A Trump-boosting super PAC is launching new adverts in Pennsylvania to highlight Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s opposition to fracking.
The campaign sees the issue as crucial to holding a state that Donald Trump won narrowly in 2016, and where recent polls suggest the president is better trusted on energy issues — albeit narrowly.
Launching the 30-second television ad, America First Action said: “Joe Biden, and his radical, phony running mate Kamala Harris, will destroy Pennsylvania’s fracking industry.”
Pennsylvania is the second-largest producer of natural gas after Texas and has more than 300,000 jobs connected to energy, with fracking concentrated in the west of the state.
The ad will be broadcast in Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Johnstown, Erie, and Wilkes-Barre.
A recent study by the Global Energy Institute of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce concluded that a ban on fracking would cost the state as much as $260 billion by 2025.
The advert features a third-generation oil and gas worker, who says: “When Joe Biden says he’d eliminate fracking, he’s talking about my job, he’s talking about our future. Joe Biden would be devastating for us.”
“When Joe Biden says he’d eliminate fracking, he’s talking about my job. He’s talking about [my baby’s] future.”
Be sure to watch the latest testimonial ad from America First ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/urn2WYuKpZ
— America First (@AmericaFirstPAC) August 12, 2020
Last year, during a candidate town hall, Harris, who was named by Biden as his vice presidential pick on Tuesday, outlined her opposition to fracking.
“There’s no question, I’m in favor of banning fracking,” she said in September.
However, a climate plan released the same month stopped short of a ban, although she proposed a “carbon fee” on polluters.
Biden, too, has publicly said he is opposed to any new fracking, but that he does not believe there are enough votes in Congress to impose a national ban.
Either way, Trump campaign allies see the issue as a win-win. Highlighting fracking forces Biden and Harris to face a choice between placating the left of their own party and getting tougher on fossil fuels, or winning back some of the blue-collar Democrats who switched to Trump in 2020.
In a recent column for the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, Keith Naughton, political strategist and founder of Silent Majority Strategies, said Biden was under intense pressure to strike the right balance.
“Pennsylvania is must-win country for Joe Biden. And he simply cannot do it with just progressive-left voters. Alienating households that depend on Pennsylvania’s energy industry would be a disastrous miscalculation and repeat the hubris of the Hillary Clinton campaign,” he wrote.
