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(AP) — Opponents of offshore wind energy projects expect President-elect Donald Trump to kill an industry he has vowed to end on the first day he returns to the White House.
But it might not be that easy.
Many of the largest offshore wind companies put a brave face on the election results, pledging to work with Trump and Congress to build power projects and ignoring the incoming president’s oft-stated hostility to them.
In campaign appearances, Trump railed against offshore wind and promised to sign an executive order to block such projects.
“We are going to make sure that that ends on Day 1,” Trump said in a May speech. “I’m going to write it out in an executive order. It’s going to end on Day 1.”
“They destroy everything, they’re horrible, the most expensive energy there is,” Trump said. “They ruin the environment, they kill the birds, they kill the whales.”
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Trump has railed against offshore wind turbines spoiling the view from a golf course he owns in Scotland. But numerous environmental groups say the real reason he opposes offshore wind is his support for the fossil fuel industry.
There is almost 65 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity under development in the U.S., enough to power more than 26 million homes, and some turbines are already spinning in several states, according to the American Clean Power Association.
Currently operating projects include the Block Island Wind Farm in Rhode Island, the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind pilot project and the South Fork Wind Farm about 35 miles (56 kilometers) east of Montauk Point on New York’s Long Island.
Trump is unlikely to end those projects but might have more leverage over ones still in the planning stage, those in the debate say.
Bob Stern, who headed an office in the U.S. Energy Department responsible for environmental protection during the Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations, said Trump can get Congress to reduce or eliminate tax credits for offshore wind that were granted in the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act. Those credits are an integral part of the finances of many offshore wind projects.
Stern, who leads the New Jersey anti-offshore wind group Save LBI, said Trump also could issue executive orders prohibiting further offshore leases and rescinding approval for ones already approved while pushing Congress to amend federal laws granting more protection for marine mammals.
The president-elect also can appoint leaders of agencies involved in offshore wind regulation who would be hostile to it or less supportive.
Opponents of offshore wind, many of them Republicans, were giddy following the election, saying they fully expect Trump to put an end to the industry.
“I believe this is a tipping point for the offshore wind industry in America,” said Robin Shaffer, president of Protect Our Coast NJ, one of the most vocal groups opposing offshore wind on the East Coast. “They have been given a glidepath by Democrat-run administrations at the federal and state level for many years. For this industry, (Tuesday’s) results will bring headwinds far greater than they have faced previously.”
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“Offshore wind might appear to be on the chopping block — Trump’s explicitly said this was something he’d fix on the first day — but when the economics of offshore wind are in alignment with his overall strategies of returning manufacturing to America and becoming energy-independent, his administration is likely to back away slowly from this claim,” she said in an interview. “Offshore wind may be temporarily hampered, but its long-term prospects in the U.S. are unlikely to be hurt.”
Commercial fishermen in Maine said they hope the Trump administration will undo policies designed to help build and approve offshore wind projects, saying regulators attempted to “future-proof” the industry against political change. Jerry Leeman, CEO of the New England Fishermen’s Stewardship Association, called on Trump to reverse a commitment to deploy 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030.
The offshore wind industry is taking an optimistic stance, pledging to work with Trump his political allies. National and New Jersey wind industry groups, and several offshore wind developers including Atlantic Shores and Denmark-based Orsted, issued similarly worded statements highlighting terms likely to appeal to Republicans including job creation, economic development and national security.
“By combining the strengths of all domestic energy resources, the Trump administration can advance an economy that is dynamic, secure, and clean,” Jason Grumet, CEO of the American Clean Power Association, said in a statement. “We are committed to working with the Trump-Vance administration and the new Congress to continue this great American success story.”
But few Republicans were in a welcoming mood following the election. New Jersey Assemblyman Paul Kanitra listed the major offshore wind companies in a Facebook post, saying, “It’s time to pack your bags and get the hell away from the Jersey Shore, our marine life, fishing industry and beautiful beaches.”
Kanitra said he was looking forward “to your stock prices tanking.” And that was starting to happen.
The stock prices of European offshore wind companies, many of which are planning or building projects on the U.S. East Coast, plunged amid fears the new administration would seek to slow or end such projects. Orsted closed down nearly 14% on Wednesday and was down 11% over the past five days. Turbine manufacturer Vestas Wind Systems was down nearly 24% over that same period.
