Washington, D.C.– For nearly 30 years, LCV Victory Fund’s Dirty Dozen has named the candidates for federal office whose records most consistently side against the environment. This year, the list carries an added, urgent throughline: the skyrocketing energy costs that will be a major deciding factor for a crucial set of swing voters. Every candidate on this year’s Dirty Dozen has a record, a vote, a lobbying history, or a policy position, that is helping drive up the electricity and heating bills their own constituents pay, whether through blocking or repealing clean energy projects, providing handouts to dirtier and more expensive fuels like oil, coal and gas, or embracing costly data center buildouts without protecting ratepayers from the bill or the pollution.

LCV Victory Fund calls this rising force the Energy Bill Voter: the parent, retiree, or small business owner in a battleground community watching their electricity and heating bills climb, and increasingly ready to vote on it. As we detailed in June, 42% of swing voters say they are “very concerned” about rising electricity costs, and new polling found that 35% of all voters, and 51% of undecided voters, now rank the cost of utilities like electricity and heating as the single most important issue in deciding their vote in Congressional elections. Energy costs have risen 18% nationwide since Trump took office, with electricity prices near data centers rising as much as 267% in some areas. The politics have moved just as fast: Congressional Republicans, who voters credited by a 7-point margin at the start of 2025 with making energy prices better, are now underwater by 37 points on the same question, while Trump has swung from +15 to -41.

The 2026 Dirty Dozen includes five Senate candidates and seven U.S. House incumbents running in competitive races. Nearly all of them voted in 2025 for the Republican Tax Law also known as the Big Ugly Bill, which eliminated tens of billions of dollars in clean energy tax credits. Independent economic modeling from the Rhodium Group and Energy Innovation projects that law’s energy provisions alone will raise average U.S. household energy costs by roughly $80 to nearly $200 a year by 2035 — with the steepest increases concentrated in states these candidates represent — even as data center electricity demand adds further pressure to utility bills nationwide.

This is part of LCV Victory Fund’s broader effort this cycle: an at-least-$50-million investment in the 2026 midterms, announced in July 2026, funding paid media, field, mail and content-creator programs to reach Energy Bill Voters and hold Dirty Dozen candidates accountable for their records in the country’s most competitive races.

The 2026 Dirty Dozen

Jon Husted — Senate, Ohio

Jon Husted has a 3% lifetime score on the LCV National Environmental Scorecard. As Ohio’s lieutenant governor, he championed the House Bill 6 bailout at the center of what federal prosecutors called a roughly $60 million bribery scheme funneled through the dark-money group Generation Now. Ohioans paid an estimated $663 more a year for electricity under HB 6 before its repeal, and FirstEnergy was ordered in November 2025 to pay $250.70 million in customer restitution and civil forfeitures. Husted testified in the bribery trial in March 2026 but said he did not recall the substance of a 2018 dinner with FirstEnergy executives central to the scheme. He has since become known as “the face of data centers in Ohio”, as the state has committed at least $2.3 billion in sales tax exemptions to 18 data center companies.

Mike Rogers — Senate, Michigan

Mike Rogers earned an 8% lifetime score on the LCV National Environmental Scorecard across his 14 years representing Michigan’s 8th District (2001–2015). He appeared on the Dirty Dozen list back in 2000 when he originally ran for the House seat because of his anti-environmental record in the state legislature. Financial disclosures show Rogers personally holds between $1.7 million and $2.6 million in tech investments positioned to benefit from a data center boom — including up to $250,000 in a Blackstone real estate trust where data centers now make up 29% of the portfolio, up from just 1% in 2020, plus an advisory role at a venture capital firm with stakes in dozens of AI-related companies (The Lever). Only after that financial stake was reported did Rogers reverse course days later and endorse a one-year moratorium on new Michigan data centers. Over his congressional career Rogers also took roughly $693,000 in direct contributions from oil and gas industry donors, and his 2026 campaign and allied super PAC have continued taking fossil-fuel money, including from Chevron’s PAC and oil financier Tim Dunn.

