This week we talk about lobbying, renewables, and the NRA.
We also discuss implied threats, midterm elections, and political action committees.
Recommended Book: Sunward by William Alexander
Transcript
For much of the late 20th century and the first few decades of the 21st, one of the most feared interest groups in US politics was the National Rifle Association, the NRA.
Its power came from a large and politically engaged membership, a mailing list, a grading system that reduced complicated voting records to a letter, and a reputation for ending political careers over specific votes.
Once it attained that reputation, the NRA didn’t have to defeat every politician it disagreed with. Members of Congress only had to believe it could defeat them, and that belief shaped races in which the group spent nothing; politicians went out of their way not to anger the NRA. Money can buy an advertisement or a meeting. What tends to change a vote is the expectation that one choice will be rewarded and another will carry consequences.
The NRA’s influence has declined following internal scandals, financial trouble, and the growth of well-funded gun-control groups. But its model remains potent: pick a few visible fights, and allow your reputation to do a lot of the work for you, in the future.
In 2010, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, alongside a related appeals-court ruling later that year, helped create the modern super PAC: a political committee that can raise and spend unlimited sums advocating for or against candidates, so long as it does not coordinate that spending with their campaigns.
This did not eliminate the effort and resources required to build influence, but it meant a few wealthy donors, a competent team, and some carefully selected races could establish a reputation in months rather than decades.
In 2026, solar, wind, and batteries are projected to account for about 93% of new utility-scale electrical generating capacity added in the United States.
That doesn’t mean they provide 93% of the country’s electricity—natural gas remains the largest source in the US—but these technologies are now the overwhelming majority of what the industry is building.
Despite that growth, in 2025 Congress passed a law that sharply rolled back federal support for much of the clean-energy industry, and most of the politicians who voted for those rollbacks appeared to suffer no political consequences for doing so.
What I’d like to talk about today is the effort to build a feared clean-energy lobby, how it has influenced a series of Republican primaries, and what its early successes do and do not tell us about the role of money in American politics.
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The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or OBBBA, was signed into law on July 4, 2025.
For wind and solar projects, the new law generally ended production and investment tax credits for facilities placed in service after December 31, 2027, unless construction began within twelve months of the bill’s enactment.
That twelve-month window closed in July of 2026, and a subsequent executive order directed the Treasury Department to adopt a stricter definition of when construction actually begins, further clamping down on entities hoping to benefit from those now-defunct credits.
Tax credits for electric vehicles and residential efficiency upgrades ended in 2025, while support for clean hydrogen was curtailed. Other technologies, including batteries, nuclear power, and geothermal energy, were treated differently, so it would be misleading to say the law eliminated every federal clean-energy incentive, though it did severely curtail a lot of renewables-oriented industries and construction in the US.
Republicans have generally been more supportive of fossil-fuel production and more hostile to federal wind and solar subsidies, while Democrats have generally taken the opposite position. There are important regional exceptions, especially among Republicans whose districts have attracted manufacturing plants, wind farms, and other energy investments. Several Republican lawmakers have even written letters asking party leaders to preserve some of the credits, in part because projects and jobs in their districts depended on them. When the final vote arrived, though, nearly all congressional Republicans voted for the bill.
Tom Matzzie, the founder of the retail electricity company CleanChoice Energy, previously worked for Democratic campaigns and served as the Washington director of the progressive organization MoveOn.org, so he was familiar with electoral campaigning as well as the energy industry. In the wake of the passing of the OBBBA, he posed a question to Canary Media, possibly alluding to the success of political interest groups like the NRA when he said, “Are we someone that people can hurt without consequences?”
Matzzie recruited Chris Larsen, the billionaire co-founder of the blockchain company Ripple and an investor in clean energy, and Michael Brune, the former executive director of the Sierra Club, and together they formed the Invest in Tomorrow Coalition, or ITC, an acronym that also evokes the investment tax credit the group was organized, in part, to defend.
Federal Election Commission records show that the coalition raised about $6.8 million during the first half of 2026. Larsen provided $6 million, while the organizers said they had assembled commitments of around $20 million and hoped to spend as much as $30 million during the election cycle. Matzzie called the group’s candidate-targeting spreadsheet the “Revenge Tour Matrix,” which is an unusually candid name for a political document.
