New Research Explains Why Trump Keeps Attacking Electric Vehicles

This article is part of The DC Brief, TIME’s political newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.

The real roadmap for 2024 may have changed when you weren’t looking. Perhaps – and it’s a big perhaps, I admit – the biggest deviation in politics right now is parked in the garage.

Subtly and evidently, the electric vehicle has become the avatar of clean energy in the minds of voters, which could prove to be a political problem for Democrats, despite having a stronger story to tell.

Voters most discouraged by talks about Tesla Cybertrucks and Chevy Bolts? Young voters, voters without a college degree and Latinos, according to new voting from centrist groups Third Way and The NewDeal that is arriving in allies’ inboxes as you read this.

Their polls reveal that a surprising 44% of the American electorate have a negative view of electric vehicles. The numbers are roughly the same for voters in the swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia. That’s an anchor that no engine – powered by raw jet fuel or lithium-ion batteries – can move with so little time before election day in November.

To be clear, Biden has reason to brag about his climate initiatives. As Justin Worland, TIME’s senior climate correspondent, has reported over the past four years, “Bidenomics” is, at its core, a climate change agenda. It represents one of the sharpest breaks between a second Biden term or Trump’s return to power. But if Biden focuses too much on the details, he risks alienating important swaths of the electorate with a message they tend to hear as hypocritical, preachy and selectively favorable to the moneyed enclaves along the coast.

Republicans have already managed to convince their party’s base that clean energy is a donate to China, a talking point they used while opposing Biden’s passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which, despite its silly name, will be seen in the history books as a transformative piece of climate legislation. However, anything in this wheelhouse is often dismissed by the right as part of a sinister Green New Deal, an amorphous notion that does not exist in legislative reality.

Democrats, on the other hand, have largely come to tone clean energy as a moral imperative, based on being a good person, saving the planet and correcting injustices. Biden appears to identify the problem through this lens, frequently telling audiences that when he thinks about climate change, he is also thinking about jobs. But his base wants to hear the conversation through a filter to correct decades of inequities, and the long-term employment trajectories for internal combustion engine-based jobs are a hard sell when unemployment It’s already so low.

Both perspectives, to be clear, are incomplete at best and obscure many of the facts. Americans purchased more than 1 million electric vehicles last year, but that represents less than 10% of new car registrations and the West Coast continues to dominate the market. This helps explain why Donald Trump continues to talk about pumping the brakes on the EV transition, a point Biden will likely address directly in this month’s highly anticipated presidential debate.

There has long been a myth – and a popular myth among progressives – that so-called Climate Voters are a sufficient force in politics to influence outcomes. To be blunt, this is not the case. In fact, climate change rarely deserves a place in the top five priorities. The Third Way survey revealed that only 4% of voters classified climate change as a decisive priority, far behind the economy, borders and democracy itself. Even in the midst of a wave of inflation and concerns about everyday costs, gas prices aren’t even a driving force; food, housing, taxes and healthcare outpace the price at the pump, according to Third Way research.

That doesn’t mean Climate Voters can be ignored, strategists say. These are likely to be highly qualified, high-propensity voters who favor Biden by a solid 96-point margin. (They also have checkbooks that feed the campaign and its allies.) The problem is that there simply aren’t enough of them to counter their intellectual inverse, a group grouped together in Third Way research as Economy First Voters . This conservative bloc tends to skew heavily toward Latinos, women, younger voters and those without a college degree. These voters see themselves as just trying to get through the week without the government making it harder. And for these voters, Trump enjoys a 26-point margin and opposition to EVs enjoys a 44-point advantage. For Economy First Voters, 64% of these voters tell researchers that climate change will have to wait until inflation is under control.

All of this puts the Biden team in a bind. That’s where the two rounds of Third Way polls and focus groups, in January and May, could come into play. In low-key briefings with candidates, officeholders and consultants, Third Way teams have suggested ways to change the language used to talk about climate change and how it affects transportation in particular. As presented in a briefing TIME was asked to audit, unless voters are among those who see the direct economic advantages of this new technology, there is no reason to mention the issue; it only fuels suspicion of a technology that, in many, many districts, has not yet reached a viable scale. (Some common charging stations may take one hour to recharge a battery. And the majority are still in the richest areas of the country, a study foundwhile most of the country continues to be a charging desert.)

Overall, there is a limited Democratic dividend in discussing these changes to everyday life at the expense of gas-guzzling vehicles in every driveway and garage. When asked about specific components of an environmental and energy market, voters already see Trump as the best choice for reducing inflation and energy costs, increasing domestic energy production, and reducing dependence on foreign energy sources. Voters consider Biden the best choice just to combat climate change and reduce pollution.

On this, Biden supporters may need to tone down the talk about his biggest inherited victory, at least until the idea of ​​a hatchback you have to carry around seems more like a must-have and less like bullshit.

Understand what’s important in Washington. Sign up for the DC Brief newsletter.