There is a conversation happening on project after project this year that deserves a direct acknowledgment, because it reflects a shift in the environment that is not going away on its own.
A community has a strong site. The incentive package is competitive. The economic development team is engaged and doing good work. And then, at the point where the process would normally be moving toward structuring a deal, the ED staff pulls the consulting team aside and says some version of: we love this project, we want this project — but can you hold off until after the primary?
The first time that conversation happens, it is surprising. By the fifth or sixth time, it has stopped being surprising and started raising a more uncomfortable question about what kind of environment economic developers are now operating in.What Has Changed
Coming up on thirty years in this business (first as a local economic developer, then at the state level, now as a consultant), the political dimension of a project has always been real. Navigating local politics, making sure the right people were in the room, helping elected officials understand what they were voting for: that was always part of the job, and it was workable.
Trust is built long before a project arrives.
What is happening now goes beyond a difficult council member or a skeptical county commission. It is a community's own economic development professionals signaling that beginning the public approval process — for a good project, one that creates jobs and tax base and economic activity — could be a political liability for an incumbent facing a primary. The concern is that many types of projects are destined to draw opposition and give an opponent something to campaign against.
That is a fundamental shift. For most of the modern era of economic development, wins were also political wins. Elected officials showed up at ribbon-cuttings because job creation was unambiguously good politics. The idea that a local official would want to delay the incentive approval process or announcement until after an election would have been nearly incomprehensible two decades ago. It is not incomprehensible now. It is a pattern, and it is showing up consistently enough that it warrants serious attention.
The Cost of the Ask
What asking a consulting team to hold a project actually creates is not always fully understood on the community side, and it is worth being direct about.
Sometimes the project moves to a second-choice location because the first-choice community asked for time.
Companies make location decisions on their own timelines, not on the political calendar of the communities they are evaluating. When a community asks for a delay, the consulting team has to go back to the client and explain that the preferred location needs more time. The client asks why. The answer — that the community's elected officials are worried about the optics of beginning the approval process before an election — does not build confidence in having the project approved. It raises exactly the questions about political stability and execution certainty that companies are most sensitive to in the current environment.
Sometimes the client waits. Sometimes the project moves to a second-choice location because the first-choice community asked for time it turned out the company did not have. Sometimes the process restarts entirely. Those communities lost projects they were positioned to win, and most of them never fully understood the reason.
There is also a subtler cost. Every time a consultant is asked to manage a timeline around a political calendar, it creates a data point about that community's operating environment. That data point gets filed away and affects how the community is perceived on the next project.
The first is a scheduling problem. The second is a support problem.
What Economic Developers Can Do
There is no clean solution here, because the root cause — the political polarization that has reached down to the local level and made economic development a contested issue rather than a shared one — is not something economic developers can solve unilaterally. But there are things that reduce exposure to this problem.
The most important is the work that happens long before a project arrives. If elected officials and board members have a genuine, ongoing understanding of what economic development is and why it matters, there is less risk of being caught without political support when a project requires it. The communities that end up asking consultants to wait are often the ones that have not invested in that ongoing education, built through consistent communication rather than deal-by-deal advocacy.
When a timing constraint exists, the best approach is to surface it early. Disclosing a political timing complication in the first call is far more manageable than disclosing it six months in. A consulting team that knows there is an election in eight weeks and a clear path after that can work with that information. Vagueness about timing — or worse, discovering it late — is more damaging than the constraint itself.
Politicians once ran on economic development wins. Now, in some communities, they are running against them.
The distinction that matters most: there is a difference between a timing constraint (the primary is in eight weeks and the situation clears after that) and a support question (it is not clear whether leadership will back this project at all, regardless of when it is announced). The first is a scheduling problem. The second is a much more serious signal about the community's competitive position, and the consulting team needs to know which one it is dealing with.
The Larger Shift
The pattern worth naming plainly is this: for most of the modern era of economic development, politicians ran on economic development wins. Now, in some communities, they are running against them. That is not universal. There are plenty of places where job creation is still political gold and elected officials still compete to be associated with major announcements. But the trend is real enough, and widespread enough, that it has to be factored into how economic developers do their jobs.
Political savvy has always been part of this work. What it requires now is a different kind — one that accounts for the possibility that the biggest obstacle to landing a transformational project is not a competitor state, a site deficiency, or a utility capacity gap, but the political environment inside the community itself. Recognizing that early, managing it proactively, and being honest with consulting partners about what exists is almost as important a skill as anything else in the toolkit right now.
