The nation’s leading clean energy lobby aims to bolster solar power’s standing via conservative media partnerships, polling and Stephen Miller’s wife.
By Kelsey Brugger, Zack Colman and Pavan Acharya, Politico, Feb. 27, 2026
Environmentalists and solar power proponents have found a pair of surprise allies: Katie Miller and Kellyanne Conway.
Miller, the wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, and Conway, the polling guru who led President Donald Trump’s first campaign, raised eyebrows this month when they publicly touted the clean energy source that has come under fire from the Trump administration.
According to a confidential strategy memo obtained by POLITICO, their advocacy is aligned with a campaign by members of the nation’s largest renewable energy lobby group to MAGA-fy solar power — technology that Trump once derided as “a blight on our country.”
The memo distributed earlier this month shows the American Clean Power Association launched the “American Energy First” campaign to engage Conway and conservative influencers like Miller “to amplify the benefits of solar energy” and “note the harm that could result from reckless trade policy.”
The memo lays out a strategy to leverage recent Conway-driven polling data — commissioned by American Energy First and conducted in December — showing solar power was popular with Trump’s base.
“As part of the campaign, ACP is working with a series of conservative influencers to secure opinion media placements authored by conservative columnists, former Republican lawmakers, and other credible Republican voices in conservative outlets,” the memo says.
The campaign will expand in the coming weeks, it states, “with the release of polling data from a Trump aligned firm, paid media partnerships with podcasts like the Katie Miller Pod (Steven Miller’s wife), as well as advertorials and sponsorships with right-of-center publications like the Washington Reporter, The Dispatch and The Federalist.”
Trump has regularly assailed renewable energy as he has promoted fossil fuels and nuclear power, but has focused most of his derision on wind power. He and Republicans in Congress used their budget bill last year to roll back hundreds of billions of dollars in clean energy incentives passed during the Biden administration.
Miller, a former aide to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, has been relentlessly touting solar power on social media this month, posting “Solar energy is the energy of the future” and noting “Solar is now the dominant source of new U.S. power capacity and is on track to surpass coal in total installed capacity before the end of 2026.”
However, Miller said she was not being paid by AEF or ACP for her posts or her podcast.
“I do not have a paid partnership with them,” she said in a statement. ACP declined to comment on whether it paid or partnered with Miller.
In addition to vehicle manufacturing, Musk’s Tesla also produces solar panels, but the business that formerly operated under the SolarCity brand has seen its share of the market drop sharply since it was brought inside the larger company in 2016.
The MAGA-focused solar re-brand comes as surging utility bills and construction of new power-hungry data centers serving the artificial intelligence boom at the center of Trump’s economic vision will squeeze voters’ finances — and threaten the narrow GOP hold on Congress.
Many of the president’s backers believe the fresh data points about Republicans’ support for solar energy will create space for Trump to ditch policies that have stalled the growth of solar, helping him accomplish goals to buoy U.S. manufacturing, tame prices and bolster data center operations.
Heather Reams, CEO of conservative energy group Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, said consumers are focused on their rising power bills — and pressing policy makers for answers now.
“Not, ‘What nuclear reactor are you going to build for me 15 years from now?’ What are you going to do for me today?,” she said. “That’s where solar has its hand up, saying, ‘We’re ready to go right now.’”
Deployment of solar power has accelerated rapidly over the past two decades as its costs have plummeted, and it is expected to supply 10 percent of U.S. electricity by 2027 — even with the sunset of federal subsidies and tariffs on imports that have raised equipment costs.
It’s no secret that ACP has gone to great lengths to appeal to Republicans in GOP-controlled Washington, but the memo reveals an intensification of its effort to lean on Trump allies at a time when the administration has tried to block renewable energy projects throughout the country.
The memo says the campaign is “not directly associated with ACP’s multi-technology brand,” and in a statement, the trade group’s spokesperson, Artealia Gilliard, said “American Energy First is supported and led by a small number of ACP member companies that deploy utility scale solar across the U.S.”
