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Packing ever more ions into ever smaller batteries, spangling the landscape with charging stations, lowering the cost to make electric cars and trucks: these are complex, exciting challenges that engineers, regulators and others will probably solve. The tougher problem, the one that may define the limit of the American market for electric vehicles, is much stupider. It is polarisation, the stuff that makes an EV go but in its metaphorical incarnation is cursing not only America’s politics but, increasingly, its culture and marketplace.
Three researchers who studied the adoption of electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles between 2012 and 2022 discovered that fully half of them went to Americans living in the 10% of counties with the highest proportion of Democratic voters. A third went to just the top 5% of such places. The pattern held even when the researchers controlled for income and population density.
Lucas Davis, a professor at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business who was an author of the study, was startled that the correlation with ideology did not subside over the period under review, a decade during which the electric-vehicle market diversified with scores of models. “The market has matured in many ways, and I expected to see more of a broadening of EVs across the political spectrum,” he says. “I think the results suggest that it may be harder than previously believed to achieve widespread EV adoption.”
From the popularity of what the researchers called “conspicuous” EVs, they tentatively concluded that many purchases were driven by “extrinsic” motivations—a desire to advertise one’s concern about climate change. That is a signal many Republican drivers are eager not to send.
This problem has caught the attention of one of America’s most experienced Republican campaign operatives, Mike Murphy. A past devotee of internal combustion, Mr Murphy grew up in Detroit and boasts he has averaged about eight miles per gallon over the years. But when he traded in his Porsche for an electric BMW he became entranced by both the superior performance and the community of engineers and enthusiasts trying to overcome the obstacles to electrification. “It’s like the Apollo programme,” he says. “They’re full of joy. They’re solving really tough engineering problems and have a purpose to that. And that’s a bit infectious.”
Mr Murphy decided to apply his skills to knocking down the barrier that the boffins were less equipped to defeat. In January he launched an outfit, the EV Politics Project, to advise automakers on how to overcome Republican resistance and also to counter what he expects, in the 2024 campaign, to be an intensifying barrage of attacks on electrification.
Mr Murphy undertook a poll to gauge the problem. He discovered that Democrats and Republicans had similar attitudes toward car brands in general but split radically over electric-only carmakers. Democrats approved of them by a net margin of 15 points, whereas Republicans disapproved by 40 points—”an Osama bin Laden number,” Mr Murphy says. While 61% of Democrats said their friends and relatives would praise them for a “smart move” if they bought an eV, only 19% of Republicans said that.
The son of a labour lawyer and grandson of carworkers, Mr Murphy fears the American auto industry will not survive if electrification falters. “If half the American market is ruling this stuff out based on bullshit and tribalism—and on marketing that doesn’t understand that—that’s a gift to the People’s Republic of China,” he says. Mr Murphy is a Reagan Republican who advised the likes of John McCain, Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney. The toughest adversary he confronts over the politics of electrification is the same one he has been tilting against for years, unsuccessfully, over the direction of his party: Donald Trump.
Mr Trump has identified in the polarisation over electric vehicles the kind of energy that has powered his politics since 2016. “MAY THEY ROT IN HELL”, he wished of EV supporters, among others, on Christmas Day. He owned a Tesla, according to his aides, but he has claimed electric vehicles are bad for the environment, require charging every 15 minutes and will cause 40% of American auto jobs to disappear in a year or two. Some Republican-led states have begun imposing fees on EVs, restrictions on how they can be sold and even new taxes, purportedly to make up for lost fuel-tax revenue, though Republican leaders, starting with Mr Trump, do not habitually object to tax avoidance.
Yet some Republican leaders have embraced the possibilities of electrification. It has taken ridiculously long for states to begin opening new charging stations with the $7.5bn fund created by President Joe Biden’s 2021 infrastructure law. But the first governor to do so, in December, was Mike DeWine of Ohio, a Republican. Brian Kemp, the Republican governor of Georgia, is busy recruiting battery manufacturers.
The body electric
Mr Murphy sees other openings. He notes that five of the top ten states for EV investment, including Georgia and Michigan, are swing states in presidential elections. He intends to aim his pro-EV messages at them. Whereas 66% of Democrats think Elon Musk is a bad ambassador for EVs, 61% of Republicans disagree. “So is he Nixon to China?” Mr Murphy wonders.
