Gallego’s Energy Plan: Pull The Democrats To The Center

Adopting an “all of the above” energy policy message will help Democrats show voters the party is serious about tackling the affordability crisis — and ultimately boost clean energy and the fight against climate change Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) said in Monday’s episode of the POLITICO Energy podcast.

Gallego’s calls for Democrats to pivot to the more centrist position comes as soaring costs for gasoline and electricity are pushing up inflation and hitting voters in the wallet, and raising the party’s chances of winning control of Congress in the midterm elections in November.

That energy message should replace the climate change appeals that Gallego said causes many voters to shut off, since soaring fuel prices represent a more urgent problem than rising temperatures — even in Arizona, which suffers the nation’s worst heatwaves and has been hard hit by climate-influenced drought.

“Honestly, it's just so loaded,” Gallego said. “If our goal is to bring down our carbon footprint – try to restrain climate change — we need to win. And focusing on words versus outcomes, I think, is a real good pathway to losing.”

Gallego said energy is the top issue on the campaign trail when intertwined with Americans’ concerns about the cost of living. He released a 32-page energy policy paper in December that outlines a platform to grow energy output in order to assuage Americans’ anxieties about rising costs while benefiting clean power sources that represent the vast majority of new additions to the electric grid.

Polling shows that voters are increasingly blaming Republicans and Trump for the surge in pump prices, which have spiked nearly a dollar-and-a-half per gallon as a result of Iran closing the vital Strait of Hormuz waterway in response to U.S. and Israel attacks. Rising electricity bills, driven in many places by demand from energy-hungry artificial intelligence industry and data centers, were buckling wallets even before the war.

“You are really tackling what people are worried about when it comes to energy and what they're worried about is the cost of living and the high cost of utilities,” Gallego said. “And for some of us that grew up poor like I did, playing the utility roulette game is not fun. Like what can you pay now before it gets shut off, before something else gets shut off?”

The first-term senator said his experience winning statewide in Arizona the same year President Donald Trump won his election should be instructive for Democrats as they approach the November midterms.

Americans like the idea of more, not less, Gallego said, and that will make Republicans vulnerable on energy given GOP and Trump administration policies that have bottled up new renewable projects amid the growing energy supply crunch.

“A day-one scenario is try to put as many electrons on the grid as fast as possible with a very smart grid that you can move it on-demand across the country,” he said.

Gallego said Trump’s and the broader Republican victories in 2024 were more of rejection of the Democratic brand than a repudiation of the green policies enacted under former President Joe Biden. Gallego said he championed the renewable energy incentives contained in the Inflation Reduction Act during his Senate campaign — and he said Democrats should tout them and vow to restore tax credits for wind, solar and home energy efficiency improvements.

“I overperformed the top of the ticket. So just to say that Republicans won because they ran against the Green New Deal and that beat everything else out, that's too simplified,” he said. “I'm not going to be afraid to run on it again. And I don't think American candidates should be afraid to do that.”

Gallego acknowledged that adding more energy to the power grid would mean additional carbon-based fuel like natural gas, the steep cost declines for technologies like solar and batteries mean those sources are likely to lead the pack. The U.S. Energy Information Administration forecast solar, wind and batteries will comprise 93 percent of a record 86 gigawatts of new utility-scale power capacity this year.

The fast-rising energy demand from artificial intelligence data centers is driving much of the need for that new power — and voters are less likely to support their construction if they raise electricity bills, a POLITICO Poll of more than 2,000 Americans found. More people trusted Democrats over Republicans to protect them from rising energy costs related to data centers, but not by a wide margin.

The data center issue is hot in Arizona, where the city of Chandler recently rejected a project and Democratic Gov. Kate Hobbs reversed her prior support for data center tax breaks. Gallego said developers should be required to meet certain conditions to ensure they do not increase power bills or pollution, and he said projects should not get tax breaks. But he was wary that the party’s “loudest voices” sound too adversarial to the new tech buildout.

Gallego’s approach, instead, is “making sure that we control the growth,” he said. “That [a data center is] placed in the right place, that it brings its own energy, and to make sure that there is another voice out there besides kind of the more extreme position on it when it comes to data centers.”

Gallego declined to answer questions about his relationship to former Rep. Eric Swalwell, instead referring POLITICO to ask his staff for comment. The California Democrat bowed out of the state's gubernatorial race and resigned from Congress last month amid sexual assault allegations.

Gallego chaired Swalwell's 2020 White House campaign. Last month Gallego said revelations regarding Swalwell's alleged behavior "betrayed" his trust.