Conway’s polling firm did not provide comment on the memo.
GOP strategists are worried voters’ concerns about affordability will determine the outcome of the midterm elections this year — putting Republicans’ four-seat majority in the House and six-seat advantage in the Senate at risk. While gasoline prices have broken modestly in Trump’s favor in his first year, residential electricity prices were 6 percent higher nationally in December compared to the previous year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, though several states have shown double-digit jumps.
Solar backers in recent weeks have upped their push to bolster the growing industry’s reputation among Trump and GOP voters. Much of the messaging has coupled the political urgency of tempering power prices with a focus on the growing made-in-America character of the industry that has long been dominated by China.
“It is, to some extent, creating a permission structure to not be perceived as getting in the way of this,” said Mike Carr, executive director of the Solar Energy Manufacturers of America Coalition. “That this is actually market forces that are pushing solar, and to make sure that he’s not perceived as getting in the way of that and therefore driving up electricity prices.”
Last week, polling from Conway’s consulting firm found that three-quarters of Trump voters agreed “that solar energy should be used in the US to strengthen and increase” the domestic energy supply, with 62 percent of Trump voters holding a favorable view of solar energy. It surveyed voters from five states that voted for Trump in 2024: Indiana, Texas, Florida, Ohio and Arizona.
“The results are less polarized politically than they are pragmatically,” Conway said at an American Council of Renewable Energy policy forum on Thursday when asked about the poll. “I think people are a little bit more pragmatic when it comes to energy.”
The poll came just a few weeks after another survey similarly found that GOP voters largely back solar energy, especially when domestic materials are used to build them. The survey, commissioned by Arizona-based solar manufacturer company First Solar, was conducted by polling firm Fabrizio, Lee and Associates, which is led by Tony Fabrizio and David Lee, prominent Trump campaign pollsters.
The publicity push comes amid early signs of a potential Trump administration thaw on solar power. Interior Department officials have begun reviewing 20 commercial scale solar projects, POLITICO’s E&E News reported Thursday, a potential relaxation of a policy issued in July that required Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s OK for all solar and wind permits.
That activity follows the Bureau of Land Management’s December decision to smooth a path for the massive 700-megawatt Libra Project on federal land in Nevada. Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo had privately urged the Trump administration to clear logjams for solar in his state, which POLITICO first reported in August.
“Companies that I’m talking to are getting their final permits,” Reams said. “I’m not hearing the same from some wind projects.”
Democrats and environmentalists have blasted Republicans for scrapping solar and wind incentives, arguing those moves were contributing to higher prices.
Conservatives have gone to lengths to distinguish what kind of solar they support. In remarks to reporters on Thursday, Conway defended the administration’s efforts to end subsidies for solar technologies included in 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act.
“They don’t like mandates,” Conway said of the Trump administration. “Solar is a piece of that. I think Secretary [Chris] Wright particularly speaks about this often, but it’s non-subsidized solar.”
Ray Long, president and CEO of the ACORE, said earlier this week he couldn’t predict whether the administration will change its attitude toward solar and wind power, but he said those energy sources would help the White House meet its goal of ensuring reliability, especially as electricity prices are rising.
“If they’re solutions-oriented and looking to get there, these things should all be a part of the toolkit to get there,” Long said.
Solar, especially when combined with battery storage, presents the fastest way to solve the growing chasm between power supply and demand, said Mark Menezes, who served as deputy Energy Secretary in Trump’s first administration and now heads the U.S. Energy Association.
That’s true even for AI data centers, he said, given they have prioritized linking up with whatever electricity they can install quickly to beat competitors to market.
“What we know is that if you need speed to power, the fastest new generation that you can build is solar,” Menezes said in an interview. “If we were redesigning our entire system now — today, based on our technologies — we obviously would have a lot more solar deployed.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/27/solar-powers-newest-friends-maga-influencers-00802954