It’s a new day here in Pennsylvania, where folks waking up eagerly check the internet to see how the frackers did last night, where the ideal weekend getaway is a quaint mountain bed-and-breakfast animated by the constant whine of natural gas wells, and where contented people have been known to blurt out, “I love the smell of tert-Butylthiol in the morning!”

OK, that’s not actually the Keystone State I’ve come to know and love since I moved here 35 years ago (where the number one fall issue among voters is probably Bryce Harper’s banged-up body), but that is the portrait of Pennsylvania someone who lives in Oregon or Oklahoma might get from watching too much cable TV news, where political pundits insist our love for unconventional extraction of fossil fuels is more powerful than our desire for cheesesteaks.

Fracking—which was more of a hot-button issue back in the 2010s—is back in the news with the sudden arrival of U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic presidential nominee. Harris had said in 2019—while appealing to left-wing Democrats as a 2020 White House hopeful—that she opposed fracking before changing her position when she joined President Joe Biden’s ticket. According to the TV talking heads, even that brief flirtation with opposing Pennsylvania’s most beloved gas-drilling process might cause her to lose the commonwealth to former President Donald Trump in November.

Maybe a good question for Harris at Tuesday’s make-or-break debate here in Philadelphia would be not to yet again ask her why she briefly opposed fracking in 2019, but to prod her on how she can support it now when little kids are getting cancer.

After Harris’ widely publicized CNN interview last month, host Abby Phillips questioned whether the fracking issue even matters much “except in Pennsylvania”—echoing comments I’ve heard on CNN and MSNBC probably a dozen times that the Democrats must pledge allegiance to the fracking gods to have any hope of winning our 19 electoral votes.

None of them really know what they’re talking about.

Here’s the truth from someone who actually lives in Pennsylvania. Most folks, especially in areas like Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and their suburbs where many voters reside, don’t really talk about fracking—certainly not as much as the big issues like the economy or abortion rights. And when we do discuss it, many Pennsylvanians—perhaps even a majority—oppose fracking, because we don’t want to prolong the climate destruction of fossil fuels, or because folks who live near these fracking pads are sick of the smell, the noise, and the threat to their health.

A 2021 poll commissioned by the pro-sustainability Ohio River Valley Institute (ORVI) found just 31% of Pennsylvanians support continued fracking here, and that a majority want the process to end either immediately (25%) or see it phased out over time (30%). Other surveys show the state more evenly divided, but unfettered support for unconventional gas drilling doesn’t top 50%. One reason for the split is that the economic benefits to Pennsylvania that are cited again and again by TV pundits just haven’t materialized outside of just one or two of the state’s 67 counties. A series of studies have shown that fracking is not a major job category here, that the number of new hires has never matched the industry’s overblown promises, and that counties with fracking activity have mostly underperformed the state and national economy.

“I find the whole discussion”—around fracking—“pretty deeply frustrating,” Sean O’Leary, a senior researcher for ORVI, told me this week. “I think most Pennsylvanians are at best ambivalent about fracking as a technology.” And he thinks a fair amount of the public support for fracking is reinforced by politicians—including Democrats like Gov. Josh Shapiro—constantly overstating the economic rewards.

This means that when it comes to the presidential race, the so-called experts are getting the issue completely bass-ackward. Think about it: The voters who see fossil fuels as a gift from God and nod along to Republicans’ “Drill, baby, drill” chants are in Trump’s back pocket already. But Harris’ resolute endorsement of fracking—minus a more concrete plan to end America’s addiction to oil and gas—could slow her momentum with young........

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