‘Bidenomics’ boosts blue-collar jobs and green energy. Do voters care?

Beside a highway, a single industrial building under construction spans several city blocks. Atop its flat roof, dozens of heating and cooling units sit like biscuits, neatly spaced on a sheet pan baking under the sun. The tree-lined site, which crawls with bulldozers and trucks, is visible from Interstate 75 as it cuts through the Appalachian foothills of northwest Georgia.

Once completed, this 786,000-square-foot building in Dalton will be at the heart of the largest solar-cell manufacturing facility in North America, capable of producing enough solar panels annually to power nearly 1.3 million homes. Hanwha Qcells, a South Korean company, already builds solar panels inside an adjacent plant that began operating in 2019. Another production facility is under construction in Cartersville, 30 miles south along I-75. 

All told, Qcells is investing $2.5 billion in Georgia. It’s among a slew of companies that have made Georgia an emerging hub for clean-tech manufacturing, including electric vehicles and the batteries that power them. Meeting part of America’s growing demand for electricity with solar and other renewable energy is essential to reducing emissions of heat-trapping gases. 

The same highway, I-75, connects Georgia to Detroit, the traditional automaking hub. Along the way, though, truckers must cross the Ohio River on a bridge known for accidents that is a notorious bottleneck for freight worth $1 billion that passes through daily. Built in 1963, the Brent Spence Bridge carries around 160,000 vehicles a day between Cincinnati, Ohio, and Covington, Kentucky, twice the number it was designed to carry. 

Dave Baker joined the Iron Workers union in Cincinnati in 1997. “I was told we were going to build a bridge,” he says. Politicians promised action. Planners drew designs. Nothing happened. And the Brent Spence Bridge became a symbol of partisan gridlock in Washington and a daily reminder of America’s decaying public infrastructure. 

Last year, federal funding was secured for a $3.6 billion replacement of the bridge and parts of its adjoining highways. Work is due to start this year, and Mr. Baker’s ironworkers will finally be put to work on a new bridge. “To say that it’s overdue is kind of an understatement,” he says. 

What links both projects – apart from I-75 – is legislation signed into law by President Joe Biden that provides hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies, loans, and grants for infrastructure, green-tech industries, and semiconductors. This gusher of public money is designed to unlock even larger flows of private capital so that the United States retains its competitive edge in manufacturing and its economy lifts more families into the middle class. 

President Biden has taken to branding his program “Bidenomics” and to contrasting it with what he calls the failure of “trickle-down” policy to spread wealth. In a speech in Chicago in June, he said public investment was essential to drive long-term growth, and he compared his infrastructure law to the Interstate Highway System built in the 1950s and 1960s. “Biden economics means the industries of the future are going to grow right here at home,” he said. 

While his branding may be premature, Mr. Biden’s agenda could prove transformative, both in nurturing new industries and, arguably as importantly, in breaking with decades of putting restraints on government and letting the market set the nation’s economic priorities. Under President Ronald Reagan, this orthodoxy – often called neoliberalism – prioritized free trade, limited government, and unfettered capital. It commanded fealty from Republicans and Democrats alike. To dissent was to be branded a big-government heretic who would imperil the money machine of capitalism. 

That makes the shift under Mr. Biden, a Democrat from the party’s center, all the more profound. 

While Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama largely adhered to the post-Reagan economic playbook, Mr. Biden has embraced a far more interventionist approach, says Gary Gerstle, an American historian at the University of Cambridge. “I think he has a sense that America is at an inflection point” – a point, he adds, where the “neoliberal economics of Clinton and Obama are no longer suitable ... for an America that needs a different and more ambitious agenda.” 

Jennifer Harris, who served for two years as senior director for international economics and labor on Mr. Biden’s National Security Council, calls his agenda “a revolution in economic ideas” that upends the neoliberal approach. “We’re living now in an experiment around industrial policy [and] the power of fiscal policy to solve what needs solving,” she says. 

The White House can point to early indicators that its experiment is working. From May 2022 to May 2023, private investment in industrial plants rose to $200 billion, triple the yearly average seen in the 2010s. Manufacturing employment has risen to nearly 13 million jobs, its highest level since 2008. Barely a week goes by without the announcement of a new clean energy project. 

Harder to gauge is whether voters will credit Mr. Biden for this activity and repay him and his party at election time. Infrastructure projects typically take years to complete. Many of the new factories are being built in conservative states like Georgia where Republican leaders lambaste the president and obscure the role his policy plays in attracting investments. And voters are still reeling from high inflation and the higher interest rates applied to reduce it. 