The group’s most interesting strategic decision, though, is arguably that its advertisements generally did not mention clean energy.
When ITC opposed Texas Representative Chip Roy in the Republican runoff for state attorney general, its ads questioned Roy’s loyalty to President Trump. When it opposed Tennessee Representative Andy Ogles, it created a website called Lyin’ Andy that focused on his missed votes and a federal investigation into his campaign-finance reporting.
The coalition openly identified its reason for entering these races, but its advertisements used whatever campaign research suggested would move primary voters, not what its donors wanted them to think about solar panels.
This approach was especially well suited to Republican primaries, where relatively small electorates can be reached through a concentrated group of conservative television, social-media, and streaming outlets.
In Ogles’ race, for instance, the two campaigns had each spent roughly $600,000, while ITC spent around $2 million attacking Ogles and introducing voters to his challenger, Charlie Hatcher.
The coalition describes its record so far as five wins in five races.
In May, Roy lost the Texas attorney-general runoff by 10.4 percentage points.
In June, Iowa Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks, a Republican who had defended renewable-energy interests in Congress, survived her primary with help from ITC, including a $125,000 contribution.
Later that month, South Carolina Representative Ralph Norman finished a distant third in the Republican primary for governor after the coalition opposed him.
In August, Ogles lost his primary by more than six points despite an endorsement from Trump and more than $700,000 from the House Freedom Caucus’ political fund.
And in late August, Norman lost a second race, this time a Republican Senate primary, to Darline Graham, the sister of the late Senator Lindsey Graham. ITC spent about $1 million in that contest, which Norman lost by five points.
The reactions from Norman and Ogles were almost as useful to the group as the election results.
Norman blamed outside political spending in his concession speech, while Ogles, before his loss, said the coalition was attempting to make an example of him and that could have a chilling effect on other conservatives in Congress.
Those statements do not prove ITC caused either defeat. But they do advertise the consequence the organization wants other politicians to anticipate; come after clean energy investment and they’ll come after you.
This strategy is notable because it separates political deterrence from public persuasion.
It does not need Republican primary voters to become enthusiastic about solar tax credits. It just needs politicians to believe that aggressively attacking solar companies could make their next primary more difficult.
The ads questioning Roy’s loyalty to Trump are probably the clearest version of this distinction. The message voters received and the policy outcome the donors wanted were almost entirely unrelated, and that was intentional.
It’s worth mentioning here that the power of a wealthy individual to shape a low-turnout primary does not become less concerning because the spending supports a technology someone likes. The same rules are available to fossil-fuel companies, cryptocurrency investors, labor unions, and ideological groups of all kinds.
That said, Ogles entered his primary with several liabilities unrelated to energy policy, including controversial public comments, questions about his finances, and a district whose boundaries had changed. Darline Graham had Trump’s support in her race against Norman.
In Texas, the coalition’s roughly $1.7 million in spending was substantial, but the winning campaign spent nearly $25 million and Roy’s campaign spent around $12 million. Roy dismissed the coalition’s influence and said he would take the same positions again.
Matzzie’s response to all this is, more or less, that proof of causation is unnecessary: if lawmakers believe the coalition can hurt them, the deterrent works.
That may be true, but it makes the group’s claim difficult to test. The measurable outcome is that five races ended the way the group preferred, but it’s currently unknown, and maybe unknowable, how much responsibility the group can claim for those victories.
An analysis highlighted by Yale Climate Connections estimated that fossil-fuel interests spent about $219 million supporting candidates in the 2024 election cycle, with roughly 88% of that spending benefiting Republicans. The oil and gas industry also spent more than $150 million lobbying the federal government that year.
What the coalition may have demonstrated is that a relatively modest sum, precisely applied in low-turnout elections with inexpensive media markets, can attract attention far beyond the size of the investment. That is as much a finding about the vulnerability of primary elections as it is about the political strength of clean energy.
Now all that said, the renewable energy industry itself is divided over whether this is a useful approach.
Tim Pawlenty, the former Republican governor of Minnesota who now leads the Solar Energy Industries Association, has said his organization’s job is to make more friends rather than more enemies—an arguably rational position for a trade group that needs access to both parties.
Steve McBee, meanwhile, launched an organization called Amped to encourage clean-energy professionals to engage more visibly in politics, arguing that a major infrastructure industry, and one that’s growing in scale by the year, still behaves as if it were a marginal alternative, and that needs to change.
