Democrats are divided over whether to restore the federal tax credits for EV buyers that Republicans ended last year, as party leaders remain noncommittal and polls show their own voters cooling on EVs.
More than 160 House Democrats back a bill that would restore the credits, but House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is not among its cosponsors, according to the congressional record.
The legislation, the Energy Bills Relief Act, never mentions electric vehicles by name. It would revive the credits by repealing, in a single sentence, the section of President Donald Trump’s 2025 tax law that ended them.
Democrats are hoping to regain control of Congress in the midterm elections on November 3.
Rank-and-file members have backed restoring the incentives, but leadership has not said whether it would be part of the party’s plans for 2027, according to Politico.
A market without the Credit
The Inflation Reduction Act expanded the $7,500 credit for new EVs, but it came with income limits, price caps and sourcing rules for battery components and critical minerals.
US EV sales hit a record in the third quarter of 2025 as buyers rushed to take advantage of the expiring incentives, with EVs topping 10% of new-vehicle sales for the first time, according to Cox Automotive.
A year later, sales fell 39.5% to an estimated 262,649 vehicles in the third quarter of 2026, according to Kelley Blue Book estimates published by Cox. That was still up 6.1% from the second quarter and the highest quarterly total since the record.
EVs accounted for about 6.4% of new-vehicle sales in the quarter, up from 5.8% in the second quarter, Cox said.
“What we’re seeing now is a market finding its footing again,” said Stephanie Valdez Streaty, Director of Industry Insights at Cox Automotive. “The third quarter was the highest EV sales volume in a year, and improvement through 2026 suggests the reset phase is largely behind us.”
She also pointed to fuel prices. “With gas prices well above $4 a gallon, electric vehicles look better than ever,” she said.
In September alone, new EV sales were an estimated 86,632, down 40.7% from 146,076 a year earlier, when EVs took 11.5% of the market, Cox said. EV share rose to 6.5% from 6.3% in August as sales of gasoline and hybrid vehicles fell. Used EV sales rose 21.2% from a year earlier to a record 3.3% of the used market.
Tesla took 55.8% of new EV sales in September, according to Cox. Average EV incentives fell to about $6,117 per vehicle, or 11% of the average transaction price, the lowest share of 2026.
“The EV market continues to adjust following last year’s federal tax credit expiration,” Cox said.
Ford said it sold 6,047 EVs in the US in the third quarter, down 80.2% from a record 30,612 a year earlier. General Motors reported a 61.7% fall to 25,473.
Leaders hold back
Senator John Hickenlooper of Colorado, who sits on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said the party needs to weigh what the credits achieved. “We’ve got to assess how much momentum and how much benefit we got from it,” he told Politico.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer laid out plans earlier this year to restore clean energy credits for wind and solar and to support geothermal, nuclear and fusion power, but did not explicitly mention EVs, the report said. Schumer championed the EV credits during the 2022 push for the Inflation Reduction Act.
Representative Mike Levin of California, a lead author of the House bill, said repeal “was the wrong decision.”
“The whole thing is a giant self-own by this administration, and it does no good for the American auto industry,” Levin told Politico. House Democrats also argue the credits would help protect the US industry against Chinese dominance, according to the report.
Voters cooling
A Pew Research Center survey of 3,524 US adults conducted March 16 to 22 found 47% of Democrats would seriously consider buying an EV as their next vehicle. That is down 11 percentage points from 58% in 2022.
The share of Democrats who say the government should encourage EVs fell 10 points over the same period, to 60%, according to Pew. Among Republicans, 17% would seriously consider an EV, and 21% say the government should encourage them.
Overall, about a third of Americans say they would seriously consider an EV, down from 42% in 2022, Pew said.
Republicans have tried to make the credits less popular by casting them as an attack on gasoline-powered cars and American manufacturing, according to Politico. Trump has called them part of the “Green New Scam.”
In Michigan, Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers has targeted Democrat Abdul El-Sayed over his past criticism of gasoline-powered cars, the report said.
What the bill would do
Representative Sean Casten of Illinois introduced the Energy Bills Relief Act, H.R. 7977, on March 18 with Levin and more than 100 other Democrats. It now lists 163 cosponsors, all Democrats, according to LegiScan. The bill has been referred to the Energy and Commerce Committee and eight others and has not advanced.
It is the introduced version of the Cheap Energy Act, a discussion draft Casten and Levin released in September 2025, which carries the same repeal language.
Section 101 of both texts repeals “Subchapter A of chapter 5 of subtitle A of title VII of Public Law 119–21,” the law Republicans call the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
That subchapter, titled “Termination of Green New Deal Subsidies,” contains 15 sections. The first four end the $7,500 credit for new clean vehicles, the credit for used clean vehicles, the credit for commercial clean vehicles and the credit for EV charging and other alternative fuel refueling property.
Under the 2025 law, the three vehicle credits ended for vehicles acquired after September 30, 2025, and the charging credit ended for property placed in service after June 30, 2026, according to the Internal Revenue Service.
The bill would make each affected provision read “as if such subchapter had never been enacted,” with effect “as if included” in the 2025 law. That would restore the Inflation Reduction Act versions of the credits, which ran through 2032.
Read literally, that wording would also cover vehicles bought after the September 2025 cutoff, as the termination would be treated as never having taken effect.
The repeal reaches well beyond vehicles. The same subchapter also ended or restricted credits for home efficiency upgrades, rooftop solar, clean hydrogen, wind and solar power and US battery and component manufacturing.
The bill also orders streamlined local permitting for home energy equipment, including chargers that power plug-in vehicles at 2 kilowatts or more.
