Environmental groups want Democrats to confront oil companies over high gas prices. And Democrats are listening.
At the urging of environmental groups, Democrats are going on the offensive on gas prices — hitting energy companies with a populist message that puts the party squarely at odds with Republicans and the oil industry.
To do otherwise would be “dangerous and political malpractice,” Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster, argued in a memo published on Thursday.
In a survey, Garin found that 60 percent of voters viewed “price gouging and excessive price increases by oil companies to increase their profits” as major reasons that gas prices have risen to a national average of $4.29 per gallon.
“They’re jacking up prices, and people see that,” said Pete Maysmith, a senior vice president for campaigns at the League of Conservation Voters, which co-sponsored the poll.
Climate Power, an allied group, unveiled an ad this week, titled “We’ve Been Here Before,” that is running on cable television and online.
“Here we are again,” the narrator begins over footage of Russian tanks. “An overseas conflict hikes up our gas prices, and oil C.E.O.s rake in record profits.”
The ad is the beginning of a new $5 million push by a coalition of green groups to highlight what they claim is profiteering by oil companies and to raise the pressure on Congress to pass stalled climate legislation.
“This is an inflection point,” said John Podesta, a former chief of staff to Bill Clinton and the chairman of the board of directors for the Center for American Progress. “The public sees a petro-fueled, authoritarian regime violating all the laws of war and pounding a civilian population in Ukraine — these two things have come together in a visceral way.”
It’s also the latest sign of the growing clout of the environmental movement, which has moved over the last decade from the periphery of Democratic political power to its very center.
Manchin begs to differ
The White House and congressional leaders are on board with the new message — but they are already running into a familiar obstacle on Capitol Hill.
On Wednesday, President Biden accused energy companies of price gouging. “Oil and gas companies shouldn’t pad their profits at the expense of hardworking Americans,” he tweeted.
“No one should capitalize on Putin’s aggression by taking advantage of American families,” Jen Psaki, Biden’s press secretary, added at the beginning of Wednesday’s news briefing. White House officials also point to statements by oil companies indicating their preference for reinvesting profits in stock buybacks and dividends rather than in new production.
Industry representatives say there’s nothing untoward going on and that the spike in prices has been caused by typical patterns of supply and demand. Last week, Frank Macchiarola, a senior vice president at the American Petroleum Institute, dismissed Democrats’ accusations as “political grandstanding.”
Energy executives will have their say soon enough. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Senate majority leader, announced plans on Wednesday to hold hearings “very soon” on what he called “the alarming spike in energy prices.”
In the House, Representative Frank Pallone Jr. of New Jersey, chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, sent letters to six oil companies inviting them to testify on April 6, accusing the energy industry of “taking advantage of the crisis for its own benefit.”
All of this, of course, is a very different message from the one coming from Senator Joe Manchin III of coal-producing West Virginia — who happens to be the chair of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and who also happens to be the 50th vote Democrats would need to pass any legislation.
In an industry-friendly hearing last week, Manchin called for increased domestic oil and gas production — essentially, the Republican position — as he walked through his disagreements with the White House’s policies as well as its tone.
“This is going to take both the administration and industry to step up to the plate, stop pointing fingers, take action and get it done,” Manchin said.
Democrats are still negotiating over which committee would summon the oil executives, we’re told, with the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee as a possible venue.
“We’ll see where ultimately he lands,” Podesta said of Manchin. “It’s frustrating because he says something different every other day.”
The left wing of the House, meanwhile, is going its own way, in a sign of frustration with how the climate legislation has stalled in the Senate.
On Thursday, the House Progressive Caucus unveiled an expansive wish list of executive actions it wants Biden to take. It includes a number of climate ideas, including declaring a “national climate emergency,” banning exports of crude oil and ending subsidies for fossil fuels.
Other Democrats, notably Representative Parag Khanna and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, have proposed a tax on energy companies’ “windfall profits.” According to Garin’s polling, the idea is popular even with Republicans, 73 percent of whom said they supported it.
Asked about the concept, a White House official was noncommittal, but said, “We’re not going to sit back on our haunches and do nothing.”
The hunt for climate voters
Environmental groups have grown increasingly sophisticated in how they engage in politics in recent years, constantly fine-tuning their strategies as they pressure Washington.
