Voters are mad about utility bills. Republicans are blaming some in their own party

By Annie Grayer, Ella Nilsen, CNN

(CNN) — A group of moderate Republicans have warned for months that their party’s plan to eliminate clean energy tax credits would contribute to utility bills skyrocketing.

Now, their predictions are coming true. And more Republicans are starting to openly worry that the issue could hurt them in next year’s midterm elections.

Electricity and heating bills around the country are soaring. Since last September, residential electricity rates nationwide increased by 7.4% – with over a dozen states seeing double digit increases year-over-year.

And anger over high bills is showing up on the campaign trail. Emphasizing the rising cost of energy bills, food and health care, Democrats rode an affordability message to a string of victories in November, winning governors’ races in New Jersey and Virginia and flipping two seats on Georgia’s public utility commission.

The issue is “not going away,” said Adrian Deveny, founder of consulting firm Climate Vision and a former top Senate Democratic staffer. Republicans “should be very worried because they are going to be held accountable for it.”

The Republican leading the House GOP campaign arm, Rep. Richard Hudson, told CNN that Republicans are working on solutions to drive down energy costs.

“We’re living right now with high cost because of Democratic policies,” Hudson claimed. “They’re doing a very good job of trying to blame us for it.”

Most Republicans argue the party inherited the problem of high utility bill prices as a result of Biden administration policy, but there are still moderates who have been advocating for the embrace of as many energy sources as possible, including clean energy – and raising alarms that their party has not done enough to address the issue of high energy costs.

The party tensions came to a head on Tuesday when a small group of Republicans almost tanked a procedural vote on a bill looking to speed up the federal permitting and regulatory process for energy infrastructure projects.

High energy bills are being driven by a few key factors: the high cost of energy infrastructure, a spike in the cost of natural gas and the significant amount of power AI data centers are suddenly consuming. There’s a massive imbalance in the amount of electricity they need, and the amount of power that exists now to serve it.

“You have to get more power on the grid,” GOP Rep. Andrew Garbarino of New York told CNN.

Earlier this year, Republicans voted to do the opposite. At the behest of President Donald Trump, the GOP gutted generous Biden-era tax credits for renewable energy. That move, experts and some moderate Republicans fear, is taking the cheapest and fastest-to-build forms of energy off the table – in turn, making America’s growing electricity crisis worse.

“One of the arguments being made when we were talking about going after the credits in the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ is this is going to affect utility payments,” said Garbarino, who had initially pushed to not kill the tax credits before ultimately supporting the bill.

GOP Rep. Gabe Evans was another Republican who pushed his colleagues to extend the clean energy tax credits. The Colorado Republican was in House Speaker Mike Johnson’s office arguing for it a day before the final vote.

“Myself and a few other Republicans understand that business needs to have a runway to be able to make good decisions,” Evans, who voted for the final bill, told CNN. “My district truly is an all-of-the-above energy district, and so I fight for policies that promote all of the above.”

White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said utility bill rate hikes have mostly plagued Democratic states; even though federal data show consumers in several GOP-led states including Georgia, Ohio and Indiana have also seen stark increases in their bills.

“Fixing Joe Biden’s energy crisis has been a priority for President Trump since day one, and lowering energy costs for American families and businesses will continue to be a top priority in the new year,” Rogers said in a statement.

Some Republicans have seen the impacts firsthand of how their party’s policies and rhetoric around this issue have backfired.

GOP Rep. Jeff Van Drew, whose coastal New Jersey district has seen some of the largest utility bill price hikes in the nation, has been raising alarm bells within his own party since the Republican in the New Jersey governor’s race, Jack Ciattarelli, lost to Democratic Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill in a campaign where Sherrill campaigned heavily on the issue of energy affordability.

New Jersey saw the second biggest jump in electricity rates in the nation last year, behind only the District of Columbia. And as Sherrill vowed to bring down electricity prices, Van Drew’s team repeatedly warned Ciattarelli’s camp to redirect their focus back to why people’s utility bills were going up instead of focusing on Sherrill’s service in the Navy or stock trading practices while serving as a member of Congress.

Van Drew says his advice went unanswered. Ciattarelli lost the race by 14 points.

“It’s way too expensive to live here. I got to give it to [the Democrats], they stole the issue from the Republicans. The Republicans should have won on this issue. They didn’t do their job. It was a bad campaign on their part,” Van Drew told CNN.

Through conversations with President Donald Trump and House GOP leadership, Van Drew has been pushing his party to crystalize its message that Republicans inherited the energy affordability issue but are going to fix it.

But the New Jersey Republican admitted that messaging strategy comes with hurdles.

“Whenever you have to explain, it’s a problem,” Van Drew said.

‘Prices are just going to keep going up’

At the direction of Trump, the party has pivoted away from clean energy sources like solar and wind. In addition to the hit renewables took in Congress this year, the Trump administration has thrown up multiple roadblocks to make wind and solar projects more difficult to build.

The permitting reform legislation expected to get a final vote this week – titled the SPEED Act – would amend a landmark environmental law to make it easier to build oil and gas pipelines and large inter-state power lines carrying electricity from one part of the country to another.

“If we don’t start building more, the prices are just going to keep going up,” GOP Rep. Bruce Westerman, who chairs the House Natural Resources panel and is sponsoring the legislation, told CNN.

One of the sticking points on Tuesday was that a small group of Republicans did not want offshore wind projects to be given a fast-track permitting process without the ability for the Trump administration to intervene.

But even with cutting regulatory red tape through legislation, those infrastructure projects will still take years and cannot provide immediate relief to people who are suddenly seeing their utility bills doubling. And Westerman’s bill doesn’t address the need for more power generation – the renewables, gas or nuclear plants that actually generate electricity.

In the short term, even more sticker shock is on the way for everyday Americans.

“Republicans are worried right now, but if they think this is bad, just wait until next year,” Deveny said. “We have a line of sight to further increases in electricity prices. You can see it in utility rate filings; it’s coming.”

Soaring electricity and heating bill prices are an increasingly large part of American’s affordability woes.

Charles Hua, founder and executive director of consumer group PowerLines, frequently says electricity prices “are the new eggs.” Hua told CNN he has watched this year as electricity affordability went from a niche issue to a full-blown political one – helping drive Democratic wins in Virginia, New Jersey and Georgia.

“This issue is traveling at warp speed,” Hua said.

And Democrats are continuing to seize on the issue. Democratic Rep. Sean Casten of Illinois is a main co-sponsor of the Cheap Energy Act, which would restore clean energy tax credits, put guardrails around data center development to ensure companies are paying for the electricity they use, and provide energy assistance to millions of households who face electricity and gas shutoffs as their bills mount. Casten said he wanted to put forward a proactive plan for how Democrats would seek to lower bills, to give candidates something to run on.

“Inflation in the last election hurt Biden and the Democrats. Inflation in this election is hurting the Republicans,” Casten said. “It causes elections to swing, but it’s important for us to not just assume we’re going to win because (voters) don’t like what the other side is doing. We need an affirmative view of what to do.”

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