Electric Storm

President Biden has laid down the gauntlet: By 2032, 67% of all new vehicle sales must be electric vehicles (EVs). Carmakers who fail to meet these quotas will face fines.

For the most part, manufacturers have embraced this goal, with GM adopting the even more ambitious plan to phase out gas vehicles entirely by 2035. To bolster the plan, the government announced $623 million in grants to spur buildout of 500,000 public charging stations by 2030.

There is still one big factor holding back widespread adoption of EVs, however: our country’s political divide. New research by Professor Lucas Davis found that EV adoption occurs overwhelmingly in “blue” counties—those with a high percentage of Democrats—and the divide doesn’t seem to be getting better. “The results point to a strong and enduring correlation between political ideology and EV adoption,” says Davis, the Jeffrey A. Jacobs Distinguished Professor.

Combining a proprietary database of auto registrations by Experian with voting trends by county, Davis and his MIT and HEC Montréal co-authors found that one-third of EV adoption between 2012 and 2022 occurred in the top 5% most-Democratic counties; half occurred in the top 10%.

Not surprisingly, the West Coast states of California, Oregon, and Washington led EV adoption nationwide. But even when those states were excluded from the analysis, households in majority-Democratic counties were more than twice as likely to purchase an EV than those in majority-Republican counties. The correlation holds even after controlling for other factors like household income, population density, and gasoline prices.

“Over this time period, the number of EV models available has increased from only two to more than 100, yet EVs are still overwhelmingly going to the most-Democratic counties,” Davis says.

While some technologies take time to catch on, Davis and coauthors were surprised to find little evidence that the correlation with political ideology has decreased over time. If there’s hope for widespread adoption of EVs in the next decades, those championing the shift will have to build a highway-sized bridge over the divide.