Michael Whatley — Senate, North Carolina

Before chairing the Republican National Committee, Michael Whatley spent nearly two decades as a paid energy lobbyist — co-founding the firm HBW Resources in 2009 and serving as executive vice president of the Consumer Energy Alliance, an oil-and-gas-industry group backed by BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell. Lobbying-disclosure records show Whatley and colleagues reported $3.5 million in lobbying income over 12 years, roughly $1.2 million of it tied to energy clients including Duke Energy, and his family still holds stock in Duke Energy and ExxonMobil — companies he lobbied for. As RNC chair, Whatley pressured Senate Republicans to pass what became the Big Ugly Bill — which repealed the bulk of the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits — saying on a radio interview, “We’ve seen the House deliver on the ‘big, beautiful bill.’ We need the Senate to do the same”. After it passed, he called the law “our agenda” and said it would be the “cornerstone” of the RNC’s 2026 midterm messaging. That record sits alongside a proposed 18% Duke Energy rate hike hitting North Carolina customers through 2028, driven in part by surging data-center electricity demand. Appointed by Trump in January 2025 as Western North Carolina’s Hurricane Helene recovery coordinator, Whatley has drawn complaints from Black Mountain and Swannanoa residents, who told a local TV station that FEMA appeals were taking up to 180 days and tens of millions of dollars in aid remained bottlenecked nearly a year later.

Susan Collins — Senate, Maine

Susan Collins has fallen from a 100% score on the LCV National Environmental Scorecard in 2008 to 31% in 2025 and 0% in 2024, leaving her with a 52% lifetime rating that fails to tell the full story of her complete abandonment of the pro-environmental principles that once seemed to drive her decision-making. On June 29, 2025, Collins voted for the motion to proceed that advanced the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to the Senate floor, 51-49. While ultimately voting against final passage (after passage was already assured), the law Collins helped advance to the floor eliminated the tax credit for heat-pump installations and other clean-energy incentives popular in Maine. Contractors say that change adds roughly $2,000 to a typical heat-pump installation, compounded by an expiring Central Maine Power rate discount for heat-pump customers, raising household energy costs in the state.

Mike Collins — Senate, Georgia (currently U.S. Rep., GA-10)

Mike Collins has a 1% lifetime score on the LCV National Environmental Scorecard and 0% in 2025, casting 32 anti-environment votes that year, including blocking water-heater efficiency standards and rolling back methane fees. He voted for the Big Ugly Bill, gutting Inflation Reduction Act clean energy tax credits. Four clean energy projects worth $141 million had already landed in his own district, and Republican Governor Brian Kemp has publicly praised “investment after investment in Georgia’s clean energy industry” — yet Collins voted to repeal the federal incentives supporting them. In December 2025, Collins authored and championed the PERMIT Act which a former EPA official called “the worst bill for clean and safe water…in decades” for excluding groundwater and most wetlands from Clean Water Act protection and expanding exemptions for agricultural and pesticide pollution. Collins is currently under House Ethics Committee review after the Office of Congressional Conduct found “substantial reason to believe” he misused government funds to benefit his former chief of staff and pay an unearned, no-show “internship” to the aide’s girlfriend.

Juan Ciscomani — U.S. House, AZ-06

Juan Ciscomani has a 7% lifetime score on the LCV National Environmental Scorecard — down from the 14% lifetime score LCV Victory Fund cited when he first made the Dirty Dozen in 2024. He voted for the Big Ugly Bill and voted for the Homeowner Energy Freedom Act, which repealed a $4.5 billion federal program funding home insulation and heat-pump upgrades that lower household energy bills. So far this cycle Ciscomani has taken $182,000 from electric utilities and the oil, gas and mining industries. Arizona households are now facing among the steepest electricity increases in the country — prices are up 18% since January 2025. Arizona led the nation in electricity-demand growth in March 2026, and Tucson Electric Power has requested a 13% rate hike driven in part by $1.7 billion in data-center-related infrastructure costs — even as Ciscomani voted for cuts one analysis found threatened $557 million in clean energy investment and 245 jobs in his own district.

