Should Republican politicians fear voter vengeance in 2026 if they support rolling back the Green New Scam?

Bloomberg News reported in “Republican Who Flip-Flopped on Energy Credits Risks Voters’ Ire” that Democrats plan to target Rep. Jen Kiggans (R-VA) in 2026 because she “flip-flopped” on green energy subsidies and “cast the deciding vote” for the House version of the “big, beautiful bill.”

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Kiggans reportedly “cast herself as the leading Republican champion of renewables” yet voted to cut green subsidies by about 50%. “Jen Kiggans’ brazen flip-flop on supporting clean energy tax credits is exactly what voters hate about D.C. politicians: She says one thing back home, but turns around and votes another way in Washington,” a Democrat operative told Bloomberg.

Kiggans is in her second term in the House. She won her seat in 2022 by 2.4 points. She was reelected in 2024 by 3.8 points. But Virginia is a purple state, and President Donald Trump won Kiggans’s district by a mere 1,000 votes (0.2%). So, 2026 is likely to be a close election regardless of her vote on the “big, beautiful bill.” But that’s exactly the point.

Since the 1990s, no one has been able to identify a single Republican at the federal level who lost an election specifically because he or she ignored or opposed the green agenda. And there is a good reason for this. Green issues, especially climate, are just not voter priorities. Election outcomes typically depend on how voters feel about a range of issues.

Ahead of the July 2022 midterm elections, a New York Times-Siena College poll reported that a mere 1% of voters named climate as the most important issue facing the country. Democratic data guru David Shor described climate’s traction problem with voters like this: “When you talk about climate change, you sound like a weird, very liberal white person.” While that may be a legitimate voter demographic, it has never been a very important one.

Trying to be “green” just doesn’t work. Of the 30 Republican members of Congress who joined the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus in 2017, 24 were targeted by Democrats anyway in the 2018 midterm elections. Of the caucus’s total 45 Republican members, more than one-third were defeated in 2018.

Trump campaigned against the “climate hoax” in 2016 and won in an electoral landslide. Climate wasn’t a pivotal issue in 2020, but it was in 2024 when candidate Trump specifically and repeatedly campaigned against the Green New Scam.

Many Republicans, unfortunately, scare easily on climate. But all Democrats have to rely on is such Republican skittishness. That said, there is one bad actor that Kiggans, as other Republicans in close races, will need to watch: the local electric utility.

As I have written previously, Virginia’s Dominion Energy wants to build the largest offshore wind farm in the United States. It is doing so with the expectation of receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in Inflation Reduction Act subsidies (aka, the Green New Scam).

Utilities around the country are looking for similar largess from taxpayers for their various green energy schemes. They are a very powerful and deep-pocketed lobby on the federal and state levels, spending $130 million in 2024 and $41 million so far in 2025.

That’s the threat to Republicans like Kiggans. Utilities will spend money to intimidate and defeat them to keep the subsidies coming. 

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But Republicans aren’t helpless. In fact, they have the Trump card. Virtually all large-scale utility projects depend on a host of approvals from federal regulatory agencies. Trump just needs to play that card against the utilities if they oppose his agenda.

It sounds very Machiavellian. And it just might be. But unlike Trump and the MAGA agenda, no one ever voted for a utility, much less the ever-rising electricity prices caused by Green New Scam subsidy profiteering.

Steve Milloy is a biostatistician and lawyer, publishes JunkScience.com and is on X @JunkScience.