Joe Biden’s signature climate law was not just about climate. The Inflation Reduction Act was also a big bet on a particular theory of politics: Pass a law that creates factories and good-paying jobs in communities across the country, and voters will reward you at the ballot box. Such a law might even become too popular to repeal.
The conventional wisdom today is that Biden’s bet was a bust. His White House had hoped that “the Inflation Reduction Act would allow the party to make inroads in communities that had been drifting away from them,” The Bulwark’s Sam Stein observed after the election. “The theory proved wrong.” According to this line of thinking, the IRA poured billions of dollars into left-behind places, only for voters to decisively reject Democrats in 2024. Even places such as Lordstown, Ohio, which got a gleaming new battery plant courtesy of IRA incentives, still swung toward Donald Trump. Then, when restored to the White House, Trump partnered with a Republican Congress to effectively wipe the IRA from existence.
Every part of that story, however, is at best incomplete and at worst simply wrong. The law did, in fact, deliver votes for Democrats. And key components of it are still on the books—still growing the clean economy and cutting pollution. As politicians consider what climate policy should look like after Trump, it’s important that they avoid drawing the wrong lessons from the Biden administration’s experience.
From a political perspective, the centerpiece of the IRA was a massive tax credit for clean-energy manufacturing. By Election Day, this policy, alongside other, smaller Biden-era programs, had driven $185 billion in announced private investment into factories that make solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles, among other clean technologies. The administration believed that, as voters saw new factories going up in their community, they would reward the party responsible for those investments. Did that happen?
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A few early studies concluded that the IRA generated little to no political reward. But those papers had two key limitations. First, they studied county-level election results. That’s a poor match for a federal election. Counties contain anywhere from a few hundred people to many millions, and a big one can include a dozen House districts. Drop a factory into Los Angeles County (population: 10 million) and its effect all but disappears. Second, these early studies lumped factories—brick-and-mortar operations that employ people in a community—together with other forms of investment, such as energy generation, transmission, and storage, that had not been touted for their electoral benefits in the first place.
In a new working paper, my colleague Denis Lomov and I attempted to more precisely measure the political impact of the IRA’s manufacturing credits, which were the primary driver of this manufacturing boom. Just because Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election doesn’t mean that the law didn’t help her. The question is about whether more people voted for her than would have in the absence of the investments. To answer that, we identified 234 House districts that saw a total of 523 clean-energy factories announced during the Biden years and compared them with demographically similar districts that weren’t slated for factories.
Over the four presidential elections preceding 2024, voting patterns in these two sets of districts moved in lockstep, rising and falling together with the national tides. Then, they split. In 2024, we found that clean-energy manufacturing lifted Harris’s vote share by roughly 1.5 percentage points—a swing of 2.5 million votes across the 234 districts. For context, Trump won the national popular vote by just 2.3 million.
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The Electoral College vote came down to three states that Trump carried by less than two points: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In Michigan, where every single district had at least one factory announced, the swing we identified was larger than Trump’s entire margin of victory. Without the manufacturing build-out, our estimates suggest, Harris would have lost that state by three times as much as she did. And we find that the effect scaled: Larger investments moved more votes than smaller ones did. And there was no backlash, not even in deep-red districts.
Political scientists have a name for this phenomenon: policy feedback. A law that puts a battery factory in a district changes the politics of that place. Suddenly, its representative has a reason to protect that policy. This was part of the theory of the IRA. More than 70 percent of announced clean-manufacturing investments went to districts that Trump carried in 2020. And in March of last year, during the lead-up to the passage of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, 21 House Republicans sent a letter opposing the repeal of the clean-energy tax credits. The next month, four Republican senators followed suit. Behind the scenes, clean-energy companies lobbied hard. With factories and jobs now established or poised to arrive in Republican districts, several senators worked to strip out the House’s harshest cuts before the repeal bill passed.
