How Shale Gas Helped Shift Coal Country Toward Republicans

Why This Question Matters

Political realignment in historically Democratic U.S. coal communities has been striking in recent decades. Alexander Gazmararian asks whether the rise of shale gas—by displacing coal employment and production—made national environmental regulations more salient and so pushed voters toward Republican presidential candidates.

What Gazmararian Tests

The paper tests whether local economic disruption from the shale gas boom produced a partisan backlash by increasing the perceived importance of federal environmental policy and redirecting blame for decline onto national regulators and Democrats.

Difference-in-Differences on 1972–2020 Presidential Elections

• Design: A difference-in-differences analysis of presidential vote outcomes from 1972 through 2020 compares places affected by the shale gas “shock” to similar places that were not.
• Complementary evidence: Geospatial data, media content analysis, and interviews are used to trace how the shock was experienced and discussed locally.

Key Findings

• The shale gas shock is associated with a 4.9 percentage-point increase in Republican presidential vote share in affected places.
• Qualitative and media evidence indicate many voters attributed community decline to national environmental regulations rather than to the energy transition per se.
• The partisan backlash was stronger where the shale boom’s impacts were less visible on the ground, suggesting that indirect or diffuse economic dislocation can amplify regulatory blame.

Broader Implications

These results link economic displacement, causal attribution, and voting: when voters in “left behind” communities see national policy as responsible for local decline, they are more likely to shift partisan support. The study sheds light on how local experiences of energy transitions and environmental policy shape electoral responses and has implications for the politics of climate and energy policy in affected regions.