Why Didn’t Climate Change Come Up More in the Presidential Campaign?

Though the stakes could hardly be higher for a planet increasingly imperiled by global warming, the topic surfaced only occasionally in the run-up to the presidential election, puzzling analysts who said that climate change is a key issue for voters that Vice President Kamala Harris needed to court.

The Democratic platform recognizes climate change as a global emergency and warns that protecting Americans’ lives and futures requires urgent action. Yet the economy, abortion rights and threats to democracy were the central issues of the Harris campaign, with climate getting just passing mentions. That remained true even after Hurricanes Helene and Milton battered key swing states and scientists said climate change supercharged their intensity.

Former President Donald Trump, meanwhile, promised to expand the production of gas and oil, what he called the “liquid gold under our feet”; pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement “so fast your head will spin”; and continue his previous administration’s demolition of dozens of climate and environmental rules, a job that would be easier with a new round of Trump-appointed judges. 

Harris has had overwhelming support from environmental activists—some progressive groups that had declined to endorse President Joe Biden voiced support for her soon after she entered the race in July. But some criticized her campaign for speaking out so little on climate change.

After the candidates’ one debate in September, during which Harris emphasized she would not ban fracking and touted the increased oil and gas production under the Biden administration, the youth-led Sunrise Movement fired off a frustrated statement. “Harris missed a critical opportunity to lay out a stark contrast with Trump and show young voters that she will stand up to Big Oil and stop the climate crisis,” Stevie O’Hanlon with the Sunrise Movement said at the time. “Harris spent more time promoting fracking than laying out a bold vision for a clean energy future.”

One potential reason: Even though a recent poll from George Mason University and Yale found that 62 percent of registered voters “would prefer to vote for a candidate for public office who supports action on global warming,” that same survey found climate change ranked only 19th out of 28 issues as “very important.” 

But that’s among all registered voters. The base that Harris needs to turn out, liberal Democrats, ranked global warming the fourth most important issue.

Inside Climate News asked some top thinkers on climate policy, pollsters, voting experts, an activist, a climate scientist and one former U.S. senator why climate change didn’t come up more than it did and how that could matter.

One of them—former Democratic U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, who Harris succeeded in 2017—pushed back against the notion that the Harris campaign skimped on climate change. “Harris has mentioned it in almost every speech she makes,” Boxer said, “particularly when she addresses the new voters.”

“Those Three Groups Care a Lot About Climate Change”

Anthony Leiserowitz is the director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, which has extensively studied where climate change ranks in priority for voters. 

“It’s not in Trump’s wheelhouse, so it’s not surprising he doesn’t talk about it, other than his usual rants about offshore wind and whales,” Leiserowitz said. “But the biggest surprise is why Kamala Harris hasn’t talked about it. Part of me is mystified by that, because our data show that climate change has not dropped as a voting priority, especially for liberal Democrats.” 

In Leiserowitz’s last survey, climate change fell behind only election integrity, abortion and healthcare as the issue of most importance to liberal Democrats.

“It’s at the very top of the voting priorities of the base of the Democratic party,” Leiserowitz said. 

Leiserowitz noted that Harris’ campaign appeared to go after undecided votes and peel off Republican voters who may have voted for Trump’s Republican primary challenger, Nikki Haley. 

Undecided voters are “historically what we call ‘low information’ voters. They don’t pay attention to politics. Climate change is not an issue for them,” he said. “They tend to be driven by kitchen table, economic concerns.” Climate change is not an important issue for Republicans, either.

If the campaign’s strategy was to go after these groups, it’s not surprising that Harris didn’t waste time raising the climate issue. But for three critical demographics for Harris—young voters, people of color and suburban women—climate change is a key issue. Motivating these groups to vote could swing the election.

“It turns out those three groups care a lot about climate change,” Leiserowitz said. “If young people voted in proportion to their size in the population, elections wouldn’t be close—and they’re the ones who care about climate change, as do people of color, particularly Latinos. That’s why I’m surprised. In the end, they may be banking that these demographics are motivated by other issues.”

