Keith Laing and Alicia Tang | (TNS) Bloomberg News
Tucked between the onslaught of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris ads flooding Michigan’s airwaves ahead of the U.S. election is a six-figure TV blitz that, on the surface, has nothing to do with politics. Rather, the 30-second spots are aimed at convincing swing-state voters of the merits of buying electric vehicles.
“Forget the political noise,” the ad says, flashing photos of factory workers at car manufacturing plants over clips of Trump railing on EVs. “EVs mean good American jobs.”
Electric cars have a “Republican problem,” said longtime GOP strategist Mike Murphy, who started an advocacy group that has coordinated with carmakers to speed up adoption in red states where sales have lagged.
Murphy says even a recent influx of appearances from Tesla Inc.’s Elon Musk alongside Trump hasn’t helped reverse decades of derision against plug-in vehicles and the former president’s pledge to end Joe Biden’s EV policies on “day one.”
“Unless we start getting Republicans to buy EVs, we’ll never get to the numbers” the Biden administration has proposed, Murphy said, referring to Biden’s pledge for electric cars to make up half of all U.S. vehicle sales by 2030. Last year, they accounted for just 8%.
EV politics are playing a big role in the presidential campaign in Michigan. Trump is running an ad there that claims Vice President Harris wants to end all gas-powered jobs and that auto workers in the state are at risk of massive layoffs. In an Oct. 4 speech in Flint, Michigan, Harris told the crowd she “will never tell you what kind of car you have to drive.”
Democratic strongholds of California, Colorado and Washington continue to make up the largest share of new EV purchases, with Republican bastions including Mississippi, Arkansas and West Virginia making up the smallest percentage of sales. In each of those southern states, electric cars accounted for less than 3% of new-vehicle sales in the second quarter compared with 27% in California and 18% in Washington state, according to the Alliance for Automotive Innovation.
There are clear geographical and economic elements that influence EV buyers in these areas, but it’s hard to ignore the political divide: Murphy’s data shows that Republicans make up the largest group of new car buyers in the U.S., but Democrats are 4.5 times more likely to buy an EV.
Meanwhile, automakers are slashing their EV projections. Only 29% of American adults now say they will seriously consider a plug-in vehicle for their next purchase, down 9 percentage points from last year, according to a recent poll from Pew Research Center.
The hard sell
Uncertainty about the election is adding to EV hesitancy, said Mark Trudell, the general manager at Extreme Dodge Chrysler Jeep Ram in Jackson, Michigan. “If the election bounces one way, a lot of those government subsidies are going to go away,” he said, referring to the $7,500 federal tax credit for buyers of the Teslas, Rivians and other EVs that meet certain criteria.
He’s one of thousands of auto dealers across the country charged with selling new EVs, which have been piling up on lots.
Many dealerships have started to approach the process more clinically. At Hall Mazda and Hall Volkswagen in Brookfield, Wisconsin, customers are asked a series of questions about what they need in their next car before discussing specific options. But about one-quarter of those matched to EV models refuse to consider them for political reasons, according to Charlie Hall, president of operations.
“Some people object to the idea of large tax incentives that are out there for EVs,” Hall said. “They feel that that’s not the free market at work. And they want to vote with their dollars.”
Lexus of Montgomery in Alabama is trying a different approach to selling electric cars. The dealership recently named Holly Dobson to a new role called the “electrified champion,” which involves educating car shoppers and training salespeople on the technology in a bid to move past the politics. Dobson said 90% of customers she approached about EVs were rejecting the idea outright.
“We’re trying to grow our customer base for electric vehicles here in the South,” Dobson said.
The Musk factor
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One big Republican donor with the power to change the narrative around EVs is Musk, who spent big to support Trump’s candidacy, campaigning with the former president and discussing a potential position in his administration.
Morning Consult Intelligence surveys show that net Republican approval of Tesla ticked up in recent months after Trump called Musk a genius, but that the company is losing favor among Democrats.
Some on Wall Street already see Musk’s politics showing up in Tesla’s results.
“Given that consumers are hypersensitive about politics and more than half of Tesla’s buyers lean politically left, this dynamic may have reduced deliveries by 5-10k during the quarter,” said Deepwater Asset Management’s Gene Munster.
Pavel Ihnatovich, owner of GS Motors, a used EV dealership in Hopkins, Minnesota, mostly avoids selling Teslas because public opinion of Musk has soured. “There’s way less buyers for them right now than there used to be,” he said.
Mickey Anderson, president and CEO of Baxter Auto Group, which owns dealerships in Nebraska, Kansas, Wisconsin and Colorado, said that he’s seen more former Tesla owners shopping for alternate models thanks to Musk’s politics.
“That’s not causing people to abandon EVs,” he said. “That’s causing people to abandon Tesla.”
Anderson said many gas-vehicle owners’ first response to an EV is “this just doesn’t work for me,” though he says this is largely due to a lack of knowledge.
‘Move the iron’
Wes Lutz, president of Extreme Dodge, said customers can be more or less open to EVs “depending on where you get your news from.” But these days, he tells his staff to avoid discussing politics with customers altogether.
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“Good salespeople want to sell things. They’re not confrontational,” said Lutz, who’s also a former chair of the National Automobile Dealers Association. “We have to move the iron.”
And it’s not just avoiding political talk in their showrooms.
“I’ve told my employees, ‘You put something online that comes back at the dealership, you’re no longer employed here,’” said George Gatto, president of Gatto Cycle Shop, a motorcycle dealership in Tarentum, Pennsylvania.
Gatto, who is offloading electric motorcycle inventory because demand has been soft, said “you just have to be really careful with anything political.”
Murphy of the EV Politics Project is optimistic this can change. His poll asking whether respondents agreed that “EVs are the future and one day I’ll probably drive one” showed that a majority of Democrats and 45% of Republicans responded affirmatively.
“If it’s at 45% now, we can get to 60% with a hearts-and-mind message aimed at the right people,” Murphy said.
(With assistance from Jo Constantz and Matthew Townsend.)
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