Donald Trump is pushing all his chips onto the table in the final sprint to Election Day.
He’s banking on one decision sending him to the White House.
And Donald Trump made one big bet that could wreck Kamala Harris in November.
The road to the White House goes through the Rust Belt
The Rust Belt states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania are the most important swing states in the Presidential election.
Neither Presidential candidate has a path to 270 Electoral Votes without winning at least one of these states.
Former President Donald Trump became the first Republican to win these states since the 1980s in the 2016 Election.
President Joe Biden flipped them by a narrow margin in the 2020 Election.
Energy issues are going to play a major role in determining who wins these manufacturing-heavy states.
Vice President Kamala Harris was a supporter of the Green New Deal until the moment she started running for President in July.
Now, she’s tried to back away from some of her more extreme positions like banning hydraulic fracking.
Trump is going on the offensive against Kamala by attacking her on her support for Green New Deal policies.
Muhlenberg College politics professor Christopher Borick told The Washington Times that Trump’s campaign is going to try to use the energy issue.
“Despite low gas prices and record fossil fuel production, consumers are always attentive to energy costs,” Borick said. “And if inflationary concerns linger, Trump’s campaign hopes to harness the issue.”
Kamala made two fatal mistakes
Pennsylvania, the most hotly contested state in the election, is experiencing an energy boom from fracking natural gas.
The Marcellus Shale Coalition said fracking in the state supports 123,000 jobs and generated $41.4 billion in economic activity in 2022.
Kamala said that there was no question that she wanted to ban fracking during a 2019 CNN town hall.
Her campaign claims she no longer supports a ban but she’s never explained this dramatic election year reversal.
Trump has been hammering over her long held support for a fracking ban.
He’s promised to unleash American energy production that the Biden-Harris administration has waged war on.
“To achieve this rapid reduction in energy costs, I will declare a national emergency to allow us to dramatically increase energy production, generation and supply, which Comrade Kamala has destroyed,” Trump said at a rally in Michigan. “She’s destroyed it. Starting on Day One, I will approve new drilling, new pipelines, new refineries, new power plants, new reactors. And we will slash the red tape. We will get the job done.”
Kamala supported multiple bills in the Senate that would ban the sales of gas-powered cars.
Her campaign claims she no longer supports an electric vehicle mandate.
But the Biden-Harris administration has two de facto electric vehicle mandates set to start in the early 2030s from the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) tailpipe emission regulations and corporate average fuel economy (CAFÉ) standards from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).
The American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) has been hitting her in swing states for her support of an electric vehicle mandate.
“Until the vice president says otherwise, we have to believe she still stands for everything that was in her 2019 policy plan and for every policy she co-sponsored as a senator. Unfortunately for American consumers, that would include a 100% ban on new gas car sales throughout the United States,” AFPM President and CEO Chet Thompson said.
The auto industry in Michigan would be decimated by an electric vehicle mandate that would ship American jobs overseas to China.
Energy could be the ticket to victory for Donald Trump in the Rust Belt.
