In her first campaign speech in Milwaukee, the Democratic vice president and presumptive nominee took aim at Big Oil's support for former President Trump’s campaign.
“Trump is relying on support from billionaires in big corporations, and he is trading access in exchange for campaign contributions,” Harris told supporters.
Harris pointed to reporting from The Washington Post that found Trump had, as she put it, “literally promised Big Oil companies and Big Oil lobbyists he would do their bidding for $1 billion in campaign donations.”
While Harris has billionaires in her own corner, she played a populist note at the rally, pointing audiences to her record haul of donations, which brought in $81 million in just 24 hours.
In Harris’s brief mention of Big Oil, she did not mention the word “climate,” but instead focused on the theme of big energy corporations. Democrats have accused large energy companies of getting a quid-pro-quo on a Trump White House — something that progressive pollsters have found turns off roughly two-thirds of American voters.
Sources told The Hill in May that Trump asked for donations when speaking with the oil executives, but one source said the discussion was not framed as a quid pro quo.
This opposition to fossil fuel companies isn’t entirely environmental. While about 70 percent of Americans want the country to stop emitting carbon by 2050, nearly 90 percent are worried about “price-gouging” by oil and gas.
In her challenge to Big Oil, Harris has past prosecutions to point to. While California attorney general, she sued and won judgments against Chevron, BP and ConocoPhillips for illegal spills at their gas stations.
She also sued and won a $86 million judgment against Volkswagen for cheating on its emissions-detection software and won criminal charges against pipeline company Plains All-American for a 2015 oil spill.
That record is already firing up the climate movement, as HeatMap reported. But it also carries with it a liability, as OilPrice.com noted: To win, Harris has to take Pennsylvania, one of the heartlands of the unconventional oil and gas boom that reshaped American production.
"If the Dems don't win PA they are COOKED. And her views aren't compatible with winning there," Scott Jennings, a political commentator and strategist for the Republicans, told Axios.
How Harris will play in the Keystone State is up for debate. On the one hand, Biden trailed Trump there until retiring from the race, and a 2022 poll by business coalition Pittsburgh Works Together found three-to-one support for natural gas, which is largely produced by fracking.
On the other hand, a 2021 Pennsylvania poll commissioned by the progressive Ohio River Valley Institute suggested most residents (55 percent) asked about fracking specifically want fracking to end.
Many Democrats see in Harris’s opposition to the industry a blueprint for success.
Harris is “the kind of leader who will hold the fossil fuel industry accountable, and that's what we need right now," Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) told Bloomberg.
