Kamala Harris’s Big Pennsylvania Fracking Issue

James Hulings was standing 40 yards from Donald Trump at the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July when a gunman fired at the former president, injuring his ear and killing a spectator.

But the 79-year-old engineer will be back with Trump on Saturday to watch him at another campaign rally at the same venue.

“We got burned in 2020, and we don’t want to get burned again,” said Hulings, who as chairman of the local Republican committee is working to register voters before Election Day in November.

“I mean this girl Kamala Harris is a communist. . . It could shut down the state’s gas industry. Jobs and energy independence are at stake.”

To win the White House in November, Harris or Trump will likely need to win Pennsylvania — the swing state that Joe Biden won by just 80,000 votes in 2020.

But in the west of the state, fears about Harris — supported by Trump — and her stance on fracking, the drilling technology that sparked the shale revolution and transformed parts of rural Pennsylvania, could be decisive.

The state is a major producer of shale gas — and fertile ground for Trump, who draws fervent support from areas that account for a fifth of the country’s natural gas supply and an industry that employs about 70,000 Pennsylvanians.

Harris is explicit that he is not trying to ban fracking; a position he clarified again in a debate with Trump last month. But that’s a reversal from her position in 2019, and the former president has pounced on the switch during frequent campaign trips to Pennsylvania.

“If anybody here thinks they’re going to let your energy industry continue — like fracking — you should go to a psychiatrist immediately and get your head examined,” the Republican candidate said at a rally in Indiana, Pennsylvania, last week past.

A Sept. 19 Philadelphia Inquirer/New York Times/Siena College poll found that 48 percent of Pennsylvania voters trusted Trump to do a better job on fracking than Harris, at 41 percent. A majority, 51 percent, said they trust Trump to do a better job on the economy, compared to 46 percent for Harris.

Both campaigns poured advertising money into the swing state. While Harris has focused on increasing voter turnout in progressive cities like Philadelphia, her half-point lead in the poll means she can’t afford to give up rural votes.

But in Butler County, where registered Republicans outnumber registered Democrats two to one and many homes proudly display their “Trump 2024” yard signs, the Republican message hit home.

“I don’t trust her,” said John Dusheck, a former surveyor who spent years working to install gas pipelines across the state. “Fracking is a really big industry. It brought a lot of wealth to Pennsylvania.”

In shale-rich Washington and Fayette counties, people who work in or benefit from the industry fear Harris would use environmental regulations to strangle a sector struggling during the collapse of gas prices.

“The industry has hit a brick wall,” said Bert Sterbutzel, owner of T&B Excavating, which works closely with the gas industry and has laid off two dozen employees in recent years due to the downturn in the local industry.

The U.S. rose to become the world’s largest oil and gas producer during the Biden-Harris administration, but Sterbutzel and others in the Pennsylvania shale area believe Democrats are hostile to their businesses.

The Energy Department’s decision this year to freeze approvals for new LNG plants added to the pain for the shale patch, said Sterbutzel, who works seven days a week to make ends meet.

Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, who is also pro-fracking, used an interview with the Financial Times earlier this year to urge the Biden administration to quickly roll back LNG approvals.

This issue is complicated. Even if developers could build new LNG plants — a big source of demand for Pennsylvania gas — the state lacks the pipeline capacity to carry much more supply to Gulf Coast export facilities.

But shale industry leaders in the state say Harris needs to do more to convince people her new position on fracking is real.

“There’s a lot of opportunity, a lot of things to get right,” said Toby Rice, chief executive of Pittsburgh-based EQT, the largest U.S. gas producer. “And it can start by lifting the LNG break immediately. Otherwise, we’re just relying on words.”

Some people in heavily Republican rural areas are unenthusiastic about Harris’ new support for fracking, seeing the practice as harmful to the environment.

“I wasn’t surprised that Harris backed down on a fracking ban, but I was disappointed,” said Victoria Switzer, an anti-fracking activist and artist who lives in eastern Susquehanna County.

She said she would still vote for vice president. “Unfortunately, everyone is doing the fracking dance now.”

Her neighbor Ray Kemble, an anti-fracking campaigner, said he decided not to vote in the election because all politicians are “bought and paid for”.

If Harris is going to win votes in shale, it could be by pressing issues other than fracking.

Heidi Bednarz, a 22-year-old financial advisor who lives in Butler, said she voted for Trump in 2020 mainly because most of her friends and family were Republicans, but her opinion of him changed after the Court The Supreme Court ended the federal abortion guarantee in light of his comments about women and minorities.

“I didn’t feel like it was that radical in 2020,” Bednarz said.

But many Trump supporters prioritize pocketbook issues such as the future of the local gas industry, the high cost of living and taxation.

Biden’s administration has overseen a period of record job creation, increased energy production and billions of dollars in investment in new manufacturing plants. But a spike in high inflation in 2022 left many Pennsylvanians feeling the economy was better under Trump.

“I personally don’t like the man, but that’s not what I’m voting for,” said Bill Jackson, a dairy farmer who lives near Uniontown, in fracking country south of Pittsburgh. “I vote for policies and when he was in office the economy was humming.”

“The current administration has caused inflation and they have stopped as much drilling and fracking as they can,” he added.

Additional reporting by Myles McCormick in Houston