Mr Murphy’s polling also suggests, hopefully, that regardless of party most Americans share important sentiments about EVs. They have the same anxieties about price and range, and they are drawn to some of the same advantages: never paying for petrol, cashing in on government rebates. Mr Murphy thinks carmakers need to shut up about how EVs help the environment—those who care are already sold on the vehicles—and talk instead about how they benefit their owners. “If we want to move iron, we gotta make it about cars, not about luxury opinions,” he says. There may be a lesson in there for Mr Biden’s re-election campaign, too. ■
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WITH AMERICA still reeling from the tariffs imposed by Donald Trump on around 180 countries, a conservative organisation has filed a lawsuit challenging an initial round of tariffs the president announced in February—and doubled in March—on Chinese imports. The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), which counts Charles Koch, a right-wing billionaire, among its supporters, argues that Mr Trump lacked the authority to impose these levies. Similar lawsuits against the broader tariff blitz of April 2nd could yet scuttle the boldest—and most destructive—move of Mr Trump’s second term.
President Donald Trump may hope his tariffs jump-start a renaissance in manufacturing in the United States, but the reality is not so simple, according to experts.
The president announced sweeping tariffs Wednesday, including a baseline 10% levy across the board on all imports. He also targeted specific countries with steep tariffs, such as 34% on China, 20% on the European Union and 46% on Taiwan.
Trump said “jobs and factories will come roaring back.”
“We will supercharge our domestic industrial base, we will pry open foreign markets and break down foreign trade barriers and ultimately more production at home will mean stronger competition and lower prices for consumers,” he said during his news conference.
The U.S. has lost about 6 million jobs over the last four or five decades as companies moved operations overseas, largely because business could be done cheaper elsewhere, said Harry Moser, president of the nonprofit Reshoring Initiative.
He said the tariffs are a good start to overcoming that problem but that dealing with a strong dollar and building up the workforce is the best solution.
Moser said he would have preferred lower levies than those Trump announced.
“Smaller would be easier to defend, but still enough to drive reshoring and FDI [foreign direct investment] in excess of our ability to build and staff factories,” he said.
He said he expects Trump’s initial salvos to result in negotiations.
“As long as he convinces the other countries that he will keep attacking the problem until it’s solved, then they will come forward and maybe let their currency go up a little bit,” Moser said. “Maybe they’ll lower their tariff barriers to our products. Maybe they’ll encourage their companies to put factories here in the United States.”
“When you have crisis of confidence, the confidence of global companies that have announced investments in the U.S., they are going to pause,” Kabra said. “Unless we solve the crisis of confidence, the potential investments, the announced investments will not happen at a fast pace. It will slow down.”
“The U.S. is in the best position to get the incremental factories than it has been in the last 50 years,” he said. Plus, the wave of manufacturing starts that has occurred since the pandemic has stalled and the tariffs will give them more urgency to finish, he said.
Automobile makers are likely among the industries that will reshore, experts said. Trump imposed a 25% tariff on imported cars and has also vowed to tax key auto parts.
Manufacturers of gas-powered cars will have to weigh their options, since they already have a very streamlined supply chain, said University of Washington’s Kouvelis.
“The gas-powered car industry is in trouble with hard-to-adjust supply chains and not enough incentive to do it,” he said.
Electric vehicles are a different story, because they have fewer parts, the battery being the most important, so those companies are more likely to shift operations, he said.
“Everybody understands the U.S. market is lucrative to lose, and the competitors with an advantage [such as Chinese companies] more or less are kept out,” Kouvelis said.
Snyder also said that EVs are among those likely to come to the U.S., but because they will need more capacity. His thesis is that industries that need to expand — rather than close up shop in another country and move — will be the ones that return to the U.S. That includes industrial equipment and semiconductors, he said.
While semiconductors and pharmaceuticals were exempt from the tariffs, they may still be targeted at a later date. Experts said they expect both industries to reshore.
Semiconductor manufacturers got the incentive to return after Congress passed the CHIPS Act in 2022, which provided financial assistance and tax credits to those building and expanding facilities nationally. The computer and electronic products industry saw the most reshoring jobs announced in 2024, according to the Reshoring Initiative.
“Those are high tech, high-end technology and a lot of automation. They don’t need that many workers,” said Tang.
With pharma companies, just some of the supply chain may come back, Kouvelis said.
“The question is, where are you going to apply the tariff? Will you apply to the final or to the chemicals? Because right now, you want the chemicals and the active ingredients to be sourced from China,” Kouvelis said.
Formulation and packaging, however, can be done in the U.S., if that’s enough to avoid tariffs, he said.
“If you want them to bring all of the supply chain, you got to be very aggressive on how you apply tariffs on everything in the supply chain,” Kouvelis said.
Some pharma companies, including Eli Lilly and Johnson & Johnson, already began expanding in the U.S. before Trump took office.
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