Rep. Jeff Van Drew, a New Jersey Republican, hosted Trump at a rally earlier this year at which Trump again vowed to kill offshore wind.
“We are currently working out the specifics of what that will look like once he takes office again this January,” VanDrew said. “President Trump is a good friend of New Jersey, and he understands the devastating impact these projects will have on our communities.”
Fed up with high prices and unimpressed with an economy that by just about any measure is a healthy one, Americans demanded change when they voted for president.
They could get it.
President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to topple many of the Biden administration’s economic policies. Trump campaigned on promises to impose huge tariffs on foreign goods, slash taxes on individuals and businesses and deport millions of undocumented immigrants working in the United States.
With their votes, tens of millions of Americans expressed their confidence that Trump can restore the low prices and economic stability they recall from his first term — at least until the COVID-19 recession of 2020 paralyzed the economy and then a powerful recovery sent inflation soaring. Inflation has since plummeted and is nearly back to normal. Yet Americans are frustrated over still-high prices.
“His track record proved to be, on balance, positive, and people look back now and think: ‘Oh, OK. Let’s try that again,’ ” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former White House economic adviser, director of the Congressional Budget Office and now president of the conservative American Action Forum think tank.
Since Election Day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has skyrocketed more than 1,700 points, largely on expectations that tax cuts and a broad loosening of regulations will accelerate economic growth and swell corporate profits.
Maybe they will. Yet many economists warn that Trump’s plans are likely to worsen the inflation he’s vowed to eradicate, drive up the federal debt and eventually slow growth.
Trump policies could boost inflation
The Peterson Institute for International Economics, a leading think tank, has estimated that Trump’s policies would slash the U.S. gross domestic product — the total output of goods and services — by between $1.5 trillion and $6.4 trillion through 2028. Peterson also estimated that Trump’s proposals would drive prices sharply higher within two years: Inflation, which would otherwise come in at 1.9% in 2026, would instead jump to between 6% and 9.3% if Trump’s policies were enacted in full.
Last month, 23 Nobel-winning economists signed a letter warning that a Trump administration “will lead to higher prices, larger deficits, and greater inequality.”
“Among the most important determinants of economic success,” they wrote, “are the rule of law and economic and political certainty, and Trump threatens all of these.’’
Trump is inheriting an economy that, despite frustratingly high prices, looks fundamentally strong. Growth came in at a healthy 2.8% annual rate from July through September. Unemployment is 4.1% — quite low by historic standards.
Among wealthy countries, only Spain will experience faster growth this year, according to the International Monetary Fund’s forecast. The United States is the economic “envy of the world,” the Economist magazine recently declared.
The Federal Reserve is so confident that U.S. inflation is slowing toward its 2% target that it cut its benchmark rate in September and again this week.
Americans are deeply unhappy with prices
Consumers, though, still bear the scars of the inflationary surge. Prices on average are still 19% higher than they were before inflation began to accelerate in 2021. Grocery bills and rent hikes are still causing hardships, especially for lower-income households. Though inflation-adjusted hourly wages have risen for more than two years, they’re still below where they were before President Joe Biden took office.
Voters took their frustration to the polls. According to AP VoteCast, a sweeping survey of more than 120,000 voters nationwide, 3 in 10 voters said their family was “falling behind’’ financially, up from 2 in 10 in 2020. About 9 in 10 voters were at least somewhat worried about the cost of groceries, 8 in 10 about the cost of healthcare, housing or gasoline.
“I don’t think it’s either deep or complicated,’’ Holtz-Eakin said. “The real problem is the Biden-Harris team made people worse off, and they were very angry about it, and we saw the result.’’
The irony is that mainstream economists fear Trump’s remedies will make price levels worse, not better.
Tariffs are a tax on consumers
The centerpiece of Trump’s economic agenda is taxing imports. It’s an approach that he asserts will shrink America’s trade deficits and force other countries to grant concessions to the United States. In his first term, he increased tariffs on Chinese goods, and he’s now promised much more of the same: Trump wants to raise tariffs on Chinese goods to 60% and impose a “universal’’ tax of 10% or 20% on all other imports.
Trump insists that other countries pay tariffs. In fact, American companies pay them — and then typically pass along their higher costs to their customers via higher prices. Which is why taxing imports is normally inflationary. Worse, other countries usually retaliate with tariffs on American goods, thereby hurting U.S. exporters.