David Valadao — U.S. House, CA-22

David Valadao has a 9% lifetime score on the LCV National Environmental Scorecard, with a 12% score in 2025. He voted for the Big Ugly Bill, a vote CNN reported has become a political liability in his swing Central Valley district. He voted for the Homeowner Energy Freedom Act repealing a $4.5 billion federal program that funded home insulation and heat-pump upgrades to lower energy bills. His record includes repeated votes against clean water protections. In January 2016 he voted to permanently block the EPA and Army Corps’ Clean Water Rule, and he voted for the PERMIT Act. Climate Power, citing OpenSecrets data, reported Valadao took $627,378 from the oil and gas industry over his career before voting to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy incentives.

Bill Huizenga — U.S. House, MI-04

Bill Huizenga has a 6% lifetime score on the LCV National Environmental Scorecard, including a 0% score in 2025. He voted for the Big Ugly Bill, which rolled back clean energy tax credits. His west Michigan district contains the J.H. Campbell coal plant in Ottawa County, which the Trump administration has repeatedly forced to stay open past its planned retirement through a series of “emergency” orders. Michigan’s attorney general says the extensions had cost Consumers Energy customers roughly $259 million as of spring 2026. Huizenga has refused to take action.

Gabe Evans — U.S. House, CO-08

Gabe Evans has a 6% lifetime score on the LCV National Environmental Scorecard, unchanged from his 2025 score. He voted for the Big Ugly Bill and the SPEED Act permitting bill, a shift to speed up the environmental review process for oil and gas while leaving clean energy projects languishing. Evans’s campaign has taken donations from more than a dozen oil and gas companies, with roughly three-quarters of his first half 2025 fundraising coming from PACs and joint fundraising committees rather than small donors, even as Colorado regulators approved a new Xcel Energy rate hike in August 2026 that will raise average residential bills by about $5 a month (Colorado Newsline; CBS Colorado).

Scott Perry — U.S. House, PA-10

Scott Perry has a 2% lifetime score on the LCV National Environmental Scorecard, with a 3% score in 2025. He voted against the Inflation Reduction Act, and voted to repeal the clean energy incentives, eliminating tens of billions of dollars in clean energy tax credits. In January 2025, Perry introduced three bills specifically to repeal federal tax credits for renewable energy, ethanol, and electric vehicles. Perry’s central Pennsylvania district sits inside the PJM grid region, where residential electric rates have risen nearly 14% in the past year and more than 50% since 2020, driven substantially by data-center power demand.

Derrick Van Orden — U.S. House, WI-03

Derrick Van Orden has a 9% lifetime score on the LCV National Environmental Scorecard, dropping to 6% in 2025. He voted for the Big Ugly Bill, repealing billions in clean energy incentives that would have reduced costs and created jobs in his own district. Van Orden also voted in 2025 roll back a rule cutting methane pollution fees and voted “present,” instead of voting against a bill to block new water-heater efficiency standards that would have lowered household energy costs. As wildfire smoke from Canada blanketed the U.S. in June 2023, Van Orden mocked the crisis on Twitter/X. Three years later, as record wildfire smoke again choked Wisconsin in July 2026, Van Orden joined five other Wisconsin Republicans in a letter to the EPA blaming Canada’s wildfire management — a letter that did not mention climate change.

Mike Lawler — U.S. House, NY-17

Mike Lawler has a 17% lifetime score on the LCV National Environmental Scorecard, falling to 12% in 2025. Before his 2020 election to the New York State Assembly, Lawler was the founding executive director of New Yorkers for Affordable Energy, an oil-and-gas-industry-backed lobbying group whose funders include the American Petroleum Institute — the trade association representing both the oil and natural gas industries — alongside Williams Companies and utilities Con Edison, National Grid and Avangrid, and which lobbied against New York’s 2019 climate law and to keep gas infrastructure in new buildings; his own financial disclosure shows he personally continued lobbying for a NY4AE member, the Engineers Labor-Employer Cooperative, through 2021. Lawler voted for the Big Ugly Bill and voted to defund Department of Energy clean-energy and efficiency programs and to block water-heater and appliance efficiency standards. Since returning to the campaign trail, Lawler has blamed New York’s climate law for rising utility bills while continuing to draw contributions from utility-linked PACs, including roughly $18,000 since mid-2025.

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Paid for by LCV Victory Fund, www.lcvvictoryfund.org, and not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.