With President-elect Trump’s inauguration looming, the search for Democrats’ road back to power continues. Reid Wilson, an insightful native of the Pacific Northwest, wrote in The Hill this weekend on one of Western Democrats’ new pitches:
Western states run by Democrats are aiming to use government responses to climate change as the basis for a new economic pitch to show voters the party can manage a transitioning economy.
State leaders are plotting aggressive new measures to tackle carbon emissions and promote renewable energy, in the face of an incoming administration that takes a skeptical view of climate change.
The Democrats are using the environmental policies to try to convince middle-class and rural voters they can handle an economic transition that could lead to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of new jobs in lucrative manufacturing and energy sectors.
“This is fundamentally a jobs message,” Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) said during an interview in his office. “We represent a horizon of job creation that is as great or greater than any other industrial sector.”
That economic pitch was lacking in 2016, many Democrats said, when President-elect Donald Trump more effectively convinced voters that he would bring jobs back to areas left behind by a slow and unsteady recovery than did Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Hillary Clinton did pitch this exact idea. She did it in coal country when she told a coal miner that she would bring (theoretical) “green energy” jobs in to replace recently or soon-to-be-terminated coal jobs. It backfired spectacularly, and it isn’t hard to see why.
In Washington, Oregon and California especially (maybe also Colorado) you can sell an unusually large number of voters on green energy for its own sake. Voters in those states have demonstrated they are willing to make economic sacrifices for the sake of environmentalism — at least up to a point.
You can also throw in the business about job creation, but on its own it isn’t a strong pitch because it is more obviously untrue. Yes, you can create some green jobs through subsidies, but not as many as you have to destroy in order to raise and distribute the subsidy money in the first place. Opportunity costs are a real thing — they’ve learned this the hard way in Europe, where studies have found that each regulatory-economy green job comes at a cost of between 2.2 and 3.7 real-economy jobs.
If you could create new wealth by simply erecting new regulatory obstacles to production and then paying people to overcome them, we could all be infinitely wealthy by now, there would be no President Trump, and Democrats wouldn’t be cooking up new approaches to show voters they can indeed govern. Maybe you make your state cleaner by imposing cap-and-trade (as Oregon is now considering) but you can never make your state richer that way.
In the more populated East Coast and Midwestern states, and especially in states that produce oil, coal and natural gas, “green energy jobs” is going to be a much harder sell. That kind of pitch, on a national scale, may only accelerate the Republican trend in the heartland that Trump’s election laid bare.
