THE GND IS TOO CONSERVATIVE:

There's a weird kind of magnet force that draws journalists to look for laid-off gas workers or struggling small barkeepers in quaint rural burgs while ignoring the densely populated, un-quaint suburbs that are voting for politicians like Chester County state Rep. Danielle Friel Otten, who made opposition to the Mariner East pipeline the centerpiece of her 2018 upset win and who recently told a journalist that "the pipeline project is an example of how our constitutional rights, like health and safety, have been chipped away."

No wonder, then, that the conventional wisdom is so wrong, and so I'm going to state clearly what the TV pundits refuse to grasp -- perhaps, to quote the great Upton Sinclair, because "his salary depends on not understanding it."

A majority of Pennsylvanians oppose fracking. Period, full stop.

A recent CBS statewide poll, taken in August, found that 52% of commonwealth residents oppose fracking -- the modern drilling practice that uses high-pressure water to blast out oil or (for the most part in Pennsylvania) natural gas that's trapped deep in rock formations like the Marcellus shale bed. And that wasn't a fluke. Back in January, a Franklin and Marshall College poll found that 48% of Pennsylvanians backed a straight-up ban on fracking -- a more radical step than even Biden or many establishment Democrats are willing to take right now -- while only 39% opposed such a move. And that survey was taken before the latest summer onslaught of West Coast wildfires and Gulf Coast hurricanes reminded folks that climate change -- heavily caused by pollution from fossil fuels -- is already wreaking widespread havoc.

Indeed, widen your lens and you'll see that most voters across America don't find Biden's comments about transitioning away from oil as radical, but as reality in the face of climate change and rapid advances in cleaner energy such as wind and solar. A Politico/Morning Consult poll taken right after Thursday's debate found an overwhelming 57% of Americans -- even 41% of Republicans -- strongly or somewhat support transitioning from oil to renewable energy. Biden's much-discussed remark was in fact what the politics geeks call "a Kinsley gaffe," when a comment isn't a mistake at all but a possibly uncomfortable truth. In this case, though, it's only uncomfortable because of journalists whose heads are still buried in the long gas lines of the 1970s.

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