Doubling down on climate won't win the Senate

It’s the cost of living, stupid

Back on April 28, I posed a pretty straightforward question to all factions of Democrats — “What’s The Plan to Win The Senate?” — and readers have asked me since whether I’ve gotten any good responses.

The answer is … not really.

As Shane Goldmacher reported, Democrats currently seem focused on recruiting. And recruiting is important. If Roy Cooper is your nominee in North Carolina, that makes winning in North Carolina more plausible. Likewise with Mary Peltola in Alaska, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, and other key names on the list. But I think the recruiting focus is also a way to elide the conversation of what those recruits say when they run, and what the national party adopts as its message.

The most intriguing name on the list of target recruits, really, is former Louisiana governor John Bel Edwards. Edwards is clearly the strongest possible recruit for that state, though equally obviously, he would still be a huge underdog. What makes him interesting is that unlike Cooper or Andy Beshear, I have never seen him highlighted in any context by the national party as a red state champion. The reason is that Edwards, as governor, signed a draconian abortion ban, but I think that’s exactly what would make Edwards a great recruit, much better than anyone else on Schumer’s list. Not because I agree with him about abortion (I think he’s wrong) or because I think abortion rights is per se bad politics (in most contexts it’s one of Democrats’ best issues), but because this is an issue where the tent has clearly narrowed relative to 2005, and enthusiastically backing Edwards would be a clear move to expand it.

After all, while abortion rights is a great issue for Democrats nationally, it’s a bad issue for them in the South.

Among the white population, abortion rights is a lot more popular than the Democratic Party, but in the African-American population it’s the reverse. So in states like Louisiana and Mississippi with a larger Black population, abortion rights probably loses more votes than it wins. Trump successfully took a lot of the juice out of the abortion issue by coming out against a federal ban, and I think Democrats need to expand the tent here. Recruiting Edwards and clearly stating that while Democrats are still the pro-choice party, they welcome supporters with a range of views would be a big deal.

But I’ve also heard a really bad plan: A safe seat senator told me that Democrats should “double down on climate change,” which at first I thought was just him being eccentric.

But Jay Inslee published a Washington Post op-ed announcing that the climate movement’s official theory of the case for Democrats is that they could win more elections by talking more — and more aggressively — about climate change. And as I wrote on Tuesday, there’s a push within the climate movement to try to force frontline senators to talk more about climate.

This is a terrible idea, and I believe most stakeholders in the Democratic Party know that it’s a terrible idea. But the climate movement is so over-funded and so shot-through with expressive politics and misinformation that I’m worried party leaders won’t say that it’s a terrible idea.

Please look at the map

The beginning of wisdom here is to go back and look at Schumer’s list of target recruits.

In Alaska, he wants former Rep. Mary Peltola. She’d be a great recruit. She’s also a strong supporter of Alaska’s fossil fuel industry, which is one of the reasons she’d be such a great recruit. If the Senate were 50-50, Democrats would put a lot of effort into persuading Lisa Murkowski, a pro-choice and anti-Trump moderate Republican, to switch parties. But guess what? She’s also a strong supporter of Alaska’s fossil fuel industry.

In Texas, Schumer wants Colin Allred. Another good choice. Allred lost last time around, but he did overperform. He also slammed the Biden administration’s LNG export pause and portrayed himself as a defender of the Texas oil and gas industry. And he got slammed by Ted Cruz as a fake who supports the national Democratic Party’s efforts to kill the Texas oil and gas industry.

In Ohio, Schumer wants Sherrod Brown. In some ways, this is the clearest case. Brown clashed repeatedly with the Obama administration over climate and won re-election bids in 2012 and 2018. He then became a more orthodox green for most of the Biden years, only to try to pivot back to the center in the summer of 2024. Ohio, like Alaska and Texas, has a robust oil and gas industry, and you can’t win there as someone who wants to kill a home state industry. This is not unique to Ohio or Texas or Alaska. The Democrats from Colorado and Pennsylvania and New Mexico are the most oil and gas friendly members of the caucus, because those states have oil and gas industries. Note that this is not unique to oil and gas. No politician anywhere runs on kneecapping a major home state industry!

I know many Democrats have been heartened by recent electoral wins by the Labor Party in Australia and the Liberal Party in Canada, both boosted by anti-Trump sentiment.

But Labor prime minister Anthony Albanese views Australia as an energy-producing country, and while they have taken measures to boost renewables deployment and electric cars, they’re not seeking to curb coal mining or exports. Similarly, Mark Carney went to Alberta to proclaim his desire to make Canada an “energy superpower” that would “recognize that we are home to an abundance of conventional — that means oil and gas — conventional and clean energy resources.” I think that part where he went off script and clarified that by conventional he meant oil and gas is important. The prepared text was sort of doing dog whistle moderation, but he wanted people to hear his message clearly: that, while his strongest interest is in facilitating clean energy deployment, he intends to keep selling the world oil and gas as long as oil and gas are useful.

