Why Electricity Price Politics Could Get Complicated for Democrats

Electricity prices are rising and voters are mad about it — two facts that might seem to add up to a political victory for Democrats.

Environmental groups and elected officials alike are gearing up to use electricity prices against Trump, citing the president’s multi-pronged assault on renewables as the problem and promising to immediately bring them down as the solution. “Cheap is clean and clean is cheap,” Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz said at Heatmap House during New York Climate Week, echoing what has become essentially a universal talking point among climate activists.

The problem with that message, however, is that lowering electricity prices is really hard. In reality, the responsibility for high prices can’t be laid that the feet of any one person, party, or governmental body. What’s worse for Democrats: the voters seem to agree.

That’s not to say Trump isn’t giving Democrats a fighting chance.

“What’s interesting politically is that Trump started this term with cost of living being his single strongest issue, and now it’s his weakest,” Democratic political strategist David Shor said at an event hosted by the moderate Democratic group Third Way during New York Climate Week last week.

“A lot of the Democratic attacks trying to blame these energy price increases on Republicans have done well in our testing,” Shor said, and that there was “potential” for such attacks to be effective.

But the public’s views on energy go back further than January 20.

Trump won the 2024 election in part because of public outrage at rising prices across the board. Polling done during the campaign showed that Trump both had an advantage on cost of living issues in general and energy in particular. A Third Way poll conducted early last year showed that Trump had strong advantages on energy production, supporting manufacturing, reducing the cost of energy and gasoline, and the economy in general.

“While Biden was president, energy was one of his biggest vulnerabilities,” Shor said on the panel. “The flip side though, though, is that Democrats aren’t in charge anymore.”

According to polling by Heatmap Pro, voters largely don’t pin the fault for high electricity prices on Washington, D.C. They are more likely to blame “more demand,” their “ electricity utility,” or their “state government,” with roughly equal numbers blaming “the Biden administration and Democrats” and “the Trump administration and Republicans,” with predictable partisan splits.

And while the Trump administration is undoing tax credits for clean energy projects and unleashing regulatory hellfire on existing projects, the electricity price hikes we’re already experiencing are largely due to the cost of the poles and wires that transit and distribute electricity. In some cases, sharply rising demand has played a role, especially in the Mid-Atlantic and parts of the Midwest covered by PJM Interconnection.

Because the bulk of high energy costs are due to investments that have already been made — and can likely only be slowed down by new investments in longer-distance transmission — politicians are unlikely to find a way to lower costs, so much as perhaps slow down their increase. “Unfortunately, electricity rates are not going to go down. Our goal here is to minimize how much they go up,” Gretchen Kershaw, vice president of strategy at Grid Strategies, said on the same Climate Week panel as Shor’s.

Any politician running as a challenger can simply say that rising electricity prices are bad and force incumbents to take responsibility for it, even if they don’t have a plan to lower prices in the short term.

However, Democrats are in charge in some places that have seen large price increases, and that has tripped up their ability to make electricity price increases a marquee issue.

New Jersey, for instance, not only has some of the highest retail electricity prices in the nation, it has seen substantial price increases over the last five years as the state’s electricity market, PJM, has faced billions of dollars in new costs for capacity. Just in the past year, retail electricity prices in New Jersey have risen by over 25%, to around 25 cents per kilowatt-hour.

Along with Virginia, New Jersey’s gubernatorial election — held the year after the presidential election, is often considered a kind of mid-mid-term temperature-check for the country as a whole.

New Jersey is a solidly Democratic state, although one that swung considerably towards Trump in 2024. The Democratic nominee in this year’s governor’s race, Mikie Sherrill, is the favorite and should be able to ride the backlash against Trump to Drumthwacket, a.k.a. the New Jersey governor’s mansion. But with electricity prices at the center of the race, she has failed to dominate the polls.

Her Republican opponent, Jack Ciattarelli, has tried to pin the price increases on progressive policy, namely support for renewables, especially the troubled offshore wind industry, as well as efforts to prevent new fossil fuel power plants from opening.

One anti-Sherrill ad quotes the congresswoman saying, “We need to move into clean power. It’s going to cost you an arm and a leg, but if you’re a good person you’ll do it,” and describes her price freeze plan as just a way to “lock in” already high prices.

Sherrill’s campaign has hit back at the Republican Governors Association, which ran the ad, pointing out that the quote was actually Sherrill explaining how not to talk about climate and energy policy. In other words, Sherrill is getting tagged with the argument that she explicitly says Democrats should reject.

Sherrill has tried to go after utilities specifically in her campaign, and in August proposed a freeze on electricity rate increases.

There’s some indication that voters in New Jersey at least give an edge to Republicans on energy and electricity questions. In a Quinnipiac poll showing Sherrill leading Ciattarelli 49% to 41%, she had just a two-point lead on electricity prices, specifically, with 17% of the respondents not having an opinion.

In short, Sherrill was right to be concerned about how voters perceive Democrats when it comes to electricity prices.

“Democrats have to be very careful,” Shor said. “If you just ask people ‘what party do you trust more to keep energy prices down’? Historically, that’s something that Republicans have massive advantages on.”