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As we’ve discussed several times before, many buyers and shareholders are moving away from Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) due to Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s public departure from far-right political culture. We’ve seen multiple instances of former Tesla fans who held shares since the IPO (2010) and Model S launch (2012) selling their Tesla shares and saying they will no longer buy Tesla. While Tesla’s market cap remains far higher than any other automaker in the world, demand for Tesla vehicles appears to be hurt by Musk’s political adventures (among other factors).
We found this data released last month. It’s not conclusive evidence that political tweets are causing former Tesla buyers to stop buying, but it suggests that they are. Data from analytics firm CivicScience shows that Tesla’s favorability rating among liberals/Democrats has fallen by 23 percentage points in six months, from 39 percent on January 24 to just 16 percent on July 24. That’s a significant drop in favorability.
But perhaps more surprising is that Tesla’s favorability rating among conservatives/Republicans has also dropped significantly over the same period, dropping from 36% on January 24th to 23% on July 24th. We’re not sure what’s causing the drop among Republicans, but we suspect it could be due to declining Tesla sales, Tesla layoffs and scaling back its Supercharger program, vague plans for cheaper models, or dissatisfaction with the Cybertruck and the Cybertruck rollout. Or maybe there are also a lot of conservatives/Republicans unhappy with Elon Musk’s tweets.
What the decline in Conservative/Republican favorability shows is that the decline in Liberal/Democrat favorability is probably not due to Elon Musk’s political adventures. Again, the issues mentioned above and others I can’t remember right now could be at play. But the decline in Conservative/Republican favorability was 13 percentage points, while the decline in Liberal/Democrat favorability was 23 percentage points. That’s a significant difference, and how can it be explained other than as a reaction to Elon Musk’s political comments? Of course, this is only anecdotal evidence, but we’ve read many examples of this in our articles over the past six months.
But perhaps the most concerning aspect is the overall decline in approval ratings for both Democrats and Republicans. Combined, that’s a big drop in approval ratings. Already Tesla’s sales in Q1 and Q2 are down year over year. Tesla’s approval ratings are obviously at their lowest in quite a while, but what about Q3 and Q4 sales in the US?
The CivicScience findings seem to back up my intuition about Tesla demand with numbers and graphs. Tesla seems to be struggling to reach the same sales levels as last year. That said, maybe I’m wrong, “likeability” means nothing, and Tesla sales could bounce back strongly later this year. Or maybe Tesla makes some big strides with “full self-driving” and sparks a new burst of consumer interest. What do you think?
This graph shows that the virus of the awakened mind is taking over traditional media.
The same thing happened with online media and education systems, and then spread to other countries.
The infection rate is almost 100%.
But now I’m dead. pic.twitter.com/z5wMNfRym2
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 24, 2024
Finally, here’s another article that struck me: “Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, found last year that electric vehicle ownership is strongly linked to political stance,” writes The Telegraph. “They found that a third of electric cars bought in the US were registered in the 5% of counties most likely to vote Democratic.”
To quote from the paper’s abstract, “Over the study period, roughly half of the EV flowed to counties in the top 10% of Democratic voters, and roughly one-third to the top 5%. There is relatively little evidence that this correlation has declined over time, and some specifications even suggest that it has increased.” A graph from the study is shown below.

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