To check President Trump’s growing grip on the judiciary in the midterms or to advance a legislative agenda in 2029, Democrats need to answer a very difficult question: How can the party keep winning in states like North Carolina, become competitive again in Ohio and expand the electoral map to include Texas or even Alaska and Kansas?
Almost any viable path to a Senate majority runs through those states. They happen to be the ones (along with Iowa and Florida) where Kamala Harris came closest to winning in 2024 that currently have all-Republican Senate delegations.
There are some promising ideas, but they are somewhat abstract: abundance, populism, affordability and the battle against oligarchy.
There is a specific issue that could both boost Democrats in those key states and fit within those frameworks — a position the party embraced in the relatively recent past.
Liberals should support America’s oil and gas industry.
This won’t be popular with everyone on the left. But President Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico, Prime Minister Mark Carney in Canada and the labor parties of Norway and Australia have done it. It’s not just about votes; it’s also a realistic path toward a cleaner environment.
Start with the politics. It wasn’t that long ago — in 2012, for Barack Obama’s re-election — that the Democratic Party’s national platform argued that “we can move towards a sustainable energy-independent future if we harness all of America’s great natural resources.”
Since then, the party has pivoted toward hostility to oil and gas.
In a 2020 debate with Mr. Trump, Joe Biden vowed to focus on a green economy and “transition from the oil industry,” and sought to halt new oil and gas leasing early in his term (though ultimately the industry, after defeating the leasing pause in court, thrived).
The animus is often invisible to participants in factional arguments because so many of them are based in coastal metropolises that lack major natural resource industries.
But from the standpoint of formerly blue or purple states like Pennsylvania and Ohio — or a place like Texas, where Democrats were once optimistic that a growing Hispanic population would deliver them a vast trove of voters — the change is notable.
Mr. Obama’s approach, which he characterized in speeches and campaign videos as an “all of the above” energy policy, succeeded in delivering a solid re-election win against a backdrop of falling American greenhouse gas emissions and stricter standards for clean air and clear water. It also succeeded at its stated goal of advancing American energy independence.
Thanks to Obama-era policies, including a historic deal that re-legalized crude oil exports while increasing investments in clean electricity, the United States is now a significant net exporter of oil as well as natural gas.
The benefits of this to the American economy are large. Natural resource extraction offers good-paying blue-collar jobs. It also generates useful tax revenue. In more abstract terms, it improves the country’s terms of trade — when foreigners are buying oil from us rather than us from them, it reduces the cost of our imports of foreign-made food, clothing and other products, in that way driving down the cost of living for everyone.
The national security benefits are also clear. As long as the world is using oil — and it absolutely still is — it is much better for that to be American oil rather than oil from Russia, Iran, Venezuela or Saudi Arabia.
There’s a strong environmental case for Democrats taking America’s natural resource wealth seriously as an asset.