“They’ve Decided That She Shouldn’t Talk About It”

Vice President Harris hasn’t gone “particularly deep” on climate issues on the campaign trail based on news reports, said Edward Maibach, a professor of communication and director of George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication. 

“I think her campaign has just decided that it’s an issue that she doesn’t have to talk about and so they’ve decided that she shouldn’t talk about it,” said Maibach, whose work focuses on helping humanity overcome the existential threats of climate change.

The week after Biden stepped aside and endorsed Harris, more than 350 climate leaders did the same, noting that Harris “has been a climate action champion for her entire career.”

But research conducted by Maibach’s center suggests that in not talking about climate, the Harris campaign is failing to appeal to voters who otherwise might stay home. 

“I think her campaign is making a strategic error,” he said. “We know that environmental voters have a really poor track record of showing up.”

The Environmental Voter Project, a nonprofit advocacy group, identified 4.8 million voters this election who had strong pro-environmental attitudes but were likely not to show up. As of Monday, the group reported that more than 561,000 of those low-propensity climate voters—about 12 percent—had cast ballots early; the group had 7,000 volunteers working in 19 states to get the rest to the polls. 

The vice president could have made it really clear that she’s going to continue Biden’s work on climate change and “even do it one better,” Maibach said. “By not talking about it, she risks leaving those voters at home.”

It doesn’t help that the Biden administration did an insufficient job of talking about the Inflation Reduction Act. “That is a huge missed opportunity,” Maibach said, “because it really is the biggest climate investment the world has ever seen.”

“I think her campaign is making a strategic error. We know that environmental voters have a really poor track record of showing up.”

— Edward Maibach, George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication

Most voters have no idea what the IRA is, he said, “but when we describe it to them briefly, they say, ‘That’s a good idea.’ Even many Republicans say that’s a good idea.” 

The administration needed to do a better job talking about the IRA—which passed after the vice president cast the deciding vote in Congress—not just for the political gains, Maibach said, but to connect people and businesses to its benefits.

Maibach thinks the lack of climate messaging by Harris comes down to fracking in Pennsylvania. The vice president’s advisors want her to win the swing state, and they’re worried that speaking about actions that might limit fracking could cost her voters. 

“I think that’s wrong,” he said. “Anybody who is going to be potentially alienated or put off by any discussion of policies that might limit fracking aren’t going to vote for Vice President Harris anyway. It’s the voters who might not show up because they think she’s not going to be strong on climate, those are the voters she’s leaving behind.”

In fact, a recent poll commissioned by the Ohio River Valley Institute showed that a significant majority of likely voters in the state supported more regulations on the natural gas industry.

Perception Versus Reality on Climate

In Pennsylvania, climate change is not a key issue for voters, said Christopher Borick, the director of the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion, which conducts frequent polling of Pennsylvanians on political and environmental issues.

Even as Pennsylvania is struggling to adapt to the effects of climate change, from drought and wildfires to heat and flooding, the number of voters for whom climate change is a top issue remains small. 

“Only one percent or two, when we do our polling in the state, identify it as the key issue,” Borick said. Of the Harris campaign’s focus on other issues, he said: “If the polling was telling them something different, they would behave differently.”

Nationwide, increases in the number of respondents who say they’re concerned about climate change, and that they’ve experienced the impacts of global warming, haven’t translated into a sense of urgency at the ballot box. Borick said that’s in part because so many Americans don’t see climate change as primarily manmade and therefore connected to government action and public policy. 

Only 46 percent of Americans believe that human activity “contributes a great deal to climate change.” Seventy-eight percent think that “natural patterns in earth’s environment” contribute some or a great deal. These beliefs are at odds with near-total scientific consensus on the human causes of climate change. 

“The clarity of the science and the clarity of people’s perception of the science are different things,” Borick said.

Because of these perceptions, the gap between the significant and wide-ranging consequences of climate change for the future and its importance as an electoral issue could not be wider. “The juxtaposition between the impacts of the issue on lives and where it stands politically is still striking,” he said.

