Economists confirm what everyone already knew: Democrats buy electric vehicles
Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s political move to the right is likely alienating his core customer base.
Political ideology plays a major role in Americans’ decisions to buy electric vehicles, a new NBER working paper that sifted through county-level vehicle registration data found. That’s the case even after controlling for other contributing factors like a state’s zero-emission vehicle benefits, household income, availability of charging stations, population density, and electricity prices.
The trend has remained remarkably consistent and enduring even as Democratic approval of EV poster child Tesla has slipped drastically, along with its sales.
“ I’m a little bit surprised that this pattern shows up in the data and so clearly and persistently even after we throw all demographic controls that we can think of at it,” Jing Li, assistant professor of economics at Tufts University and one of the report’s authors, told Sherwood News. Li added that the correlation didn’t change much between 2012 and 2023, the years covered in the data, as more people adopted EVs.
About half of all electric vehicle registrations in the US occurred in the top 10% most Democratic counties in the US in the past decade, the research found. In other words, Democrats buy electric vehicles, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s move to the right probably hasn’t been doing his company any favors.
It’s perhaps an obvious finding, but an important one for Tesla, which makes the vast majority of its revenue from EV sales in the US. Overall, EV sales continue to grow in the US, despite declines in Tesla sales.
This research adds to the bevy of survey data on the topic from the likes of Gallup and the EV Politics Project.
Li added that car companies themselves are very aware of where their cars are sold and what buyers’ demographics look like. “Every automaker would know where their sales numbers are and could do something like what we are doing much more quickly than we could,” she said.
Of course, Musk has long been trying to pivot his company’s value proposition away from that of a mere car company. Most recently Musk said, “The value of the company is delivering sustainable abundance with our affordable AI-powered robots.”
