Capital Research Center published three pieces last week, all doing what CRC does best: run damage control for the Right, bury inconvenient truths that disprove their spin, twist whatever’s left until it fits their narrative, and call it “research.”
In “Ranked choice voting is down, but not out,” Parker Thayer writes that “RCV has been overwhelmingly rejected in nearly every state and territory where it has been on the ballot.” The tally omits that in both states where voters have actually used RCV, they’ve voted to keep it. Maine approved statewide ranked-choice voting in 2016, defended it in a successful 2018 people’s veto, expanded it to presidential elections in 2020, and still uses it — the article never mentions Maine at all. In Alaska, the official recount recorded 160,973 votes against repealing RCV. The article’s Nevada argument fares no better: it says the 2024 defeat “proved” that voters reversed course “when faced with the reality of RCV,” but ranked-choice voting never took effect in Nevada — Question 3 was a constitutional initiative requiring a second approval before implementation, a vote on an unimplemented proposal.
From donor concentration, the same piece concludes the movement is “little more than a few donors pulling the strings” and closes by urging that donors “pull the plug” on “a long-since dead fad.” Funding provenance cannot settle whether a policy is good, and it cannot explain away the hundreds of thousands of voters who chose to adopt or keep RCV in Maine, Alaska, New York City, Portland, and Washington, D.C.
The Enemies of Energy profile of the Southern Environmental Law Center leans on the same move: using genuine facts to draw conclusions that the evidence doesn’t support. The piece asks whether SELC is “using poor folk as public relations props,” answering environmental-justice claims about highway-adjacent low-income communities with an anecdote about wealthy high-rise dwellers rather than the exposure research those claims rest on. And it converts a single statistic — 57 percent of EV owners in 2024 earned over $100,000 — into a claim that SELC somehow wants to price middle-income Americans out of car ownership, a leap from description to motive that the underlying source does not support. Meanwhile interest in EVs continues to rise alongside gas prices despite the Trump administration killing the EV tax credit which made those vehicles more cost effective.
The biggest error of the week is in the profile of GRID Alternatives. The article claims the Denali Commission approved $381,000 for GRID’s solar work in two remote Alaska villages and that “GRID managed to spend just $25,000, or 6.5 percent of what the Denali Commission had approved.” The USASpending record in the article’s own footnote shows otherwise: the Denali Commission’s federal obligation was $25,000 in total, with the other $356,000 recorded as non-federal funding — the recipient’s cost share, not federal money left unspent. The claim that GRID failed to spend money it was given is false; the $25,000 the article calls a shortfall is the full federal award, fully accounted for.
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