All of Pennsylvania is counting on in-person voters

Pennsylvania is the birthplace of the oil industry, and to this day oil and natural gas remain crucial to our economic well being, particularly in the western half of the Commonwealth.

After the second and final presidential debate, during which Democrat nominee Joe Biden openly admitted that he plans to abolish the oil industry, there are undoubtedly many Pennsylvanians who had already cast mail-in ballots and now fervently wish they could change their vote.

For their sake — and for the sake of our friends, family, neighbors and future generations of Pennsylvanians — it’s urgently important that all of us who declined the opportunity to vote by mail make absolutely certain that we show up to cast our votes in person on Nov. 3.

There are thousands of oil wells and tens of thousands of natural gas drilling operations scattered across Western Pennsylvania. If you plot them out on a map, they cover practically everything west and north of the line running from Altoona through State College to Scranton. Tens of thousands of Pennsylvanians are directly employed by these operations — and they earn a very good living in the process — but that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the oil and gas industry’s economic contributions to the Commonwealth.

Prior to the last presidential debate, Biden was doing everything he could to walk back his previous support for a ban on fracking, insisting that he would only ban fracking on federal lands, and would be open to allowing fracking operations to continue elsewhere as long as they met a list of vague environmental criteria. Now that he has acknowledged his intention to get rid of the oil industry as part of his push to eliminate fossil fuels altogether, it’s obvious that his conciliatory rhetoric toward fracking was just election year lip service.

The threat a Biden-Harris administration would pose to Pennsylvania’s economy won’t be limited to those who work directly in the oil and gas industries — they’ll just be the first ones on the chopping block. A fracking ban by itself would cost more than 600,000 Pennsylvania jobs over the course of just four years, and that figure would rise significantly higher if a ban on oil production were factored in.

Beyond the jobs that are supported directly and indirectly by the oil and gas industry, Biden’s bans would also have a devastating impact on households throughout Pennsylvania, roughly half of which rely on natural gas for heating. Lower gas prices created by Pennsylvania’s energy boom save the average consumer about $1,200 per year on their home heating bills, which for many families can be the difference between being able to save money for a rainy day and having to run up credit card debt just to meet ordinary living expenses.

For some additional context, $1,200 per year is about the same amount that the average Pennsylvania taxpayer saves on their federal income taxes thanks to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 — the “Trump tax cuts” that Biden has vowed to eliminate even faster than oil and gas jobs.

Pennsylvania’s future is at stake on Nov. 3. If you’re eligible to cast your ballot in person on Election Day, make sure you do so — the entire Commonwealth is counting on you.