Donald Trump has secured a second term as U.S. president riding a red tide on Nov. 5 that swept the White House and Senate into Republican hands.

Trump declared victory shortly after midnight, but election officials and pollsters waited until almost 5 a.m. CT to call the race. Several states were short of reporting 100%, but most were close enough for projections. Several seats in the House of Representatives were still in play but leaned Republican.

It takes 270 electoral votes to win the presidency. At daybreak, Trump counted 276 votes and Harris carried 219.

It’s a victory unlikely without the blessing of the oil and gas industry. Republican momentum took a sledgehammer to the so-called “blue wall” states, including a nail-biter in Pennsylvania, which is second only to Texas in natural gas production.

Both Trump and Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris had spent their crucial final hours of campaigning in Pennsylvania, a state important not only for its energy production but also for its 19 electoral votes.

Polling throughout the cycle has shown the Keystone State in a dead heat.

A foundation piece of the U.S. electoral blue wall, Pennsylvania is part of a set of states that have supported the Democratic nominee in every election since 1992 with one exception: in 2016, Pennsylvania was one of three blue-wall states that broke for Trump.

McKean, Warren, Forest and Venango counties in northern Pennsylvania are the state’s most prolific producers of crude. Trump carried those counties with double-digit leads over Harris.

Industry support for the former president was clear by the numbers. The sector contributed almost $23 million to the Trump campaign this year, according to OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan research group that tracks money in U.S. politics. Harris reported almost $2 million worth of oil and gas fundraising.

‘Frac-frac-frac’

As a candidate, Trump has routinely led his supporters in chants of ‘drill, baby, drill’ but he got creative during a town hall in Lancaster, Pennsylvania on Oct. 20, when he made like a duck, squawking “frac-frac-frac.”

Drawing a comparison between himself and Harris, he said, “We’re gonna let ‘em frac, frac, frac … like a duck … frac-frac-frac.”

A week later, Trump was back in Pennsylvania.

"Starting on Day One of my new administration, I will end Kamala Harris' war on Pennsylvania energy because you know she’s going to ban fracking,” he said during an Oct. 26 rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. "And we will frac, frac, frac."

Harris’ position has been more nuanced during her time on the national stage.

As a senator and candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2019, she was unequivocally opposed to oil and gas proliferation.

“There's no question I'm in favor of banning fracking," she said during a CNN town hall on climate change.

But her position softened by the time she signed on as Joe Biden’s running mate. And as the Democrats’ nominee, Harris has made some effort to rebrand her stance on oil and gas.

During the only presidential debate this year, Harris asserted that the Biden-Harris administration had orchestrated “the largest increase in domestic oil production in history because of an approach that recognizes that we cannot over rely on foreign oil.”

U.S. crude oil production averaged 12.9 million bbl/d in 2023, blowing past the previous record of 12.3 million bbl/d set in 2019 under Trump, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The U.S. average monthly oil production beginning in December 2023 set a record high at more than 13.3 million bbl/d.

This summer, Harris told CNN that her time as vice president offered new perspective on several pressing concerns, including U.S. energy policy.

“We have set goals for the United States of America and by extension, the globe, around when we should meet certain standards for reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, as an example. That value has not changed,” Harris said. “What I have seen is that we can grow, and we can increase a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking.”

As Texas goes, so goes the US Senate

Trump handily won Texas, which last supported a Democrat in the White House in 1976 with President Jimmy Carter.

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, was locked in a tight – and expensive – race against Democratic U.S. Rep. Colin Allred, but it was called relatively early in the hours after polling closed. 

No Republican has lost a statewide race in Texas since 1994. And Cruz in particular had something to prove after his last election in 2018, when he worked to beat back a grassroots campaign by Beto O’Rourke with a margin of 2.5%.

Cruz raised more than $84.8 million this year, with oil and gas contributing some $1.27 million toward his effort, according to OpenSecrets. Cruz was the top Senate recipient of the industry’s contributions.

Allred’s war chest for the cycle came in close to $79 million; oil and gas contributed $339,520.

During the weeks leading up to Nov. 5, Cruz had taken pains to link Allred to Harris as an opponent of the oil and gas industry.

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