Even if Biden-backed projects provide concrete benefits, that may not be persuasive in a distrustful, polarized democracy, says Ted Strickland, a former Democratic governor of Ohio. “For some people, a road or a factory ... may move them in how they’re going to vote. But I think, unfortunately, for most people it’s going to be based on, are you on our team or the other team?” 

Mr. Biden is already campaigning on his economic policies and his belief in their power to improve people’s lives. His chance of winning a second term, and of making his transformations stick, may depend on how many voters share his belief that Bidenomics can deliver. 

It was January 2018, and Carl Campbell had a problem. 

It took the form of a 184-acre industrial park along I-75 on the outskirts of Dalton, Georgia, a town that for decades had grown wealthy making carpets for homeowners who expected wall-to-wall carpeting. After the housing bubble popped in 2007-08, putting hundreds of carpet-mill employees out of work, the county government drew up a diversification plan. It was time to roll out a welcome mat in the “Carpet Capital of the World” for other types of factories. 

As executive director of the Dalton-Whitfield County Joint Development Authority, Mr. Campbell had to find tenants for the industrial park, a former campground the county had purchased in 2010. Now, eight years on, there was nothing to show for its investment. Auto-industry suppliers and other manufacturers checked it out, and the site often made their shortlist. But they all chose to build factories elsewhere. Dalton was always the bridesmaid, never the bride, and Mr. Campbell and the county commissioners were feeling political pressure. 

But then, in January 2018, President Donald Trump – who in his inaugural address said “protection will lead to great prosperity and strength” – slapped tariffs of 30% on imports of solar cells, hitting producers in China and South Korea. Shortly after, Mr. Campbell heard that Qcells was looking for sites in Georgia.

By February, he was sitting down with representatives from the company, who told him they wanted a plant to be operational in a year. “They were on a really fast timeline,” Mr. Campbell says. 

The first Qcells factory opened on time in early 2019 and created 600 jobs, with entry-level wages starting at $15 per hour. This was above what Dalton’s carpet and flooring mills were paying, says Mr. Campbell. 

Landing Qcells didn’t quell the criticism, though. For one, the Korean firm received a 10-year tax abatement on its 480,000-square-foot plant, so the county was still in the red. And why should a solar company receive subsidies when carpet manufacturers employed far more workers, many residents wondered. 

“I’m not sure how you create wealth by giving money away to a foreign company,” says David Pennington, the Republican mayor of Dalton who ran for governor in 2014. 

This argument mirrors the wider debate about government intervention, from trade barriers to protect domestic producers to tax incentives for favored industries. To neoliberals, such policies distort the economy and put too much power in the hands of bureaucrats and politicians. 

“If you subsidize something, you get more of it. But I think you get too much of it, generally. And what you get is often not cost-effective,” says Donald Boudreaux, an economist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. 

Under President Biden, this debate has intensified. In 2021, he signed into law the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which includes financing for clean energy projects. This was followed in 2022 by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which offers at least $370 billion in subsidies for solar, wind, nuclear, and other low-emissions technology. Next came the CHIPS and Science Act that subsidizes new semiconductor plants, primarily in Texas, Arizona, and Ohio.

This Bidenomics legislation was largely opposed by Republicans. The IRA passed the House on a Democratic party-line vote. The infrastructure law, which was co-written by then-Sen. Rob Portman, a Republican from Ohio, had support from 19 Senate Republicans, but only 13 House GOP members. 

Among those opposed was Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right Republican who represents the district in which Dalton sits. She tweeted the names and telephone numbers of the 13 “traitors” who voted for the infrastructure bill. Some later reported receiving death threats over their vote. 

After the IRA became law, Qcells began negotiations to expand in Dalton. This time, the county struck a harder bargain: Tax relief would be capped at 50% over 10 years, with revenues earmarked for public schools. Hourly wages would start at $19 an hour, rising to $20 after a trial period. 

Qcells says the IRA’s clean-tech incentives are the reason it is expanding. Marta Stoepker, a Qcells spokesperson, says that state and local support in Georgia has been “really important,” but the IRA “gave us the market certainty we needed to make critical investments.” 

Like many Republicans, however, Jevin Jensen, chair of the county commission, is skeptical of Mr. Biden’s economic agenda. He gives the IRA little, if any, credit for Qcells’ expansion. “I think we would’ve closed the deal regardless,” he says.

What attracts manufacturers to Georgia isn’t just subsidies. Land and electricity prices are lower than in the Northeast and California, and Georgia offers easy access to ports and highways, like I-75.

Another factor is labor costs and union contracts. Georgia and other Southern states are “right-to-work” states with low unionization rates. Since the IRA was passed, Georgia has announced clean energy manufacturing projects worth almost $12 billion, more than any other state, in addition to preexisting commitments to build EV and battery factories. 

