Trump’s War on Wind Energy Is Costing Him Blue-Collar Support

President Donald Trump built his 2024 campaign around the country’s working-class voters.

Some of those voters are changing their minds about him as his administration’s war on renewable energy has cost them their jobs, labor leaders and workers said.

“A lot of my members voted for President Trump in the last election, and they completely turned around on him,” Patrick Crowley, the president of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO, told NOTUS.

His union represents thousands of workers who work on renewable energy projects like Revolution Wind, the offshore wind development the Trump administration halted in August and then again in December. The project resumed construction last month after a federal judge ruled in its favor, but the impacts remain, Crowley said.

The Trump administration’s sweeping attempts to stymie energy projects and other infrastructure have impacted thousands of jobs.

Revolution Wind is one of many infrastructure projects the administration has paused, canceled or defunded. The list includes onshore and offshore wind farms, massive public works projects like the Hudson Tunnel in New York and New Jersey and billions of dollars in energy projects.

The exact impact on jobs is difficult to measure, but estimates for each project range from hundreds to thousands of direct and indirect construction, manufacturing and other labor jobs lost or threatened, according to court filings, company statements and NOTUS’ conversations with lawmakers and labor leaders.

It’s an upheaval that could cost the president’s allies at the ballot box in 2026 and beyond.

“When a family is feeling like that, they’re looking for somebody to blame and they could look at the president and say, well, he canceled the project that was employing me because he didn’t like it was solar,” Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito told Politico. “And yes, that could cost you at the ballot box.”

Crowley said his union members haven’t felt heard.

When Department of Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer — who has stayed quiet about the administration’s stop-work orders on offshore wind and their effect on jobs — went to Rhode Island in August, Crowley told NOTUS his team reached out in an attempt to meet with her, but Chavez-DeRemer was not receptive.

“She didn’t want to,” he said. “The word we got back was ‘not my problem.’”The Department of Labor did not respond to NOTUS’ request for comment.

Nationally, the unions whose workers are involved in these energy projects have largely backed Democrats.

Locally, the political makeup of the unions is a different story. Trump’s campaigning successfully sparked a rightward shift among blue-collar Americans.

“Working people generally across the country get distracted by social issues,” said Mike Hellstrom, the vice president and eastern regional manager for the Laborers’ International Union of North America. “I like to say that because you have a good job, it gives you a lot of space to think about social issues and sometimes fixate on those issues.”

Now, Hellstrom told NOTUS, the calculus is changing. His union represents workers involved in the offshore wind sector on the East Coast and in the Hudson Tunnel project.

The Gateway Development Commission, the tunnel developer, said in a statement that the Trump administration’s decision to withhold more than $200 million in funds to date for the tunnel puts 1,000 jobs at risk immediately. An extended pause on the tunnel, which will cease work after Friday unless funds are reinstated, could kill up to 11,000 construction jobs and 95,000 long-term jobs, the developer said.

“Workers are feeling betrayed,” Hellstrom said. “They’re feeling bamboozled by somebody who promised to be somebody that would speak up for them.”

It’s a sentiment that has popped up time and time again — sometimes among union workers whose jobs haven’t been impacted by the administration’s policies so far.

“I’m a little bewildered by the Trump administration. You know, he ran on a couple things. He ran on jobs, manufacturing and steel,” said Jim Strong, the offshore wind sector assistant at United Steelworkers, which represents workers involved in a key manufacturing component of an offshore wind project off the coast of Maryland. “So when we see him coming out against offshore wind, and turn some of the roadblocks up specifically against us, it kind of goes against what he campaigned on.”

The administration has suggested it could revoke an existing permit for the Maryland project, which would put hundreds of jobs at risk, including 530 per year at the Sparrows Point Steel facility where United Steelworkers members would work.

Sean Cedenio, the president of Joint Council 62 of the Teamsters union, wrote in an opinion piece last year that the project would create “beneficial energy” and “good paying jobs.”

Nationally, Teamsters rank-and-file members overwhelmingly encouraged leadership to endorse Trump in 2024.

A group of largely Trump-supporting fishermen in New England, who use their fishing boats to do work on cables for the Revolution Wind project, were able to continue working even when Trump paused the project on national security grounds because their work fell under safety exemptions, said Gordon Videll, the founder and owner of a marine services company called Sea Services North America.

The company employs the fishermen and has a contract with Orsted, the Revolution Wind developer.

Videll said that most of the people he knows who worked on the offshore wind farm have other income to fall back on and that they may not change their voting behavior entirely. But there’s frustration emerging, he added.

“Most of our guys are Trump supporters,” he told NOTUS. “They weren’t interrupted in a meaningful way. There’s certainly frustration, because you want to know what’s happening. Everybody wants something to depend on. So there is frustration in that way.”

Some Republicans have taken notice. In a January 2026 letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a group of seven moderate Republican lawmakers asked for more information about what prompted a 90-day halt of five offshore wind projects along the East Coast — four of which have resumed construction after court orders.

Their letter also underscored the significant job losses that the stop-work orders could bring about.

“Pausing these projects also jeopardizes thousands of good-paying jobs for American workers who are building, maintaining, and operating these developments,” the letter said. “The industry supports a robust domestic supply chain across the United States, and halting construction will have negative economic consequences for districts far removed from where the projects are physically located.”