These approaches can of course coexist, but there is a tension between building a coalition and threatening to make an example of anyone who doesn’t fall into line, and each tactic can make the other more difficult.
The coalition’s first announced Democratic target was Rhode Island Governor Dan McKee, who blamed some of the state’s electricity-price problems on clean-energy policies and proposed delaying its renewable-energy target while reducing funding for efficiency programs.
ITC committed about $500,000 to oppose him in the September 9 primary. Targeting a Democrat helps establish that it is enforcing an industry position rather than functioning as another Democratic-aligned group. And that investment may have paid off: former CVS executive Helena Foulkes beat McKee on September 9’s runoff, with around 62% to McKee’s 38%—not even close.
This wasn’t a clean experiment, though. McKee was already trailing Foulkes by a wide margin, and his standing had been damaged by controversies unrelated to energy, including the prolonged closure of a major bridge.
The next test will be whether the approach works outside primaries. General elections have larger, less ideologically uniform electorates, more expensive advertising, and more competing messages. Matzzie has not offered much detail about the coalition’s plans, and a tactic that works in a small primary may not scale in November.
The midterm elections on November 3 will clarify what this produces at the federal level, but deterrence and legislation are different things. Roy and Norman were running for offices outside the House, while Hatcher was not a wind-and-solar champion. Replacing an outspoken opponent may help the industry, but it does not produce the votes required to restore a tax credit.
The protected begin-construction window for many wind and solar projects closed in July, and the placed-in-service deadline arrives at the end of 2027. Congress could change those dates, but doing so would require legislation that can pass both chambers and receive a presidential signature; a different electoral environment could make that more plausible, but would not make it automatic.
There’s also a risk that a campaign built around retaliation will make clean energy more firmly associated with one political party, even as the industry expands through many Republican districts and states.
Targeting McKee complicates that interpretation, and supporting Miller-Meeks shows a willingness to reward a Republican ally. Still, most targets have been Republicans because most recent federal opposition to wind and solar support has come from Republicans.
That is a current political fact, but it’s not necessarily a permanent alignment. And clean energy companies would no doubt love to get both parties on side, rather than contributing to a further divide, in which one party forever opposes the sorts of projects they’re trying to support.
Thinking back to previous examples of how these sorts of things have played out, the NRA’s influence was never just a function of how much it spent. It came from a reputation, constructed one race at a time, that even influenced politicians who never personally faced its advertisements and spending.
The Invest in Tomorrow Coalition is attempting to compress that process into a single election cycle, using a campaign-finance tool that did not exist in its current form when the NRA first built its power.
Five primaries in, the outlines of that reputation are visible, but its ability to changes votes in Congress, survive a loss, and work with a broader electorate will tell us whether this is the beginning of a durable clean-energy lobby, or just an unusually effective run of well-selected races.
Show Notes
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/politics/super-pac-crushing-clean-energy-foes
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/politics/clean-energy-super-pac-looks-to-take-down-a-democratic-governor
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/29082026/super-pac-targets-conservatives-against-clean-energy/
https://www.eenews.net/articles/emboldened-clean-energy-donors-eye-big-campaign-spending/
https://newrepublic.com/post/214762/green-energy-group-pick-off-republican-candidates
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/top-trump-ally-warns-super-pac-bankrolled-dem-billionaire-meddling-gop-primary
https://www.steptoe.com/en/news-publications/the-one-big-beautiful-bill-impact-on-the-iras-clean-energy-tax-credits.html
https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/2025-reconciliation-debate-one-big-beautiful-bill-act-energy-provisions/
https://seia.org/research-resources/clean-energy-provisions-big-beautiful-bill/
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/chart-us-overwhelmingly-build-clean-power
https://www.fec.gov/data/committee/C00936997/
https://www.fec.gov/legal-resources/court-cases/speechnoworg-v-fec/
https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate-taking-receipts/understanding-independent-expenditures/
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citizens-united-explained
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2025/01/the-fossil-fuel-industry-spent-219-million-to-elect-the-new-u-s-government/
https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/industries/summary?cycle=2024&id=e01
https://www.amped.org/
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/09/09/us/elections/results-rhode-island-governor-primary.html
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