Super PAC Targeting Conservatives Against Clean Energy Touts Fifth Republican Primary Win

Both President Donald Trump and a clean energy super PAC that backed Darline Graham, sister of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, are celebrating her victory over Rep. Ralph Norman in Tuesday’s South Carolina Republican Senate primary.

The Invest in Tomorrow Coalition (ITC), financed by solar entrepreneurs and Silicon Valley venture capitalists, spent $1 million on the race. This marks the second time the PAC has turned its fire against Norman, after helping quash his bid for governor earlier this summer.

The group has targeted specific Republican candidates that have supported efforts to roll back clean energy initiatives. It has spent heavily on television advertisements devoid of clean energy messaging, instead borrowing the language of the Republican right. 

In the lead-up to Tuesday’s race, the ads declared:

“Ralph Norman is a MAGA traitor.” 

“Trump doesn’t want him. Why would we?”

The PAC’s long-term goal is to change the psychology inside the Republican caucus when it comes to renewable energy. It wants to show members of Congress that, like the fossil fuel lobby, the clean energy industry can be politically “lethal.”

That calculus shapes the ITC’s tactics. 

“In a Republican primary, a candidate’s fidelity to Trump is one of the most important topics,” said Tom Matzzie, chief executive of the retail electricity supplier CleanChoice Energy and chair of the IITC. “If that is what works, that is what we are going to spend money on.”

So far, its focus has been on accountability over advocacy. 

“We certainly hope that Darline Graham will appreciate our support and consider it when contemplating her positions on future issues,” said Matzzie. “But what we are trying to do is create chatter amongst members of Congress, that Ralph Norman betrayed the industry and the industry held him accountable for it.” 

Norman was a former co-chair of the Congressional Solar Caucus, which he co-founded in 2018. But since 2024 he had been attempting to distance himself from his former role after Silfab Solar received a $5 million grant to set up shop in his district. The company went on to open a manufacturing plant loaded with hydrofluoric acid, explosive silane and other deadly chemicals, next to an elementary school, and became deeply unpopular in the community.

Last summer, Norman went further than most Republicans in seeking a repeal of Biden-era renewable energy tax credits. He withheld his vote for Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act until he secured a promise from the president to accelerate the phase-out of subsidies for wind and solar projects. 

Earlier this year, the ITC poured $2 million into the Republican primary in Tennessee’s 5th congressional district, helping former state Agriculture Commissioner Charlie Hatcher defeat Trump-backed incumbent Rep. Andy Ogles with similar tactics. It also helped defeat Texas Rep. Chip Roy in his runoff for state attorney general and supported Iowa Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks in her primary, even after she backed the One Big Beautiful Bill. 

Opposition to the bill is important, but it is not the unifying principle. 

Of the candidates the ITC opposed, Matzzie said, “these are candidates who went out of their way to be vindictive to the industry, demonizing our technologies as a scam or some sort of Chinese conspiracy.”

The $125,000 contribution to Miller-Meeks, while smaller than the group’s other expenditures, remains something of an outlier. In interviews, Matzzie explained it by pointing to Miller-Meeks’ record as an industry ally, and its use as evidence that the group will also support some sitting Republicans.

While all the candidates the coalition has spent money for and against have been Republicans, Matzzie made clear that Democrats on the wrong side of clean energy would not be exempt from its efforts to oust candidates its leaders deem insufficiently supportive. He hinted that the group’s next intervention could come in a Democratic primary. 

Edward Maibach, founding director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, said he sees political action by clean energy companies and executives as critical.

“The fossil fuel industry is the strongest political voice in America, in the world,” Maibach said. “It essentially rents friends in Congress, in the White House and in Parliaments around the world. The only way the clean energy industry can fight back is to fight fire with fire.”

“The story is about the industry, whether or not the industry is strong,” said Matzzie. 

Born From the Bill

On Oct. 29, 2025, a few months after President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, accelerating the rollback of solar and wind tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Matzzie got a call from Peter Davidson, the CEO of Aligned Climate Capital, a climate-focused investment firm.

Both were frustrated by the outcome and by what they saw as clean energy trade associations’ failure to respond. Matzzie said they were determined to do something about it.

“Any member of Congress who’s looking to damage a business that is investing pension money in clean energy projects, which helps to control costs, is not fit for office. It is behavior that is beneath a member of Congress, in my view,” Matzzie said.

They convened a group of roughly a dozen people who all knew one another socially and pooled their money for a first bet, their primary challenge to Roy. The ITC ultimately spent $1.7 million against Roy, who boasted in press statements and in interviews with news media that the One Big Beautiful Bill would terminate more than 90 percent of all future wind and solar projects. For the group, Roy’s loss to State Sen. Mayes Middleton in late May, by a 55.2 percent to 44.8 percent margin, was proof of concept.

To find targets, the group combed through signatories of a letter House Freedom Caucus members sent underscoring the urgent need to fully repeal the IRA and its subsidies, and looked for members who published their own statements, or spoke on the House floor, calling for deeper cuts to wind and solar subsidies under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

The group then identified lawmakers with upcoming primaries and mapped where its money could have the greatest impact. Matzzie dubbed the resulting spreadsheet the “Revenge Tour Matrix.”

The effort grew rapidly. In late June, Chris Larsen, the billionaire founder of the blockchain company Ripple, gave the ITC $5 million, after three earlier $250,000 contributions. FEC records show it raised $6.78 million in the first half of 2026.

The group’s intention, Matzzie said, was not simply to win individual races but to demonstrate that lawmakers could pay a political price for crossing the industry.

Primary Positioning

Matthey Grimley, a energy policy researcher at the University of Minnesota and former solar developer, said that while the group’s destabilization tactics are novel for the solar industry, the fossil fuel industry has been employing them for decades. 

“To really build up the discursive and structural power that the fossil fuel industries hold and have held for decades, it is going to take a lot more,” Grimley said. 

While he said it was “cool” to see the solar industry “fighting fire with fire,” he added that corporate money in politics is bad news overall, and a testament to a recent trend of “dirty politics.” 

“It feels natural, for this moment, to have a big batch of cryptocurrency money funding a pro-solar lobby running ads against a Republican in Texas saying he’s not MAGA enough,” he said. 

Maibach, however, said he believes the absence of clean energy messaging “is a big strategic error.” He sees the growing Republican support for clean energy development as linked to the issue of energy affordability.

Still, a 2026 Pew Research Center study found that the share of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who say the country should prioritize oil, coal and natural gas over wind and solar power has doubled to 71 percent over the last six years.

Erin Covey, U.S. House analyst for the nonpartisan election and campaign newsletter Cook Political Report, said impacting the primary may put the clean energy industry in a better position. 

“They know they are not going to be able to elect the Democrat in that district. So it makes sense for them to invest in the Republican who is better aligned with their interests,” said Covey. 

Of the races the ITC has targeted, few offer Democrats a realistic path to victory in November, save for Iowa’s 1st congressional district, one of the country’s most competitive House races. 

For now, the focus is on adversaries. But Matzzie said electing allies could eventually become part of the formula. The group plans to be involved in the general election.

“There definitely are people out there who distinguish themselves, who are in races that are winnable for their challenger, and we plan to get involved in those races,” he said.