Some of these projects may be built using union labor. But Georgia has a unionization rate of 4.4%, compared with a national average of 10%. Qcells has no labor union in Dalton. 

Mr. Biden frequently talks about creating “good union jobs” in a decarbonized economy. “I promised to be the most pro-union president in history. And I tell business leaders all the time: Our union workers are the best in the world,” he said in Chicago. 

So far, though, the vast majority of clean-tech factories eligible for federal subsidies are located in Republican-run, right-to-work states that voted for Donald Trump in 2020. 

For Mr. Biden’s labor allies including the United Auto Workers, whose members launched a strike on Sept. 15, a subsidized stampede by manufacturers into states seen as hostile to unions is a source of tension. Under the IRA, enforcement of rules on labor standards lies with the Treasury Department, and the rules are still “a work in progress,” says Damon Silvers, a senior adviser to the president of the AFL-CIO, the federation of U.S. labor unions. 

“The statute is not as strong as it should be and this creates a very serious problem, which is the problem of some manufacturing companies wanting to take public money and then pay poverty-level wages and not respect workers’ legal rights,” he says.

This could have political implications for the president and his climate policies. “The only way that people are going to support this critical agenda is if it creates good jobs. If it creates bad jobs, the public will not, in the end, support it,” says Mr. Silvers. 

From another vantage point, though, a red-state boom in strategic industries is a political strategy, one that could keep Mr. Biden in power and extend his economic legacy. 

Take the computer chips that the U.S. imports from Asia. In Arizona, facilities planned or under construction by Intel, a U.S. chipmaker, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which dominates global production, represent a total investment of $60 billion. Meanwhile, Georgia is adding tens of thousands of jobs in EV plants and other clean-tech industries. Both states are presidential battlegrounds that Mr. Biden flipped in 2020. 

Professor Gerstle, the Cambridge historian, sees an “electoral strategy” salted into an industrial policy. “The macro strategy is to re-shore in America. The micro strategy is, which states do we target? And the Biden administration is clearly targeting red states with the hope of electoral payoffs.” 

But Mr. Biden insists that his economic programs are designed to benefit everyone, regardless of where they live or how they voted. “I promised to be a president for all Americans,” he said in June at the announcement of a $42 billion plan for broadband coverage under the infrastructure law. “We’re not going to leave anyone behind.”

“Look over there; that’s the lost Seventh Street.”

Brian Boland, an urban planning activist, is driving around Cincinnati’s west side, a drab wedge of warehouses and parking lots near downtown. This was once a thriving Black neighborhood. But catastrophic flooding in 1937 was followed by postwar highway building that displaced thousands of residents, clearing the way for I-75 and the superannuated Brent Spence Bridge. 

The reconfiguring of cities for transportation projects comes at a cost that has historically been borne by disadvantaged communities. In the 1950s, planners routed highways around and through majority-Black districts, creating physical barriers that reinforced racial segregation and divided communities. Homes, schools, and churches were bulldozed for highway construction. 

The infrastructure law signed by President Biden provides $1 billion for cities to reconnect cutoff neighborhoods, as a way to rectify this racist history. 

Mr. Boland has a proposal for using some of that money. His advocacy group, Bridge Forward, wants planners to shrink the Brent Spence Bridge project’s total footprint and reconnect Cincinnati’s west side via a new district built on reclaimed land over underground highways. “A quality urban neighborhood, safe and connected – that’s what people want,” he says. 

His vision isn’t shared by local business leaders who, after decades of waiting, are wary of costly redesigns that could hold up construction. Mr. Boland admits that his design would cost more, but he argues it would benefit Cincinnati residents. “We can make sure that everything we do going forward is inclusive and everyone gets a chance to get a share of prosperity,” he says. 

Across the river, the mayor of Covington, Joseph Meyer, can sympathize. He’s also trying to improve connectivity, while making sure highway planners don’t carve up more districts. So far, he’s happy with the design of the replacement bridge – the current bridge will be reconfigured for local traffic – and with the promise of noise barriers and storm sewers. 

Mr. Meyer, a Democrat, remembers vividly that neither President Obama nor President Trump succeeded in securing funding for a new bridge. “Biden came through when nobody else did,” says Mr. Meyer, a former state lawmaker. He “provided the national leadership to get it done.” 

As for political benefits, however, Elizabeth Mason-Hill, a paralegal who sometimes spends 45 minutes commuting 7 miles due to bridge traffic, doubts voters will express much gratitude. “Biden will definitely get credit from Democrats, but the Republicans here won’t give him any credit,” she says. 

