This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of Weather Desk cooperation.
As the midterm elections approach, a surprising thing has happened: Democratic politicians who once talked about climate change as the defining problem of our time now won’t mention it at all. Those words have has begun to disappear from their speeches, social media posts, and podcast appearances. The the main exception is Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island who has delivered some version of his “Time to Wake Up” speech about the dangers of climate change more than 300 times in the past decade and a half. Accused”climate hushers” to pressure the party to stop talking about an excessively hot planet.
If you had to pinpoint when “climate stability” began, the 2024 presidential election would be a clear contender. After President Donald Trump defeated former Vice President Kamala Harris in all seven swing states, Democrats were left scrambling to figure out where they went wrong. One popular theory was that they were too busy talking about social justice and planetary problems at the expense of everyday concerns that voters cared about more, like the rising cost of living. Whitehouse, however, sees global warming as part of that conversation, rather than a distraction from it.
“Climate change is currently raising costs for families across the country through higher property insurance premiums, grocery and electric bills, and health care costs,” Whitehouse said in a statement to Grist.
The idea that talking about climate change is a liability for Democrats has become conventional wisdom. Last year, the Institute for Democracy-aligned Academics issued an advisory “Don’t mention climate change.” A A recent edition in The New York Times he concluded, “When it comes to climate change, for now, it might be better to say nothing.” Democratic National Committee preliminary draft autopsy report of the 2024 election, released under pressure in May, said that messages about climate change and moving to green energy “raised concerns among workers in traditional industries worried about job losses.”
“It’s too much of a stretch to think right now that it’s really important not to talk about the climate, or that Democrats have paid a political price for talking about the climate,” said Matto Mildenberger, a political science professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. But there is no hard evidence that discussing climate change hurts Democrats in the polls, Mildenberger and other experts told Grist. If anything, they reward candidates with modest increases in voter turnout, surveys and studies show.
The basis for thinking that Democrats should avoid the subject comes from polls that ask voters about their top priorities: Climate change ranks 24 out of 25 when Americans are asked what issues will be most important to their vote, according to data from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication last year. That’s because other concerns have risen in importance, with liberal Democrats caring more about things like protecting democracy, government corruption, and treating immigrants than they did before the 2024 election. It’s a logical step, however, to assume that talking about climate change is a political liability just because voters don’t list it as one of their top issues.
Some commentators argue that you can achieve climate action by electing Democrats, regardless of whether they bring it. But emphasizing climate change as part of their political platform can have long-term consequences: Without a real discussion about it, you lose momentum for action and send a signal that it’s not important. “You really need to have a conversation and focus on the issue to slowly build the coalition and the policy work needed to address it,” Mildenberger said.
In fact, Democrats are leaving a base of irony for their opponents, he says, even if polls show that Trump’s agenda — to block the construction of wind farms, scrub public information about global warming from government websites, and withdraw America from the Paris climate agreement — is. in unpopular breadth. “All of this is, frankly, doing the service of the oil industry, ultimately, because it helps delay the climate,” Mildenberger said.
Whitehouse has said that Democrats are “going after the polls,” emphasizing what voters say they want to hear with short and retrograde messages. “Most Americans don’t believe that Democrats are combative,” Whitehouse said. “The best way to get rid of that label is to get on the field and fight. Our climate message has been bad for a long time, but it would be remiss of us to walk away from the war with the criminals of Central Casting (the climate denial fraud in the oil industry and the corrupt activities of dark money) and such huge stakes in the economic well-being of American families.” As people in the United States struggle with rising costs and rising gas prices, so do the oil giants collecting billions from the Iran war, a mess that Democrats can get into.
Matt Burgess, an economist at the University of Wyoming who studies how to find common ground on the environment, agrees with the broader view that Democrats alienated voters on cultural issues and lost focus on affordability, and that the ongoing message on climate change was part of that. But he said it is wrong to assume that climate change is a losing issue. “There is overwhelming evidence that climate change as a general issue helps Democrats and hurts Republicans,” Burgess said. A a study he co-authored in 2024 found that in a hypothetical world in which climate change was not an issue in the 2020 election, Republicans could get somewhere around 3 percent of the popular vote, enough to hand the White House to Trump instead of Joe Biden.
“If you have any issue that moves the needle in your favor in a very close election, it can make the difference between winning and losing,” Burgess said.
Exit polling suggests that there is little reason to believe that climate change will be a problem for Democrats in 2024, unlike other issues that play a bigger role. Swing voters considered “America’s efforts to combat climate change” a reason to support Harris over Trump by 21 points, according to a survey of 5,000 voters from. Navigator Research before and after the election. Trump won by wide margins on inflation, the economy, and immigration — concerns that were high among voters. “The very simple version is, Trump winning those voters won the election,” said Bryan Bennett, who runs the Loft Beck Strategies consulting practice, advising Democrats and progressives, and who led the post-election survey in his previous Navigator role.
Harris, in other words, didn’t lose because he rarely mentioned climate change, or even because Democrats passed climate policies under the Biden administration. Federal investment in infrastructure and manufacturing projects was linked, at the county level very little improvement in the lot section for Harris, an analysis from the Center for American Development found. If anything, the problem was that the voters he didn’t know enough about the involvement of the federal government provide loans to the administration.
Even if climate change isn’t an election issue for Democrats, they may have other reasons for keeping quiet about it. The media ecosystem is now fractured, with more people getting their news from TikTok, YouTube, and podcasts as opposed to traditional news sources, meaning it’s harder than ever for politicians to craft the narrative they want to hear, Bennett said. In recent years, the Democratic Party has gotten more serious about “message discipline,” the practice of sticking to a core message, trying to cut through the noise.
“A lot of the oxygen in the room is taken up with, ‘How do Democrats go about, and how do progressives go about, talking about the economy in a way that meets voters where they are?'” Bennett said. “And I think that precludes basically every other issue, regardless of whether it’s a good thing to talk about or not.”
Democratic politicians who still mention climate change have tended to do so indirectly, saying that clean energy is “cheap energy” and closed it rising electricity bills. Polls suggest that voters are eager for more: Last fall, 41 percent of them researched by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication they said they wanted political candidates to talk about efforts to reduce global warming more often, almost twice as many as wanted to hear about it a little. Anti-climate trends may stem from misconceptions: Studies show that politicians and the general public they tend to underestimate Americans’ desire for action on climate change, from carbon taxes to expanding renewable energy.
“We have this tension where, I think, strongly, talking about climate change gives a net benefit. It’s a very small benefit, but it’s a real benefit,” Mildenberger said. “But we have a speech that somehow says that it’s too expensive.”
