DON’T GET COCKY: ‘Now They’re Voting Red’: A Pennsylvania Fracking Boom Weighs on Biden’s Re-Election Chances.

The area’s reliance on energy jobs helps explain why Democrats look to be losing more voters than they have gained here despite a Biden agenda that’s pumping billions of dollars into infrastructure and manufacturing.

“Everyone here is aware that it’s better for oil and gas if Republicans get elected,” said Adam Kress, who works with Sabo in Zelienople, 30 miles north of Pittsburgh.

There is little sign that Biden can regain substantial support in seven largely working-class and rural counties that surround the city, every one of which produced a larger vote margin for Trump in 2020 than in 2016. The resistance to Biden’s energy policies is making it harder for the incumbent to stop his party’s decline among noncollege voters there, forcing the party to wring more votes out of a Democratic base elsewhere that, so far, seems dispirited.

They have good reason to be.