WASHINGTON — Energy industry leaders insisted Wednesday that Republicans’ electoral gains in Congress prove that supporting oil and gas development is a winning political strategy.
“One thing is abundantly clear: In the 2014 election cycle, energy was the clear winner,” said American Petroleum Institute CEO Jack Gerard, in a conference call with reporters. “In race after race, voters from all regions of our nation and both political parties voted for pro-development, true all-of-the-above energy policies.”
Although some races are still undecided, Tuesday’s elections put Republicans in control of the Senate and strengthened their majority in the House of Representatives — giving them more power to advance industry priorities such as Keystone XL and expanded opportunities for oil and gas drilling. A GOP wave also swept through statehouses, as Republicans picked up four new governorships.
Read more: Republicans have votes to force Keystone XL approval
Gerard said the election offers “a lesson for candidates in 2016: pro-energy policies win.”
The case study may be Colorado, where Democratic Sen. Mark Udall lost his race for reelection even though Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper narrowly won a second term.
The victor in Colorado’s Senate race, Republican Rep. Cory Gardner, accused Udall of being a fence-sitter on the Keystone XL pipeline and opposing the hydraulic fracturing process that has helped unlock once-unrecoverable oil and gas resources across the United States. Udall authored legislation to accelerate government approvals of proposed natural gas exports but was unable to get traction for the measure in the Senate.
By contrast, Hickenlooper brokered a compromise in August that headed off ballot initiatives that could have shut down drilling in some parts of Colorado. Under the deal, a task force now is studying ways to minimize conflicts between oil and gas activities and nearby schools, homes and businesses.
Gerard said he had seen Colorado data indicating that “in oil and gas producing areas, Gov. Hickenlooper ran well ahead of Sen. Udall.” And that shows that Hickenlooper’s approach to oil and gas development helped him at the ballot box, Gerard said.
“Sen. Udall was very reluctant to assist in the Keystone XL pipeline (while) Gov. Hickenlooper has been a pro-oil and -gas governor,” Gerard said. “That alone really begins to show the distinctions between candidates that embrace the oil and gas opportunities we have (and those who don’t).”
Notably, billionaire climate activist Tom Steyer spent nearly $8 million in NextGen PAC money in the Colorado race, trying to get Udall across the finish line with ads criticizing Gardner’s oil industry ties and his approach to climate change.
Steve Everley, a spokesman for the industry-backed group Energy In Depth, said “support for affordable energy was not a liability” at the ballot box, despite “what Tom Steyer and other anti-fracking interests promised.”
“In fact, based on the candidates’ own rhetoric, the real risk is in not supporting responsible oil and gas development enough,” Everley added. “At the end of the day, jobs matter, and a campaign that focuses on destroying work instead of creating new opportunities is destined to fail.”
Amid the navel-gazing and punditry that follows big elections, it is popular sport in the nation’s capital to debate what policies caused big waves. For instance, after the 1994 elections that put Republicans in control of the House, the National Rifle Association swiftly claimed credit and insisted that voting for a now-expired assault weapons ban effectively cost 20 lawmakers their jobs.
Environmentalists were struggling to regroup Wednesday.
“We lost far too many races yesterday,” admitted Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. “There’s no way to dance around the issue that in too many races we lost good allies — clean energy champions — and we’ll see those people being replaced by people who stand against our values.”
But environmentalists stressed that pro-conservation policies helped propel some lawmakers to victory, particularly in New Hampshire and Michigan, where Democrats Jeanne Shaheen and Gary Pearce won with the support of conservation groups. In both states, television advertisements painted their opponents as tied to Big Oil.
Some Republicans also took pains to shift their approach on energy as Election Day neared. Gardner’s campaign, for instance, ran an ad showing the lawmaker surrounded by windmills — a move Brune said was designed to illustrate him as a clean energy supporter.
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