WASHINGTON, February 23, 2026 — Am back home after being in San Francisco recently for our EDF Action Board meeting.
One of the highlights of the meeting was my colleague Jack Pratt’s presentation on some very recent polling that EDF Action commissioned. We’ll be rolling out the research findings later this week, but I wanted to share with you a couple of key takeaways. First, President Trump’s actions on energy are deeply unpopular.
- 70% of the voters in battleground states we surveyed opposed President Trump’s mandate to keep coal-fired power plants online past their planned retirement dates, with 53% strongly opposed.
- 69% of voters oppose both President Trump’s actions to cancel hundreds of wind and solar projects, and his efforts to make it harder to build new wind and solar projects.
- 64% of voters oppose the elimination of a fee that oil and gas companies were required to pay for emitting methane pollution into the air, with 44% strongly opposed.
- 63% of voters opposed eliminating tax credits that encouraged the production and use of clean energy like wind and solar, with 43% strongly opposed.
Taking away choices from the American people has never been terribly popular. These actions change voter perception strongly about who wants to ban certain forms of energy. Our pollster pointed to what he referred to as “massive movement” on this front. Those findings were buttressed by new research that will likely surprise many of us. Tony Fabrizio, President Trump’s pollster, polled what they called a “GOP+” sample of Trump voters, but what you and I would probably refer to as “the MAGA base.” Even they are favorable on renewable energy, with 51% supporting utility-scale solar, with those numbers climbing to 70% if the solar panels are made here in the U.S., with no ties to China. You can read more about that surprising survey in Axios.
I’ve used this space previously to illustrate that our job is not to make climate change and the other environmental issues we advocate for voters’ top concern; rather, it’s to understand where voters are and communicate our priorities in ways that meet them there. It’s clear from our new findings that we have a real moment of opportunity to do that around some of the President’s unpopular and fairly indefensible policy actions. With your continued help and support, that’s exactly what we intend to do.