Freedom Caucus Vice Chair Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina got a fresh taste of those consequences last week, when he lost the Republican primary race to replace the late Sen. Lindsey Graham. ITC had hit Norman with $1 million in attack ads accusing him of insufficient loyalty to Trump. The president happened to corroborate the message by enthusiastically endorsing Norman’s opponent, Graham’s sister, Darline, who went on to beat Norman by 5 points.
The PAC sought to label Ogles as “Lyin’ Andy” by calling attention to instances in which he missed votes in Congress and triggered an FBI investigation over campaign finance irregularities.
At the same time, since incumbent Ogles had much better name recognition, ITC paid for ads to raise Hatcher’s profile and ran tracking polls to test their efficacy. Over three weeks, the portion of Republican primary voters who had never heard of Hatcher fell from around half to one-quarter, Matzzie said.
Despite an endorsement from Trump and an infusion of more than $700,000 from the Freedom Caucus Fund, Ogles lost the August 6 primary by more than 6 points.
The upset proved sufficiently embarrassing that Trump disavowed Ogles in a subsequent Truth Social post, calling him “a person who I remained loyal to even though he had virtually no chance of winning.”
Can the clean energy industry deter future political attacks?
Of course, there’s no way to prove that ITC’s money played a decisive role in these races. The group operates in a noisy political landscape with many variables at play. Ogles, for instance, was reportedly in hot water with voters over Islamophobic and homophobic remarks, per Politico, and needed to reach new voters due to redistricting. Graham had Trump stumping for her in the state, and his PAC funded a barrage of get-out-the-vote texts for her.
Still, each race turned out the way ITC wanted.
As Matzzie sees it, scientifically proving a causal link is beside the point; what matters is that politicians fear the possibility of this happening to them. That narrative gains strength with each candidate who’s knocked out.
It would be hard to find better testimony to the effectiveness of that strategy than the words of the defeated candidates themselves. Norman railed against ITC during his final minutes in the public spotlight as a candidate. Ogles, before he lost, called out the group during a radio interview: “They literally are trying to make an example out of me to try to strike fear in other Republicans. Which is why, if they prevail, this will have a chilling effect to the conservatives in Congress.”
Even if politicians think they can survive an assault from a scrappy team of clean energy enthusiasts, the PAC’s interventions increase the cost of running a campaign, pushing candidates to raise more money to counter the spending. “If you make enemies, your next election will be more expensive for you,” Matzzie said.
ITC hopes to keep raising money to spend up to $30 million in this cycle, he said. The PAC is now targeting its first Democratic primary, attacking Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee for scapegoating clean energy as the cause of the state’s affordability problems. McKee was trailing his challenger in an Emerson College poll released last week.
The general election season will draw a much broader electorate than the races ITC has participated in so far. Matzzie declined to comment in detail on what the PAC’s general election strategy will be.
From political vengeance to broader support
ITC’s efforts may have delivered a visceral satisfaction to clean energy pros chafing from last year’s defeats, but these actions aren’t likely to yield a more renewable-friendly Congress. Two of the candidates it attacked — Norman and Roy — were running for offices outside of Congress. Hatcher was never a champion of wind and solar. Some Republicans may think twice before loudly attacking the clean energy industry in the future, but that doesn’t mean they’re more likely to sign legislation that’s good for the industry.
Meanwhile, the major clean energy trade groups are not exactly embracing the PAC’s approach.
“We’re in the business of making more friends, not more enemies,” Tim Pawlenty, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, said in an email. (Matzzie, for his part, allowed that the trade group has “to stay friends with everybody so they can walk into every office.”)
Another clean energy leader, cleantech executive and investor Steve McBee, sees ITC’s work on “enforcing accountability” as a valuable effort in a broader campaign to expand clean energy’s political power, even as he himself focuses on coalition building.
In May, McBee launched Amped, an effort to mobilize clean energy professionals and executives to engage more in public discourse, in order to build sustainable bipartisan support for their industry.
Though solar, wind, and batteries have taken over the power sector, representing an estimated 93% of all new power plant capacity getting built this year, the industry doesn’t yet wield the political power to match that success.
“We don’t show up with any swagger,” McBee said. “We continue to call ourselves ‘alternative.’ … We find ourselves a bit outside the cultural zeitgeist, and that’s not a good place to be.”
McBee believes that the IRA was a “beautifully designed piece of legislation,” but that not enough work was done to tell voters and their representatives about the jobs and economic opportunities flowing to their districts. He wants to spur energy professionals to flood the political arena with the degree of money and effort that the fossil fuel industry has invested over the decades — but without the “lying and distortion.”
“The good news is, as an industry, we have all the facts on our side,” McBee said. “We just have to prosecute the case.”
Since starting Amped, McBee said he has received hundreds of inbound messages from people who want to help the industry put up more of a fight, noting the “organic unstructured energy that can be harnessed.”
That’s a bigger project than the upcoming midterms: to turn the IRA defeat into a political awakening for the clean energy sector.
Julian Spector is a senior reporter at Canary Media. He reports on batteries, long-duration energy storage, low-carbon hydrogen, and clean energy breakthroughs around the world.