Biden’s New Green Jobs Are Boosting Purple and Red States

For the past three weeks, members of the Biden Administration have been crisscrossing the country, highlighting their efforts to promote green jobs and high-tech manufacturing. With everything else that has been going on—unremitting gun violence, the indictment of Donald Trump, a leak of classified documents about the war in Ukraine—this White House initiative hasn’t exactly dominated the headlines, but it has provided an illuminating preview of the economic platform that Joe Biden will campaign on when he gets around to officially launching his 2024 reëlection bid.

Biden kicked off the “Investing in America” tour with a visit to Durham, North Carolina, near where Wolfspeed, a local manufacturer of semiconductors, has pledged to spend five billion dollars to build a new factory. Biden said his Administration’s creation of generous financial incentives for manufacturers of electric vehicles, green-energy infrastructure, and semiconductor chips was “bringing the key parts of the supply chain back to America” and creating “tens of thousands of new, good-paying jobs.”

There is independent evidence to back up the President’s claims. In an analysis published earlier this week, the Financial Times identified “more than 75 large-scale manufacturing announcements” since the passage, last year, of the Inflation Reduction Act, which included three hundred and sixty-nine billion dollars (over ten years) in tax credits, grants, and loans for green-energy projects, as well as the CHIPS and Science Act, which provided thirty-nine billion dollars in financial incentives for the production of semiconductors. The Financial Times calculated that U.S. and foreign companies have pledged to spend two hundred and four billion dollars and to create more than eighty thousand jobs in building new American factories or expanding existing ones. “The amount is almost double the capital spending commitments made in the same sectors in 2021 and nearly 20 times the amount in 2019,” the report said.

A couple of months ago, I argued that Biden’s embrace of an ambitious industrial policy is the most consequential aspect of his Presidency. It goes counter to decades of free-market thinking, and its impact will be felt for decades. But just as fascinating as the economics of this policy are the politics, which are only now coming into clear view.

As part of the “Investing in America” tour, Vice-President Kamala Harris visited Dalton, Georgia, north of Atlanta, where a South Korean-owned company, Hanwha Qcells, is planning to expand its existing solar-panel factory as part of a larger investment that will include construction of a big plant in Cartersville, Georgia. Taking advantage of tax-credit incentives contained in the Inflation Reduction Act, Qcells has pledged to build an entire solar supply chain in the U.S. and to create twenty-five hundred jobs in Georgia.

The Dalton plant happens to be in Georgia’s Fourteenth Congressional District, which is represented by Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Republican and conspiracy theorist, who last week took to Twitter to defend Jack Teixeira, the National Guard airman who is accused of leaking classified documents about Ukraine. Last year, Greene referred to the Inflation Reduction Act as “the energy disaster Green New Deal.” Since then, she has been conspicuously quiet about what is happening in her own district. The White House said it notified her about Harris’s visit to Dalton, but she didn’t attend. During the Vice-President’s remarks, she didn’t single out Greene, but Harris’s spokesperson, Kirsten Allen, said in a statement, “Congressional Republicans want to roll back this progress and put investments in manufacturing, clean energy and good jobs at risk.”

There, in a nutshell, is the message that Biden will deliver next year. As Democrats have been busy tackling climate change and rebuilding the country’s manufacturing base for the twenty-first century, Republicans have been shifting even further to the right, engaging in partisan politics, and ignoring the interests of the Americans they represent. Greene isn’t the only one who is potentially in the firing line. According to the F.T.’s analysis, more than three-quarters of the new investments in green energy and semiconductors, and most of the new jobs they will create, are situated in G.O.P.-controlled congressional districts.

The location of new manufacturing projects in red districts isn’t a design feature of the Biden plan, which provides corporations with financial incentives for making investments that satisfy the terms of its legislation regardless of the exact location. Rather, the Sun Belt gets a lot of sun and wind, which makes it attractive to green-energy producers. Moreover, many Southern states have “right to work” laws that make it difficult for workers to unionize and demand higher wages—another attractive feature for big manufacturers, especially foreign ones, which have long situated many of their plants in the South. Taken together, these factors help explain why the new investment in manufacturing and job creation is skewing toward red America.

To be sure, this red-blue split shouldn’t be overemphasized. The White House has put together a map showing that, since Biden took office, U.S. and foreign companies have announced more than four hundred and thirty-five billion dollars in investments—mainly in clean-energy and high-tech concerns—in all fifty states. Some of the biggest new investments are in blue states. In upstate New York, Micron, the U.S. tech company, has committed to building a twenty-billion-dollar chip plant. In Michigan, Ford and General Motors have announced plans to build new factories and renovate existing ones to manufacture electric vehicles and the batteries they run on. Off the coast of Virginia, Dominion Energy is building a $9.8-billion wind farm. Democratic districts as well as Republican ones are already seeing the fruits of Biden’s industrial policy, which is still in its early stages.

What about the political battlegrounds that are likely to decide the fate of next year’s election? The purple state of Georgia I have already mentioned. In western Nevada, the E.V. startup Redwood Materials is building a $3.5-billion battery plant. In Point Township, Pennsylvania, the recycling company Encina is building a factory to convert plastic waste into materials that can be used in new products. In Arizona, Intel, the U.S. chip manufacturer, has broken ground on two state-of-the art factories, which it says will constitute the biggest private-sector investment in the state’s history.

Of course, none of these developments guarantee a boost for Biden among key independents and swing voters. Vital as the new manufacturing investments are for the economy’s long-term future, they won’t determine how inflation and unemployment look a year from now: that will primarily hinge on the Federal Reserve’s actions. Biden’s job-approval ratings are currently in the low forties, and, even if recession fears abate over the coming months, Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, or whoever wins the G.O.P. nomination will surely look to divert attention from the economy by stoking the culture wars and depicting the Democrats as out-of-touch élitists. However, this won’t disguise the fact that in many parts of the country, including Republican areas, Biden’s industrial policy is delivering what Trump promised in 2016: new manufacturing jobs. At some point, even Marjorie Taylor Greene may be forced to acknowledge this. Biden, when he sets out on the campaign trail, will certainly remind voters, and he will be perfectly justified in doing so. ♦