In Carteret County, six municipalities have already passed resolutions opposing offshore drilling and seismic testing, a controversial technique used to pinpoint petroleum deposits on the ocean floor. So have local governments in other states.

“Everyone is pretty much united” in opposition, Kies explained. And with the midterms approaching, Republicans up and down the ballot are breaking from the party line to oppose the president’s proposed plan.

“I believe in Donald Trump. I believe in Make America Great Again. We just disagree on” offshore drilling, Bobby Hanig, a Republican running for the North Carolina state House, told WUNC, a North Carolina Public Radio station.

Until recently, many East Coast politicians supported offshore drilling. In 2011, three Gulf Coast Republican governors and Alaska Governor Sean Parnell formed the Outer Continental Shelf Governors Coalition, which is aimed at promoting the expansion of offshore drilling. By 2013, three more Republican governors had joined in: South Carolina’s Nikki Haley, Virginia’s Bob McDonnell, and North Carolina’s Pat McCrory. In 2014, the coalition met with Interior Secretary Sally Jewell to urge drilling expansion. Each of these moves received little opposition from the public.

“Nobody really knew. Nobody was paying attention,” said Frank Knapp, a former president of the Business Alliance for Protecting the Atlantic Coast.

But in 2015, when Jewell’s department released its draft of the Oil and Gas Leasing Program, people did notice. If enacted, the five-year plan would have opened up huge portions of the South Atlantic to drilling for the first time, and outrage quickly spread along the East Coast. In Republican and Democratic areas alike, residents, legislators, and advocacy organizations held town halls, protested on beaches, and lobbied Washington. The military expressed concern that drilling would impact their operations off of Florida and Virginia. By the end of 2016, the Obama administration had revised its plan, removing the Atlantic from the leasing program, and had invoked an obscure law to ban drilling in much of the Atlantic and the Arctic.

“It really was like a bipartisan thing,” said Alex Taurel, the conservation program director for the League of Conservation Voters. “It really translated into kind of changing the politics of offshore drilling in the Atlantic, over the course of the Obama era into this Trump era.”

That change has only been exacerbated since Trump took office. Coastal communities worry about offshore drilling for a number of reasons. The threat of an oil spill looms large; few have forgotten the damage the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster inflicted on the Gulf of Mexico. Since then, there have been 4,105 reported offshore explosions, fires, collisions, and spills, resulting in 13 deaths, according to the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement. In 2017 alone, there were 10 offshore spills.