “the EV capital of the United States.” Cleaner cars, manufactured at home, with battery technology no longer firmly in the hands of a geopolitical adversary—from an electoral perspective, what’s not to like?

Yet Democrats on the campaign trail are reluctant to talk about any of this. And so far, American car buyers simply aren’t as willing to buy EVs as policy makers and automakers hoped. EV sales have risen significantly since the early days of the Biden administration, but they haven’t taken off the way automakers believed they would. GM, for example, once projected 1 million EVs produced by 2025 but will have scored a major victory if it can sell 100,000 by the end of this year. Those slower-than-expected sales, plus the fact that automakers are getting crushed on still-high battery costs, have led several companies to cancel or delay new EV projects. Plenty of Americans have little to no personal exposure to cars outside the gas-powered ones they’ve been driving for a century, and still regard EVs as expensive toys for wealthy people on the coasts.

Democrats have not yet figured out how to square these two realities: American voters might support the jobs that EV manufacturing creates, but they can be fearful of or even hostile toward the product. Instead, the party has ceded rhetorical ground to Trump’s line of attack: that Biden’s (and presumably Harris’s) policies are meant to force Americans to someday buy a car they don’t want, or even “take away your car,” as the Heritage Foundation has put it. “The Republican Party in the Senate race has been pounding, pounding, pounding on the [internal-combustion engine] ban, which is a scary thing that tests pretty well if you want to scare voters, particularly in Michigan,” Murphy said. The GOP’s anti-EV sentiment has been helped along, too, by the fossil-fuel industry’s ad campaigns.

Meanwhile, the CEOs of Ford, General Motors, and the EV start-up Rivian have all expressed dismay about how politicized vehicle propulsion has become. The Tesla CEO Elon Musk doesn’t seem to be much help: Trump has repeatedly said that Musk has never asked him to go easier on EVs, something Musk cheerfully reaffirmed on X. Trump has vowed to repeal Biden’s EV “mandate” on day one of his presidency; whether he can without an act of Congress is the subject of intense speculation in the auto industry. Then again, a Trump sweep could mean he’d get the firepower to do exactly that, by targeting the tax breaks to buy EVs, the incentives to manufacture them, or both. Trump is unlikely to be able to halt a transition happening at car companies all over the world, but he could delay it or put the U.S. further behind the curve.

In theory, no red-state governor or member of Congress should want to give up the jobs that the EV boom is creating. (Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, has contended that EV manufacturing will mean job losses for the auto industry overall, even though Honda and LG Energy Solution are committing some $4 billion to its future electric “hub” in Vance’s home state of Ohio.) But the success of this manufacturing boom in Georgia or Michigan does hinge on people actually buying those products. One recent survey by an automotive research group found that a person’s political identity has become less associated with EV acceptance. But Republican rhetoric could reverse that. Murphy pointed to one recent poll his group conducted showing that 62 percent of Michigan respondents said the government’s push to adopt more electric vehicles is a bad thing for the state. Until recently, he told me, he felt that the auto industry’s leaders weren’t spooked by the political push against EVs. Now, he said, “they ought to be.”