The last Republican left standing at the government’s utility watchdog has been weighing the polls more closely these days, especially since Donald Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee for president.
But that doesn’t mean he will be voting for him in November.
Commissioner Tony Clark is serving the final few months of his term on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees the electric grid to ensure the lights stay on and costs remain fair and reasonable for consumers.
Clark’s term expires June 30, and he has already indicated he doesn’t want to continue on for another five-year term.
FERC is an independent agency of five commissioners chartered to include an equal mix of Republicans and Democrats. Clark says some believe that’s how all agencies should be set up.
He tells the Washington Examiner that he enjoyed his time at the commission and will continue to focus on energy policy in some future capacity, although he is not certain where that will take him.
Clark plans to leave a few months after his term expires as the law permits.
“I don’t have any plans. All I know is by the end of the year, I’ll be somewhere else. But I don’t know where, and I don’t know exactly when it will happen,” he said. “On the early side, it would be in the next three months, and the later side it’s in the next six months or so.”
The political horizon may be just as uncertain at this point in the campaign, leaving many traditional Republicans such as Clark between a rock and a hard place come November.
“I am pretty much a very traditional, life-long Republican, and I just think … we have 300-and-some million people in this country, and this is where we are?”
“I will have one of two choices [Trump or Clinton] and neither of which looks all that great to me,” Clark tells the Washington Examiner.
Clark, who has been an economic regulator and politician for most of his career, says Trump is shaking up the traditional voting block of Republicans in a way that makes the results less predictable than in the past.
“The interesting thing about Trump is that he does shake the map up,” Clark says. “You just don’t know how it will play out,” underscoring that the states traditionally important to Republicans are in play differently this year.
“If you look at the polls today, he actually has an uphill climb,” he adds. “But polls tend to tighten, and he puts some states into play that you wouldn’t necessarily think would be in play.”
But Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton may have the upper hand, the energy regulator says.
“My conventional wisdom would be that Hillary will win … because if you just look at a map she doesn’t have to win that many states that aren’t already in her column.”
But then there is the Midwest, where Clark is from, and Trump could be set up to win there in a big way. Trump has managed to tap into a blue-collar angst in that region of the country — including swing states Ohio and Pennsylvania — to foment support in a way that Republicans have not ever been able to do, he says.
Although Clark grew up in North Dakota, he was born in Wisconsin, and has family ties to that part of the Midwest as well as Michigan.
The trade issue that Trump brings up “has real legs in states like that or Ohio, even parts of Pennsylvania,” Clark says. “It’s a really powerful message. It’s not really ever been tried out on the Republican side before, at least not this effectively.
“So, once you get past the Trump persona, and get down to the issues, he may have reset some states in ways that none of us are really predicting right now.”
