Surprise Support for Solar

Solar power is on the Trump Administration hit list, but it turns out to have support in unexpected places.

Here’s a social media post whose content won’t surprise you:

“Solar power is the energy of the future.

“Giant fusion reactor up there in the sky – we must rapidly expand solar to compete with China.”

And from a political ally of Trump, a poll that found three-quarters of Trump voters in five states agreed that solar should be used “to strengthen and increase” the U.S. energy supply.

Who were those solar supporters?  They’re Katie Miller, wife of White House honcho Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s deportation policy, and Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s 2016 campaign manager.

 To what extent are Miller and Conway representing grassroots GOP voters, a/k/a “The Base”?  A May 2025 poll by Pew found that 61% of Republicans & Republican-leaning independents favored expansion of solar. That was a considerable decline since 2017, but still in healthily positive territory.  (There was sharper cut in the number of Republicans favoring expansion of wind, down from about three-quarters to half.) A third of Republicans still believed that expanding wind and solar is more important than expanding fossil fuels — also well down since 2017 but still a little surprising given Trump’s attacks on renewables.

There remain some important divisions among Republicans, according to Pew.  One fault line is age:

“Younger Republicans remain more supportive of solar and wind power than their older counterparts – but their support for renewable energy has declined in the last year. For example, 51% of Republicans ages 18 to 29 say the country should prioritize renewable energy, a decrease of 16 percentage points from last year. “

In addition, rural voters are much less supportive of renewables than those in urban areas.

These changes are clearly being driven by Trump’s hostility to renewables and tribal loyalty by his followers.  Trump’s taking the reins in D.C. is the only relevant change in the past year.  Since then, Trump followers have been inundated with the message that fossil fuels are the holy grail.

It will be interesting to see whether the defections within MAGA-world toward support for solar percolate down to grassroots Republicans. It’s also unclear whether Miller and Conway could be an early indicator of a thaw in Trump-world toward solar.  There are some signs that the Administration’s blockade of new solar projects is easing. This could be just be a ploy to increase congressional support for permit reform. According to the Washington Post, however, the shift “reflects a realization taking hold more broadly among Republicans that solar power — long embraced by liberals — is increasingly indispensable to America’s bid to dominate AI, close a yawning ‘electron gap’ with China and contain runaway residential electricity costs.”

It’s clearly a mistake to assume that all Republicans buy into the  Administration’s past efforts to squelch clean energy. As the example of Katie Miller shows, there is disagreement even among  hardcore MAGA supporters.  As the President said recently, however, “MAGA is Trump.”  There will only be a real policy shift, at least at the national level, if Trump himself gets on board.

Energy, energy policy, MAGA, MAGA movement, solar, Trump Administration