Who runs behind schedule: red vs. blue
The share of planned capacity running behind its original schedule in red states versus blue states.
What does it show?
Whether power gets built on time depends on where it's built. 49% of blue-state planned capacity is behind its original schedule versus 41% of red — a gap that has widened through 2026. The gap survives the obvious challenge: excluding wind entirely, blue still runs 47% late vs red's 39%.
Methodology
Identical method to the Power Delay Index, computed separately per bucket. States are partitioned by the statewide winner of the 2024 presidential election (31 red, 20 blue including DC; ME and NE by statewide vote, ignoring their district splits). The color of a state is political fact from the 2024 result, not an estimate. Power in territories falls in neither bucket.
Limits
State lines are coarse: solar country inside blue states often votes red, and county-level election returns would sharpen the split at the cost of an external dataset. Differences between the buckets partly reflect what each side builds — offshore wind, concentrated in blue states, slips worst of all technologies — not only how each side permits and builds. As a robustness check, the split excluding wind entirely still shows blue-state power running later: 47% behind schedule vs 39% (the full-pipeline gap is 49% vs 41%), so the gap is not an offshore-wind artifact.