Kimberly Clausing and Mary Lovely of the Peterson Institute have calculated that Trump’s proposed 60% tax on Chinese imports and his high-end 20% tariff on everything else would impose an after-tax loss on a typical American household of $2,600 annually.
The economic damage would likely spread globally. Researchers at Capital Economics have calculated that a 10% U.S. tariff would hurt Mexico hardest. Germany and China would also suffer. All of that depends, of course, on whether he actually does what he said during the campaign.
Deportations would rattle the US job market
Trump has threatened to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, potentially undermining one of the factors that allowed the United States to tame inflation without falling into recession.
The Congressional Budget Office reported that net immigration — arrivals minus departures — reached 3.3 million in 2023. Employers needed the new arrivals. After the economy rebounded from the pandemic recession, companies struggled to hire enough workers, especially because so many native-born baby boomers were retiring.
Immigrants filled the gap. Over the past four years, 73% of those who entered the labor force were foreign born.
Economists Wendy Edelberg and Tara Watson of the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project found that by raising the supply of workers, the influx of immigrants allowed the United States to generate jobs without overheating and accelerating inflation.
The Peterson Institute calculates that the deportation of all 8.3 million immigrants believed to be working illegally in the United States would slash U.S. GDP by $5.1 trillion and raise inflation by 9.1 percentage points by 2028
Big tax cuts could swell the federal deficit
Trump has proposed extending 2017 tax cuts for individuals that were set to expire after 2025 and restoring tax breaks for businesses that were being reduced. He’s also called for ending taxes on Social Security benefits, overtime pay and tips as well as further reducing the corporate income tax rate for U.S. manufacturers.
The University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Wharton Budget Model estimates that Trump’s tax policies would i ncrease budget deficits by $5.8 trillion over 10 years. Even if the tax cuts generated enough growth to recoup some of the lost tax revenue, Penn Wharton calculated, deficits would still increase by more than $4.1 trillion from 2025 through 2034.
The federal budget is already out of balance. An aging population has required increased spending on Social Security and Medicare. And past tax cuts have shrunk government revenue.
Holtz-Eakin said he worries that Trump has little appetite for taking the steps — cuts to Social Security and Medicare, tax increases or some combination — needed to bring the federal budget meaningfully closer to balance.
“It’s not going to happen,” Holtz-Eakin said.
From Pennsylvania to Florida to Texas, areas with high numbers of Hispanics often had little in common on Election Day other than backing Republican Donald Trump over Democrat Kamala Harris for president.
Trump, the president-elect, made inroads in heavily Puerto Rican areas of eastern Pennsylvania where the vice president spent the last full day of her campaign. Trump turned South Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, a decadeslong Democratic stronghold populated both by newer immigrants and Tejanos who trace their roots in the state for several generations.
He also improved his standing with Hispanic voters along Florida’s Interstate 4 corridor linking the Tampa Bay area — home to people of Cuban, Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, Colombian and Puerto Rican origin — with Orlando, where Puerto Ricans make up about 43% of the local Hispanic population. Trump was the first Republican since 1988 to win Miami-Dade County, home to a sizable Cuban population and the country’s metropolitan area with the highest share of immigrants.
It was a realignment that, if it sticks, could change American politics.
Texas and Florida are already reliably Republican, but more Hispanics turning away from Democrats in future presidential races could further dent the party’s “blue wall” of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, that had helped catapult it to the White House before Trump romped through all three this time. The shift might even make it harder for Democrats to win in the West, in states such as Arizona and Nevada.
Harris tried to highlight the ways Trump may have insulted or threatened Latinos.
Trump, in his first term, curtailed the use of Temporary Protected Status, which Democratic President Joe Biden extended to thousands of Venezuelans, and tried to terminate the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. He also delayed the release of relief aid to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria in 2017 until nearly the end of his term, having long blasted the island’s officials as corrupt and inept.
Once he returns to the White House, Trump has pledge to stage the largest deportation operation in U.S. history. That could affect millions of families in mixed-status homes, where people who are in the United States illegally live with American citizens or those with legal residency.
But the Democratic warnings did not appear to break through with enough voters for Harris. Now the party must figure out how to win back votes from a critical, fast-growing group.
“Trump, he’s a very confounding figure,” said Abel Prado, a Democratic operative and pollster who serves as executive director of the advocacy group Cambio Texas. “We have no idea how to organize against him. We have no idea how to respond. We have no idea how to not take the bait.”
