Many of the swing voters here whose livelihoods rise and fall with the fortunes of the fossil energy industry have not forgotten the last time Harris ran for president, when she called for a ban on fracking — extracting natural gas by creating cracks in the earth’s bedrock. It is a position she now disavows. Even the boom in oil and gas production under the Biden-Harris administration is failing to assuage anxieties that the halcyon days of fracking for natural gas here would dim if Harris wins the White House.
Those concerns are putting out of reach voters who might otherwise fit the profile of the vice president’s target audience. They are people like 31-year-old Emanuel Paris, whose quest to expand his family’s 400-employee construction firm into green energy projects drove him to get a master’s degree in sustainability management. He has no doubt that climate change is real.
But Paris will be voting for Donald Trump.
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