“Bread and Butter Issues Are Weighing Heavily on Voters”

What candidates talk about can generally be traced back to what polling and media reports tell them voters care about, said Mindy Romero, an expert on voting behavior. 

“And in this election, bread and butter issues are weighing heavily on voters,” said Romero, a political sociologist and director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy at the University of Southern California’s Sol Price School of Public Policy. “There’s a big gap in almost every survey that I’ve seen between inflation, economy, jobs and everything else.”

The polling tells candidates they’ll be at a disadvantage if they don’t address those top issues, she said. And on the flip side, candidates may make a calculation not to talk about an important issue like climate because the other issues are grabbing more attention.

It’s risky to talk about climate if you’re trying to peel off some swing voters, or peel off some Trump voters, Romero said. “If you talk about climate, the Republican Party has done a very good job of putting climate activity and policy in the camp of the far left, very liberal, even anti-economy,” she explained. 

That’s been effective messaging for some voters, Romero said, “even as we’re experiencing an economic crisis one climate disaster at a time.”

“The One Who’s Going to Fight”

Boxer, a California Democrat who served in the U.S. Senate from 1993 to 2017 after five terms in the House of Representatives, disagrees that Harris has not talked much about climate on the campaign trail.

Her point that Harris talks about climate when speaking to young voters was reflected at a rally last week in the college town of Ann Arbor, Michigan. “I love your generation,” Harris said to students in the audience. “You are impatient for change. Because, look, you have only known the climate crisis and are leading, then, the charge to protect our planet and our future.”

Harris also has a great record on climate change “and he calls it a hoax,” Boxer said, referring to Trump. “I don’t think there’s any question in anybody’s mind, who’s going to be the one who’s going to fight.”

“If you don’t save the democracy, you’re never going to fix the climate problem because you’re going to have a dictator.”

— Former Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.)

Boxer, who with Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) formed the “Climate Action Task Force” in 2014 to make climate change a Senate priority, said she believes that if Harris is elected, major progress on climate commitments at home and worldwide will follow. 

But just as climate impacts multiple other issues, those issues can impact the climate fight. Boxer sees threats to democracy as a key one “because if you don’t save the democracy, you’re never going to fix the climate problem because you’re going to have a dictator.”

Preserve Democracy First, Then Act Boldly on Climate

Climate scientist Michael Mann, director of the Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, said he too understands why climate took a back seat to the threats to U.S. institutions during the campaign. More important than the amount of attention that climate received in stump speeches and debates is the level of action Democrats deliver if voters give them the opportunity, Mann said.

“As I see it, there is no possibility for meaningful action on climate if we don’t preserve our democracy, and that’s what is truly at threat in this election,” he said in an email. “So to the extent that Democrats emphasized this issue over nearly all others, I’m ok with that. AS LONG AS THEY DELIVER meaningful, aggressive climate policy progress if they manage to take control of both the Presidency and both houses of Congress and are in a policy to build on the policy successes (e.g. the Inflation Reduction Act) of the Biden administration.”

Staying the Course and Pressing for More

Climate activist and author Bill McKibben seems reluctant to second-guess Harris on the issue. 

“If Harris’s team thinks that supporting fracking in Pennsylvania is key to winning over undecided voters, then so be it,” he wrote in a recent article for The New Yorker.

McKibben said part of the reason climate change hasn’t been a bigger issue in this year’s election is that the U.S. is, he opined in his recent article, currently “more or less on the right track.” 

“The U.S. Congress took huge action thanks to Biden with the IRA,” McKibben told Inside Climate News. “We’re probably not going to get huge action again anytime soon. That bill is still playing out, and, with a Harris administration, will be for the next four years. There’s potentially a trillion dollars in it.”

However, McKibben was quick to note that if Harris is elected, he would be among those who would “push her hard” on climate policy.

“Quite possibly, I’ll end up arrested outside the Harris White House, just like I was outside the Obama White House,” McKibben said. “I hope that there’s a Harris White House to get arrested outside of.”