How Democrats Are Reacting to Obama's Keystone XL Decision

 Kevin Glass | Apr 24, 2014                      

The latest Obama decision to push back an actual decision on approval of the Keystone XL pipeline has put Democrats running in swing states in a tough position: go along with the leader of their party or break with Obama in order to try to win more moderate voters, with whom the Keystone XL pipeline is relatively popular. Alison Grimes of Kentucky, the Democrat running to unseat Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, has broken wth Obama and is pushing for the pipeline to be built. Unsurprisingly, this hasn't lost her any money from an environmentalist super PAC: Alison Grimes is the latest Democratic Senate candidate to call for building the Keystone XL oil pipeline. But the move hasn't cost her support among some environmentalists as she tries to win the seat now held by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell.

That's because, according to one environmentalist, those groups want Democrats to be running the Senate rather than McConnell after the November elections. Even as Grimes told The Associated Press this week that she supports building the pipeline from Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast, a San Francisco-based Super Pac, CREDO, which opposes the pipeline project, said it will spend $500,000 in Kentucky aimed at unseating McConnell.

It will be interesting to watch how other Democrats in red states - like Mary Landrieu and Mark Pryor, continue to play this.