DALTON, Ga. — Growing up in Cartersville, Georgia, Lisa Nash saw what happens to communities when factory jobs disappear. It was the 1980s and corporations were offshoring production to reduce costs and raise profits. The jobs that remained in this northwest corner of the state were typically lower-paying ones that didn’t offer the same ladder to the middle class.

“My parents and grandparents were in manufacturing, and they were the ones saying, ​‘Don’t do it,’” Nash recalled.

Nash disregarded their advice, embarking instead on a long career in manufacturing — first in textiles, followed by stints in aviation, automotive, and steel. Now she’s helping to bring higher-tech, higher-paying factory work back to the corridor between Atlanta and Chattanooga. 

Nash is the general manager of the Qcells solar panel factory in Dalton, a town of 34,000 located 50 miles up I-75 from her hometown. It opened in January 2019, after the Trump administration imposed a fresh round of tariffs on Chinese-made panels. The Korean conglomerate Hanwha owns Qcells, and initially planned to hire several hundred people at the site, Nash told me on a recent visit to the factory. By the end of 2019, it employed more than 800. 

Then, in 2020, Georgia helped elect President Joe Biden and sent two Democrats to the Senate, clinching a thin majority. Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock got to work crafting detailed policies to promote domestic manufacturing of clean energy technologies, which China had dominated for years; they wanted solar panels and batteries made in America — specifically Georgia — instead of in China, a geopolitical rival.

Those measures made it into the Inflation Reduction Act, which passed in August 2022 — two years ago this week. The legislation created the nation’s first comprehensive policies to support domestic clean energy manufacturing. Qcells broke ground on a second facility in Dalton in February 2023. Completed that August, the expansion added two football fields’ worth of manufacturing space with four new production lines — which produce 1.5 times more solar panels than the original three lines, thanks to technological advances. Now the whole complex employs 2,000 people full time and makes 5.1 gigawatts of solar panels a year, more than any other site in the U.S.

Politicians have been promising for decades to retrain American workers and revive long-lost manufacturing, with little to show for it. Now, though, the U.S. has entered a new era on trade: Leaders of both parties have rejected the long-standing free-trade consensus and its penchant for offshoring jobs. Biden married that reshoring impulse with a desire to boost clean energy production, to both stimulate the economy and fight climate change. 

This grand experiment remains in its infancy, and the success of the clean energy manufacturing revolution is by no means guaranteed. Cheap imports could outcompete even newly subsidized American products. 

And if Republicans win the presidency and retake Congress, they’ve threatened to stop subsidizing low-carbon energy resources and instead double down on fossil fuel production. House Republicans — including Dalton’s representative, Marjorie Taylor Greene — have voted repeatedly and unsuccessfully to repeal the domestic manufacturing incentives in the IRA. (Greene’s press office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

“Donald Trump and his Republican allies promised to gut the Inflation Reduction Act if he’s reelected, so there’s a lot at stake here,” Representative Nikema Williams, who leads the Georgia Democrats, told me.

Since the IRA passed, Georgia has received $23 billion in clean energy factory investment, much of it flowing to northwest Georgia. I wanted to see what impact this is having on communities formerly hit hard by industrial decline, so I followed the money trail to Dalton earlier this summer. 

I found a population that seems to like having advanced solar manufacturing in their backyard. Dalton’s solar jobs are boosting wages, invigorating the historic town center, and employing local high school graduates. Those benefits are starting to spread to nearby communities, where new solar factories are springing to life. In November, voters will weigh two very different visions of America’s energy future on the ballot, but Dalton is already reaping the rewards from slotting solar into its storied history of industrial production.

From carpets to solar

Both CSX and Norfolk Southern run Class I rail lines through Dalton, a testament to its industrial legacy, and freight trains bellow day and night.

That legacy harks back to 1900, according to local historians, when Catherine Evans Whitener sold a hand-tufted bedspread from her front porch for $2.50. The cottage industry took off in this land of forested ridges and stream-crossed valleys, and over time, local factories consolidated into global carpeting giants Shaw Industries and Mohawk Industries.