Everybody knows you’re not winning in Colorado, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, or Alaska on a message of shutting down fossil fuels. But if you’re not winning those states, you don’t have a majority. Instead of the national party adopting a message that’s toxic in those states and then recruiting candidates who try to distance themselves from it, the solution is for the national party to adopt the same kind of messages that work for the center-left in Canada and Australia and Norway.

The youth climate mirage

The climate movement maneuvered around this obvious reality for years by trying to hack opinion data and argue that young people or voters of color were especially motivated by the climate issue. This was always based on a pretty obvious bit of deception. If you take a Dem-leaning subset of the population and then ask them how much they care about a Dem-coded issue like climate, then yes, of course you’ll find that subset of the population cares more about climate than the population average.

But do marginal non-white voters care a lot about climate? Marginal young voters?

Well, we just spent 2021-2024 running the experiment of what happens when the Democratic Party makes climate, rather than health care or other aspects of the social safety net, their top legislative priority. And what happened was an unprecedented swing of young people and voters of color toward the GOP. I don’t want to argue that this happened solely because of the climate focus. But to turn around and say that even more climate focus is the answer strains credulity.

If anything, younger voters and non-white voters are more focused on economic well-being relative to older and whiter voters.

This is not particularly mysterious. I would be annoyed if my electric bill went up 20 percent, but I’d survive just fine. The further down the socioeconomic ladder you are, the less you have the luxury to blow this kind of thing off. You’re talking about blocs of voters who are drawn to the Democratic Party specifically because of support for Medicaid and other social safety net programs, but who also want competent economic management and material prosperity, and are trying to decide which party will deliver it. As Ruben Gallego says, you’re talking to people who want to make enough money to get their own place and buy a big-ass truck, or whatever else they think would be cool. Maybe they want a house with another bedroom so they can have another kid.

Data from the Tufts CIRCLE youth poll shows that young voters were less mad about immigration than older voters, but still ranked immigration and health care as more important than climate, and all of those issues were dwarfed by “the economy.”

What’s especially crazy-making about this is that on some level, the climate movement conceded all of this years ago. That was the point of the Greening of the New Deal — at a time when people were really focused on job creation, they had to pursue climate objectives in a way that advanced the goal of job creation.

Voters care a lot about consumer prices

The problem with the Green New Deal construct from the standpoint of 2025 (or 2024 or 2023 or 2022, for that matter) is that job creation is no longer most people’s main economic concern. Instead, with the unemployment rate low in the wake of a nasty burst of inflation, most people have become very focused on the cost of living.

The good news is that if you personally care a lot about climate change, even if the voters don’t, there are things that are helpful on climate and also bring down the cost of living.

Unfortunately, most of those things aren’t things the environmental movement favors or prioritizes, like making nuclear regulation friendlier to the rollout of advanced reactors. Democrats had two opportunities during the Biden Administration to pass a legislative deal that would speed the permitting process for clean energy projects. But in both cases, environmental groups killed the deal because it also offered concessions to ease the path for natural gas projects.

I don’t really know what to say to that.

The climate movement got Democrats to make climate change their top priority for a party line bill. The bill poured an enormous amount of money into facilitating clean energy deployment. Democrats are, as we speak, fighting to preserve those programs in the wake of GOP repeal efforts. But the clean energy deployment has been limited by permitting bottlenecks — bottlenecks that green groups refused to prioritize lifting, because their core commitment was killing fossil fuel projects, even though that agenda offers no path to a legislative majority and is equally toxic in a “jobs” frame or a “prices” frame.

Instead of having the internal conversation that the movement desperately needs, they’re putting Inslee out there to lie to people and say that talking more about climate will win Democrats more votes.

I care a lot about foreign aid and global public health. There is a substantial community of us who think this issue is massively important.

But we aren’t running around lying to each other and to Democratic Party politicians, insisting that talking about foreign aid is a great way to persuade swing voters. The smart leaders in the global development community are instead trying to think about ways to adapt political reality and what can be done in the policy space that is actually constructive.

Democrats have already done a lot on climate, but they’re running up against the public’s clear prioritization of the cost of living and the climate movement’s own indecision about how to resolve some of these issues around permitting. If you challenge environmentalists about the fact that Chinese emissions now dwarf American emissions, they’ll tell you it’s fine because China is deploying clean energy at a record pace. What Democrats need to do to have a winning strategy on energy is to be accorded the same level of grace that the climate movement accords to Xi Jinping, so that they can focus in a low-key way on making clean energy cheaper and more widely available. Instead, they face this childish egomania, with the climate movement demanding that Democrats talk more about an issue that is primarily motivating to their existing base voters, even when the proponents of “talk more” as a strategy can’t begin to outline a workable policy agenda.