I would say it is mostly an awareness thing. Electric vehicles are thought of as the best for the environment and people aren’t really aware or don’t care that they can cut their Co2 related output by about ~50% with their existing ICE vehicle. People just don’t know that they can choose to use a different fuel and have environmental benefits that way because no one from the car makers to the gas pumps really advertised or educated them on it.

A few car makers did have branded Flex fuel cars but really they were only branded that way to take advantage of a poorly crafted government tax credit. Many existing cars that can run e85 have no indication that they can run it and run cleaner with it which can lead to less maintenance issues and make the mechanic’s job easier.

With that said ethanol is in some respects a worse fuel, since it attracts water which doesn’t play nice with burning and as you mentioned is not as dense, but it is a much better fuel from an environmental perspective. Neither of those issues are deal breaker’s since you can just fill up a little more often or add a fuel additive occasionally to dehydrate the fuel.

I also think maybe the politics of farm subsidies for corn and ethanol are also somewhat of an issue, since massive government subsidies for corn growing and ethanol production are unfairly distorting the market quite a bit. But then again that’s par for the course compared with oil.

I have heard that most of the producers of ethanol have been bought out and taken over by oil companies, so I wouldn’t expect them to make a serious effort to promote it’s benefits or compete well since the oil companies wouldn’t like that.

Any governor that signs a bill rolling back a recent democratically passed voter initiative should be automatically trigger a recall election at the very least.

It’s not a psyop, it’s also marketing and PR.

Marketing and PR are psyops too. It is very important to those in power that you don’t think badly of them. Psychology is really at the root of marketing and PR.