“The carpet industry was born here,” Carl Campbell, executive director of economic development at the Greater Dalton Chamber of Commerce, told me when I visited the Chamber. The New Georgia Encyclopedia states that 80 percent of America’s tufted carpet production happens within 100 miles of Dalton.

The conference room where we spoke sported large-format aerial photographs of the major factories nearby: the largest Shaw site, 650,000 square feet; and the new Engineered Floors colossus, 2.8 million square feet. 

“You feel like there’s enough carpet in that building to cover the whole world,” said Campbell, who grew up in Dalton. 

Despite widely diverging party platforms, there’s one goal that both Democrats and Republicans currently endorse: bringing manufacturing jobs back to America. That’s already happening, and nowhere more so than in Georgia. The state capitalized early on federal incentives to spur a bustling clean energy industry, and that has created a bundle of contradictions for the state’s politics.

Governor Brian Kemp, a pro-business Republican, has deftly wielded his powers to attract factory investment with state-funded worker training and tax incentives. Under his watch, Georgia developed the nation’s largest solar-panel factory hub, plus a host of billion-dollar battery plants and electric-vehicle factories. Georgia leads the nation in clean energy manufacturing jobs created in the past couple of years, and trails only the auto capital of Michigan in total dollars invested in clean energy factories.

Much of this investment couldn’t have happened without the manufacturing tax credits that President Joe Biden signed into law two years ago. The Inflation Reduction Act was the first serious legislative push to invigorate American production of solar panels, batteries, and electric cars. That watershed legislation, in turn, would not have passed if Georgia had not elected two Democratic senators in 2020. Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock spearheaded the portions of the law that award credits for onshoring the clean-energy supply chain, and their constituents have reaped more benefits than just about anyone else.

Now the 2024 election could scramble this bipartisan economic success story. Competing with more established manufacturing bases around the world is tough going, even with supportive tax incentives and tariffs. But Republicans in Congress have already tried to repeal the IRA credits that underpin so much of the factory buildout. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has promised to undo the ​“Green New Scam,” which, as a made-up term, leaves some room for interpretation over which specific clean energy policies he wants to destroy. Democrats, conversely, are running on preserving their legislative victories and keeping the jobs and investment machine rolling. 

Kemp, meanwhile, says he’s trying to help Trump in ​“saving our country from Kamala Harris and the Democrats,” even as Trump attacks him and his family personally and advocates policies that would upend Georgia’s economic momentum. Kemp’s office did not respond to questions in time for publication.

Georgia’s 16 Electoral College votes could well decide the presidency, depending on how the other swing states break in November. Biden as an incumbent candidate struggled to connect with Georgia voters over how his policies impacted their lives: He trailed by six points in early July polling averages from The New York Times. Vice President Kamala Harris’ sudden vault into the candidacy has reset the race, and leading election analysts now consider the state a toss-up.

Thus Georgia has become a battleground not just for the presidency, but for the nascent yet fragile revival of American manufacturing. In the last presidential election, Biden pulled ahead there by fewer than 12,000 votes. His policies have helped create 32,000 clean energy manufacturing jobs in the state in the last two years. It’s not yet clear whether the rise of clean energy factories as an economic force will shift voters’ attitudes, but if there’s any place where it could make a difference this fall, it will be Georgia.

Georgia’s recipe for bipartisan success in clean energy manufacturing

Federal policy can’t will a nationwide manufacturing renaissance into being; factories have to go somewhere, and that’s where state and local leaders come in. Georgia demonstrates that enthusiastic state leadership can matter more than the party in power: Plenty of states with liberal leaders and aggressive climate targets have whiffed on attracting clean energy factories, while Georgia cleaned up.

Georgia’s pragmatic bipartisan alliance operates largely behind the scenes, but it is visible in the press releases that companies issue when announcing their factory rollouts. These tend to follow a certain formula: A Kemp quote highlights the local community benefits and praises Georgia’s attractive environment for doing business, followed by a quote from Ossoff or Warnock, or both, calling out the key enabling role played by the federal legislation they helped pass. This choreographed messaging lets each leader describe the same economic outcome in a way that fits their political worldview.