Interstate 71 also crosses the river using the Brent Spence Bridge, linking Louisville, Kentucky, to Columbus and Cleveland, Ohio, where John Rockefeller began refining oil, the commodity that built the modern industrial economy. 

The digital economy runs on another commodity: semiconductors, or computer chips. Every electronic device and system runs on chips. They’re embedded in cars, phones, fridges, and credit cards, which is the reason shortages during the pandemic wreaked havoc on manufacturers. 

Just off I-71 outside Columbus, Intel broke ground last year on a sprawling $20 billion semiconductor facility with funding from the CHIPS act, a plank of Bidenomics that is as much about geopolitics and national security as it is about manufacturing jobs. Federal support for domestic production goes hand in hand with the Biden administration’s efforts to curb China’s ability to produce the advanced chips used by supercomputers for technologies like generative artificial intelligence. 

“The United States has to lead the world in producing these advanced chips – this law is going to make sure that it will,” Mr. Biden said in September 2022. 

That goal has broad support in Washington, where concern over China’s competitive edge in civilian and military technologies is top of mind. The bipartisan consensus on China is likely to safeguard the law, which passed the Senate in 2022 with 17 Republican votes, from any reversal by Congress under a future administration. 

But Mr. Biden’s broader agenda to build a low-emissions economy and to support made-in-America manufacturing may be more vulnerable, with its addition to the national debt making it an easy target. House Republicans have threatened to repeal his climate-related legislation. During debt limit negotiations in April, Speaker Kevin McCarthy proposed ending subsidies for producers of wind, solar, and other green technologies. 

Ms. Harris, the former Biden administration official, worries that his programs could be uprooted prematurely if he loses in 2024, allowing the Republicans to wrest back control. “These are early days for an experiment this massive through the entirety of the U.S. economy. You need at least a few years to see how it’s playing out,” she says. 

Mr. Biden’s policies poll well individually, with 65% in favor of expanded tax credits for installing solar panels, for example, according to a July poll. But the White House has struggled to gain credit. 

In April, Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to the Qcells factory in Dalton to announce the sale of 2.5 million solar panels that will be installed across the country. She also praised the company’s planned expansion and creation of 2,500 jobs in Georgia. Jan Pourquoi, a local Democrat who owns a carpet company, attended the event. Not a single GOP official showed up, he says. 

Mr. Pourquoi, a former Republican who left the party under Mr. Trump, doubts the Democrats’ ability to sell the president’s climate agenda in Georgia. “In the rural South, it’s a nonstarter. Green policies will not get Democrats one extra vote,” he says. 

What resonates with voters are cultural and social issues pushed by Representative Greene, the firebrand congresswoman. “That’s the news” in Dalton, he says. 

Ms. Greene, who took office in 2021, visited Qcells in Dalton in August and has voiced support for the company. “Those jobs were jobs in my district under the Trump administration,” she told Politico, while denying the IRA’s subsidies spurred Qcells’ expansion. 

That a solar panel factory has been built on the back of policies of Republican and Democratic administrations – tariffs imposed by Mr. Trump and legislation signed by Mr. Biden – suggests that the shift in economic thinking represented by Bidenomics may endure longer than his presidency.

Analysts say President Trump’s dismissal of the GOP’s free trade platform and his readiness to protect domestic industries – policies championed on the left by Sen. Bernie Sanders – have seeded an economic populism on the right. Unfettered markets and limited government are out. Industrial policy and economic nationalism are in. 

“There’s a different kind of thinking going on in parts of the Republican Party, which convinces me that this is not just the Democratic moment,” says Professor Gerstle. “It’s something bigger and deeper that both parties will be reckoning with over the next 10 or 15 years.”

To Professor Boudreaux, the economist, this rebuttal of neoliberalism is alarming. He worries that, far from unraveling Mr. Biden’s agenda, the new guard of Republicans may extend its lifespan because they no longer view industrial policy as a nonstarter. Classical economic liberals, as he calls himself, “are feeling pretty lonely at the moment,” he says. 

This debate on the right is reinforced by facts on the ground. Replacing the Brent Spence Bridge has a social and economic impact that goes beyond Cincinnati, says Rep. Greg Landsman, a Democrat who represents the city in Congress. A new bridge “will make a big difference for our region to continue to grow,” he says.

It also carries a political message at a time of frayed trust in government. “It’s a reason to believe that your government is functioning and will ultimately arrive and be supportive as we try to rebuild this democracy,” he adds.

Editor's note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene had not visited the Qcells facility in her district; she visited in August. The story has been updated.