Ultimately, concerns about immigration did not resonate as much as pocketbook issues with many Hispanics.
About 7 in 10 Hispanic voters were “very concerned” about the cost of food and groceries, slightly more than about two-thirds of voters overall, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters nationwide. Nearly two-thirds of Hispanic voters said that they were “very concerned” about their housing costs, compared with about half of voters overall.
Trump had a clear edge among Hispanic voters who were “very concerned” about the cost of food. Half said he would better handle the economy, compared with about 4 in 10 for Harris. Among Hispanic voters who were very worried about crime in their community, Trump had a similar advantage.
“When they looked at both candidates, they saw who could improve our economy and the quality of life,” said Marcela Diaz-Myers, a Colombian immigrant who headed a Hispanic outreach task force for the Pennsylvania Republican Party. “Did he sometimes offend? Yes. But that happens in political campaigns. Many of the people who voted for President Trump were able to get past this and trust that he will move the country in the right direction.”
Harris promised to lower grocery prices by cracking down on corporate price gouging and to increase federal funding for first-time homebuyers. Also, recent violent crime rates have declined in many parts of the country.
Shen also spent many of the final days of the campaign trying to capitalize on remarks by a comic who spoke at a Trump rally in New York and joked that Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage.” She even leaned on Puerto Rican celebrities — from Bad Bunny to Jennifer Lopez — to decry racism.
But Trump nonetheless gained ground in some of the areas with the highest concentration of Puerto Ricans in Pennsylvania, the state where Harris spent more time campaigning than any other. He won the counties of Berks, Monroe and Luzerne — and lost Lehigh County by fewer than 5,000 votes against Harris. Biden had carried it by nearly three times that margin in 2020.
Trump’s victory was even wider in Florida, where nearly one-quarter of residents are Hispanic. He won the state by 13 percentage points — or about four times his 2020 margin.
Trump also flipped the central Florida counties of Seminole and Osceola, where many Venezuelans have immigrated as their home country becomes increasingly unstable, and narrowed Democrats’ advantage in Orange County, which is also heavily Venezuelan.
Farther south, Trump won Miami-Dade County with an 11-percentage point advantage after losing it by 7 percentage points to Biden and by 30 percentage points to Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Kevin Marino Cabrera, a Miami-Dade County commissioner who was state director for Trump’s 2020 campaign, said Hispanics rejected the “woke ideology.” Trump has made his opposition to transgender rights central to his campaign.
“To be clear, Hispanic voters are not buying what Democrats are selling,” Cabrera said.
The same was true in South Texas, where Hispanics are largely of Mexican descent.
Prado, the Democratic operative and pollster, lives in Hidalgo County, which is 92% Hispanic and the most populous part of the Rio Grande Valley. Trump carried it after losing by more than 40 percentage points in 2016. Trump swept all the major counties along the Texas-Mexico border.
Prado said Democratic county commissioners and state legislators helped secure funding for new bridges across the Texas-Mexico border and for other initiatives that have sparked commerce and economic and job growth in the area. Yet, he said, “the Republican Party has done a really good job of inserting themselves as an answer to nonexistent problems and then taking credit for (things) that they didn’t do.”
Prado said many Hispanics in the Rio Grande Valley, particularly devoutly religious ones, were alienated by national Democrats’ focus on reproductive and transgender rights, with the latter becoming a key political weapon for Republicans.
“This nonsense about you’re going to send your son to school and he’s gonna come back a girl,” he said. “Our side scoffed because we said, ‘No one’s going to believe that.’ But, no, it struck a chord.”
Others were simply looking to cast a defiant vote, Prado said, or were inspired by the idea of self-made people embracing the American dream, even though Trump got his start in business with a large loan from his father.
Daniel Alegre, CEO of TelevisaUnivision, which owns the Spanish-language television Univision, along with other television and radio properties, said Trump’s gain among Hispanics was less about party than issues and that Hispanics were most concerned about the economy and immigration.
Alegre, whose network hosted town halls in October with both Trump and Harris, also noted that there’s a growing feeling among Hispanic citizens that new immigrants were getting more government services than were available when immigrants who have been here longer arrived in the United States — and that the Trump campaign tapped into resentment around that issue.
“The most important thing either party can do is keep their ears to the ground and stay connected to the community,” he said, and in this case, the Trump campaign clearly accomplished that.