The 2024 race for the White House reignites debate over EVs
The EV transition is running head on into polarizing politics.
Already this year, pricier electric vehicles got even more expensive for many potential buyers thanks to higher interest rates, which affect loan costs.
Now, anti-“woke” backlash and high-profile politics are increasingly making the suggestion of owning an EV a political cudgel. Or, as
President Biden’s support of the transition, through subsidizing manufacturing, extending tax credits for EVs and giving money for charging stations, has come under attack from Republican rivals seeking to challenge him for the White House next year.
As the Democrat talks about trying to protect automotive jobs and help the environment with green technology, they raise concerns about losing work and question whether the governments should subsidize them or mandate future zero-emission vehicle sales, as California has done.
Intensifying the debate is a continuing labor strike against the Detroit car companies by auto workers worried about whether they will have jobs in the new EV world.
The tensions have risen as Ford and other global automakers have spent billions of dollars designing and building EVs, a move that looked especially smart a year ago when they were caught off guard by the strong demand for their new offerings.
Now, they are pulling back those plans in the midst of a slowing pace of growth in demand.
This past week, General Motors said it would delay opening a large EV truck factory in Michigan by a year, citing a need “to better manage capital investments while aligning with evolving EV demand.”
The move followed an earlier announcement by Ford pushing back to late 2024 a target of building 600,000 EVs annually. The company has also temporarily cut one of the production shifts for its electric pickup and paused construction of a $3.5 billion battery plant in Michigan.
Even Elon Musk sounded worried Wednesday when he suggested that
Tesla was slowing work on a new factory in Mexico. It was a rare moment of caution from the CEO, an entrepreneur who is targeting the sale of 20 million electric vehicles by 2030 and has cheered on other automakers to follow his path to a renewable-fuel future.
“Tesla is an incredibly capable ship, but we need to make sure, like if the macroeconomic conditions are stormy, even the best ship is still going to have tough times,” Musk said. “The weaker ships will sink.”
The demographics of car ownership show the political wedge.
In the U.S., for every five Democrats owning an EV there are two Republicans, said Alexander Edwards, president of Strategic Vision, which surveys new-vehicle buyers.
His data finds that Democrats give priority to “environmentally friendly” when buying their cars while Republicans have other things they are looking for, such as performance and prestige.
A key part of Tesla’s success as an electric vehicle maker was focusing on marketing its cars beyond just those appealing to environmentally conscious consumers. Musk often said he wanted the Model S sedan to be the best car on the market that just happened to be electric and has heavily emphasized his vehicles’ performance and styling over the years. Others have tried to follow suit.
On the campaign trail, however, EVs don’t always sound so cool. The GOP presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, who is against subsidies, has drawn laughs as he suggests that EV buyers are motivated by “a psychological insecurity,” while former Vice President Mike Pence said during the second Republican presidential primary debate that Biden’s efforts “are driving American gasoline, automotive manufacturing, into the graveyard.”
Former President Donald Trump, the GOP front-runner, has fanned the flames against the transition, whether it is tapping into consumers’ concerns about the mile range of EVs or auto workers’ worries about losing their jobs because of the new technology.
In the battleground state of Michigan, which Trump carried in 2016 but lost in 2020, Biden is narrowly leading in a potential rematch, according to the research firm EPIC MRA’s August statewide survey of voters. Among the state’s United Auto Workers union members, Trump leads 46% to 43%. Bernie Porn, the pollster, said the slippage among union members was likely because of Biden’s support of EVs.
So, it wasn’t surprising that Trump and Biden showed up last month in the Detroit area shortly after the UAW began striking.
“I don’t get why Ford and GM, why these carmakers, aren’t fighting…to make cars that are going to sell, to make cars that are going to be able to go on long distances,” Trump said at a rally during which he predicted the EV policies would lead to “hundreds of thousands of American jobs” being lost.
Biden visited the UAW picket line, one of several trips he has taken to the region, including to last year’s Detroit auto show, where he touted his work to help EVs.
“The real question is whether we’ll lead or we’ll fall behind in the race to the future; or whether we’ll build these vehicles and the batteries that go in them here in the United States or rely on other countries,” Biden said while visiting a Ford factory early in his administration.
Underpinning the politics of EVs is an economic divide, made more stark by the rise of interest rates. Most EVs are more expensive than the average new vehicle—which sold for about $46,000 in September.
As new cars and trucks become more costly, the practical effect on buyers shows up in Strategic Vision’s survey: The median family household income of new-car buyers has risen to $122,000. That is a significant increase from around $90,000, where it had been at for a couple of decades until just recently. EV buyers are even better off, with a median household income of $186,000.
In some ways, the green car tensions are a return to the 2012 political season, when GM’s Chevrolet Volt became the embodiment of the Obama administration’s rescue of the Detroit auto industry in 2009 and efforts to promote electrified vehicles.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who unsuccessfully sought the Republican presidential nomination, said the problem with the “Obama car” was that one couldn’t put a gun rack in the plug-in hybrid vehicle.
Sales of the Volt disappointed, and Dan Akerson, then CEO of GM, was left fuming that the company hadn’t designed the sedan to become “a political punching bag.”
Write to Tim Higgins at tim.higgins@wsj.com