There’s the inside game at the Capitol — nudging lawmakers to act on their priorities. This is a tough one for the environmental movement. By one estimate, various groups spent more than $2 billion on lobbying over climate-related issues between 2000 and 2016, with the energy industry leading the way. Back then, “the environmental community was largely playing an inside game” but lacked political power, Podesta said.
“Without engaging more forcefully in the public debate, you get outgunned,” he said.
Then there’s the outside game — building a coalition of voters who are motivated by environmental concerns, chiefly climate. And here, green groups are no longer simply preaching to the proverbial choir. Activists say that 2019 was the first year climate showed up on surveys as a top-tier voting issue, and they expect that trend to continue.
Democrats view climate voters as an increasingly critical element of their governing coalition, but they worry about whether many of them will turn out in 2022 — especially if Biden is unable to deliver on the rest of his climate agenda. That’s the task many left-leaning groups are turning to now.
During the last election cycle, the League of Conservation Voters’ affiliated super PAC, the LCV Victory Fund, studied what it calls “environmental swing voters” in an effort to find new pools of support.
Maysmith’s team identified 1.58 million voters across the country who were not strong partisans but who disapproved of Donald Trump’s handling of environmental issues. It’s a population that skews heavily younger — more than half were under 50, nearly a quarter were people of color, about half lived in suburban communities and two-thirds were registered independents.
He hopes that returning to in-person campaigning this year will help. The LCV Victory Fund has knocked on millions of doors in past cycles but couldn’t do so in 2020 because of the pandemic.
And while Democrats acknowledge that voters could punish them in the midterms for high gas prices despite their sharpened message, Podesta said that he would “rather be on the side of reality than on the side of conspiracy and fantasy, over the long term.”
What to read
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The Ohio Supreme Court rejected the Legislature’s latest round of redistricting maps, Michael Wines reports, deepening a standoff between the two branches of state government.
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Republican lawmakers and prosecutors are promoting a crackdown on voter fraud — even though there’s very little evidence it’s a serious problem, Reid J. Epstein and Nick Corasaniti report.
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Maya King traveled to Cuthbert, Ga., where she found Stacey Abrams shedding her Democratic celebrity and running a surprisingly conventional campaign for governor.
CAPITOL HILL NOTEPAD
Pelosi ‘very heated up’ in closed-door meeting
Last week, the Democratic-controlled House dealt President Biden an embarrassing setback when it scrapped a $15.6 billion emergency pandemic response package he had requested amid a revolt from his own party.
On Thursday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California privately had it out with her rank and file over the episode, venting her frustration with the internal strife that has left the Covid money in limbo and the president’s strategy for confronting the pandemic stymied.
“I’m very heated up about this,” Pelosi fumed to top Democrats at a private meeting, according to three people familiar with her remarks who insisted on anonymity to disclose them.
She said that what had really irked Pelosi was the willingness of some Democrats to break with the party on a procedural vote needed to bring up the aid package — the kind of defection that is virtually unheard-of in Congress, even among those who routinely cross party lines on legislation — because they objected to how it would be paid for.
Their willingness to do so showed how, given how few votes the speaker has to spare in the House, rank-and-file Democrats are increasingly emboldened to reject the kind of painstakingly negotiated, take-it-or-leave-it deals that are a Pelosi calling card.
In this case, she was dealing with Republicans who had refused to agree to any new Covid aid, insisting that Biden’s new pandemic plan be financed with money already approved for other programs. Their votes are needed to push any spending bill through the Senate, where legislation needs 60 votes. But Democrats were livid at the idea of clawing back money from their states to pay for the administration’s latest efforts.
On Thursday, after Xavier Becerra, the secretary of health and human services, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the senior infectious-disease official, had made a plea for House Democrats to find a way to end the impasse, Pelosi chided her members in front of the two officials, saying that she was sorry that they had to ask lawmakers of the president’s own party to approve the money.
But she saved her harshest scolding for the private session afterward, in which she said she was irate that some lawmakers — including some with plum committee assignments — would consider tanking a bipartisan, bicameral bill that had been painstakingly negotiated over months.
Her private comments were first reported by Politico.
Later, at her weekly news conference, Pelosi declined to elaborate about what she would tell recalcitrant Democrats, saying only, “I’ve communicated my message to them.”
Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.
— Blake & Leah
Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com.
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