Which brings us to the other half of the story—the notion that Trump erased Biden’s climate law. In my new book, The Carbon Wave, I chronicle the long, brutal fight to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, which I participated in. Now I’m often told that the law is “dead.” I understand why people think that. Even sympathetic publications have run stories with headlines declaring that “Biden’s Climate Law Is Dead” and lamenting “The Quick and Shameful Death of Biden’s Biggest Policy.” But the truth is more complicated.
The Trump tax bill did repeal some aspects of the IRA. It canceled grant programs to help disadvantaged communities. Consumer tax credits, which had given people a discount on rooftop solar, electric vehicles, and heat pumps, are gone. But much of the law survived Trump’s axe, including the manufacturing tax credits—just as policy-feedback theory had predicted. Of the 523 projects we looked at, only 37 had been canceled as of April, when we did our study.
The OBBBA was at one point expected to get rid of tax credits for building solar- and wind-energy projects. Instead, Congress shortened the window during which the credits would be available. A looming deadline tends to pull projects forward, not kill them. In the first half of this year, developers raced to break ground before a July cutoff, locking in funding for projects that will come online by 2030. Even after the passage of Trump’s bill, U.S. solar capacity is expected to double over the next five years. Wind installations will surge this year, too, despite Trump doing his best to kill them. The long-term picture is murkier, but history suggests that these kinds of credits have a way of coming back from the dead. Congress has extended earlier rounds of clean-energy credits when they’ve expired, in some cases on a bipartisan basis, and has even applied some of them retroactively.
Meanwhile, the commercial-battery tax credits are still around. With these policies in place, America is on track this year for its biggest build-out of power generation in history, 93 percent of it clean. This is happening because of the IRA’s deepest legacy: It helped make clean energy cheaper. Since the law passed, battery prices have fallen by roughly a third. A tax credit can be repealed, but a price decline cannot. (Trump is, unfortunately, doing the next worst thing: His tariffs raise the price of clean-energy inputs, making Americans pay extra for technology that the rest of the world gets for cheap.)
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Despite its partial repeal, the IRA has fared better than many other climate policies. For decades, economists advised policy makers that carbon pricing was the optimal solution to reducing emissions. But in practice, the approach has proved to be a political disaster. Australia passed a carbon tax and repealed it within two years. France’s attempt helped ignite the country’s massive yellow-vest protests, forcing the government to abandon it. Canada’s prime minister, a former central banker who once championed carbon pricing, killed his country’s consumer-carbon tax on his first day in office. Voters turn out not to like policies designed to make energy more expensive. The IRA has proved relatively resilient because it instead was designed to make clean energy cheaper.
But good policy design is only half the battle. Politicians also have to move fast enough to reap the political rewards. With the clean-energy-manufacturing tax credits, they did: Companies announced factories within months of the law’s passage, some projects broke ground, and by Election Day voters could see things happening in their community. Grants were another story. A $20 billion “green bank” established by the IRA moved so slowly that the money was still sitting in bank accounts when Trump took office, allowing him to freeze the whole thing. A policy that is never implemented cannot create policy feedback. If politicians want their legislation to move votes, the benefits have to arrive before the next election.
None of this means that Biden’s climate law saved Democrats. But they lost in 2024 in the way that nearly every incumbent party lost that year: deluged by a wave of global inflation that toppled governments around the world. Climate policy didn’t lose Harris the election. Building all of these clean-energy factories appears to have kept the vote much closer than it otherwise would have been.
Neither does the success of the IRA mean that overall climate policy is alive and well in America. Trump has done real damage, not only through the OBBBA but also through a number of executive orders. America is on track to blow past its 2030 carbon-emissions goal. Under Trump, we have fallen further behind, and time is not on our side. But a day will come when Trump is no longer the president, when passing another climate bill is a real possibility. When that time comes, lawmakers should remember the lesson of the IRA: Voters respond to benefits that they can actually see. Politicians should make sure those benefits materialize quickly—and that voters know who delivered them.