The Underestimated Power of the Climate Voter

Climate voters could end up being an important part of what happens today. That’s a bit surprising considering how little either candidate has talked about climate change on the campaign trail.

Evidence that the campaigns may have underestimated climate voters comes from the Environmental Voter Project. The group hopes to mobilize a significant chunk of what it estimates are eight million “non-voting environmentalists” this year and in future elections: i.e., people who rank climate change as a top issue but are unlikely to vote. Polling from 2020 suggests first-time voters who care about climate change played an important part in Joe Biden’s victory that year. The Environmental Voter Project’s modeling further suggests that, among swing states, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina have the largest proportion of unlikely climate voters. Tracking early voting, they found that 45,000 “first-time climate voters” in Georgia and more than 33,000 in North Carolina have already cast ballots, Grist reports—numbers that could make or break Harris’s ability to win those crucial states.

Green groups have quite a bit of money and established infrastructure to throw at elections. The League of Conservation Voters Action Fund, NextGen PAC, the Sierra Club, and the NRDC Action Fund all endorsed Biden early on in the race in the summer of 2023 and then promptly backed Harris once she became the nominee. In August, the League of Conservation Voters Victory Fund, Environmental Defense Fund Action Votes, and Climate Power Action, alongside the Democratic-aligned Future Forward PAC, announced they would spend $55 million on an ad campaign targeting swing states.* The League of Conservation Voters announced last month that it planned to spend $155 million this election cycle across its arms and affiliates that deal with electoral politics.

On some level, environmentalists going all in for Harris makes sense. Trump and his team have elaborate plans for kneecapping any and all progress on climate change; thanks partly to ginned-up culture wars around everything from ESG to E.V.s and partly to the fabulous amounts of money that fossil fuel executives give to it, the Republican Party is functionally dead set against anything called climate policy. Even if she hasn’t fleshed out a detailed climate agenda or said much about it, Harris winning keeps Trump out of office and promises at least some amount of continuity with Biden. It’s a painfully low bar to clear, but Biden’s administration has done more to reduce emissions than any in recent memory.

In other ways, stepping back, this situation is a little bizarre. An onslaught of deadly climate-fueled disasters in the United States hasn’t made rising temperatures much more of an issue on the campaign trail here and may not do much to tip the scales in swing states. Those disasters don’t seem to make all that much of an impact on how people vote. Fearful, presumably, that she’ll turn off swing voters in Pennsylvania, Harris also hasn’t talked much about climate change and hasn’t come forward with many plans to do something about it—and wouldn’t dare politicize storms like Hurricane Helene. It stands to reason there will be ever more people concerned about the fact that the planet is getting warmer and more dangerous. Many of them will be young—part of a demographic that’s less likely to vote. They’ll also, inordinately—for the foreseeable future—vote for Democrats. Environmentalists will have cash and volunteers on hand to turn those people out to vote. Since the Inflation Reduction Act passed in the summer of 2022, though, the biggest environmental groups throwing the most money around in elections haven’t demanded much in return for that get-out-the-vote service.

Climate voters, by one definition, may indeed play a big role in shaping the outcome of this election. What’s not at all obvious is whether either that or the increasingly obvious effects of climate change itself will make much of a difference in how Harris will govern if she wins with their votes.

* This piece originally misstated the amount of money climate-focused groups committed to ads in swing states.