Kamala Harris’s Pennsylvania fracking problem

James Hulings was sitting 40 feet from Donald Trump at the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July when a gunman fired at the former president, injuring Trump’s ear and killing a spectator.

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

“We got burnt in 2020 and we don’t want to be burnt again,” said Hulings, who as chair of the local Republican committee is working to register voters before November’s polling day.

“I mean this Kamala Harris girl is a communist . . . She 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 probably need to win Pennsylvania — the swing state that Joe Biden won by just 80,000 votes in 2020.

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

The state is a huge shale gas producer — and fertile ground for Trump, who is drawing 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 she does not seek to ban fracking; a position she made clear again in a debate with Trump last month. But that is a reversal from her position in 2019, and the former president has pounced on the switch during frequent trips to campaign in Pennsylvania.

“If anybody here believes they will let your energy industry continue — like fracking — you should immediately go to a psychiatrist and have your head examined,” the Republican candidate told a rally in Indiana, Pennsylvania, last week.

A Philadelphia Inquirer/New York Times/Siena College poll from September 19 showed 48 per cent of Pennsylvanian voters trusted Trump to do a better job on fracking than Harris, at 41 per cent. A majority, 51 per cent, said they trusted Trump to do a better job on the economy, compared to 46 per cent for Harris.

Both campaigns have poured advertising money into the swing state. While Harris has concentrated on running up the turnout in progressive cities such as Philadelphia, her half-point polling lead means she cannot afford to shed any rural votes.

But in Butler county, where registered Republicans outnumber registered Democrats by two to one and many houses proudly display their “Trump 2024” yard signs, the Republican message was hitting home.

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

In shale-rich Washington and Fayette counties, people who work in the industry or benefit from it worry Harris would use environmental regulations to strangle a sector struggling during a collapse in 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 because of the local industry’s downturn.

The US has risen to become the world’s biggest oil and gas producer during the Biden-Harris administration, but Sterbutzel and others in Pennsylvania’s shale patch think Democrats are hostile to their business.

The Department of Energy’s decision this year to pause approvals for new liquefied natural gas plants has increased 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 rapidly remove its pause on LNG approvals.

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

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

“There’s plenty of opportunities, plenty of things to correct,” said Toby Rice, chief executive of Pittsburgh-based EQT, the US’s largest gas producer. “And she can start by lifting the LNG pause immediately. Otherwise we’re just relying on words.”

Some people in staunchly Republican rural areas are not enthused by Harris’s new support for fracking, believing the practice is environmentally harmful.

“I wasn’t surprised that Harris backed down on a fracking ban but I was disappointed,” said Victoria Switzer, an anti-fracking campaigner and artist living in Susquehanna county, in the state’s east.

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

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

If Harris is to win votes in the shale areas, it might be by pressing issues other than fracking.

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

“I didn’t feel he was so radical back in 2020,” said Bednarz.

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

Biden’s government has overseen a period of record job creation, surging energy output, and billions of dollars of inward investment in new manufacturing plants. But a bout of high inflation in 2022 left many in Pennsylvania feeling the economy was better under Trump.

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

“The current administration has caused inflation and they have shut down as much of the drilling and fracking as they could,” he added.

Additional reporting by Myles McCormick in Houston