Electoral Returns from Climate Policy: The Effect of the Inflation Reduction Act’s Manufacturing Investments

Policy feedback theory predicts concentrated, visible benefits can generate electoral rewards for the party that enacted them. But climate policy that centers costs often produces electoral backlash. Can climate policy centered on benefits generate positive feedback? The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 used manufacturing tax credits to build a domestic clean energy supply chain, in theory boosting Democratic vote share where factories were built. We test this using a panel of 435 congressional districts across five presidential elections (2008–2024) merged with an original dataset of 523 clean energy manufacturing facilities. Two-way fixed-effects estimators identify a gain of approximately 1.5 percentage points in 2024 Democratic presidential vote share in districts receiving a facility. Effects are positive and significant at every level of treatment intensity: linear specifications imply approximately 0.4 percentage points per additional manufacturing facility, and larger dollar investments are associated with larger electoral gains. Climate policy centered on benefits can avoid backlash and provide electoral returns.

Bio

Leah C. Stokes is the Anton Vonk Associate Professor of Environmental Politics at UC Santa Barbara and the author of The Carbon Wave: A Story of Democracy, Parenthood, and the Race to Protect Our Planet. She has championed climate policy in the United States at all levels of government and was selected for Time Magazine’s Time100 Next list and Business Insider’s top 30 global climate leaders. Trained at MIT, Columbia, and the University of Toronto, Stokes has been published in top scholarly journals, as well as The New York Times, Washington Post, and other popular media outlets. A recipient of a Harvard University Radcliffe Fellowship, she is also the author of the award-winning Short Circuiting Policy, which was listed as one of the top five climate books in 2020 by The New York Times. She is also a co-host of the climate podcast “A Matter of Degrees.”