The groups have learned nothing

We got the League of Conservation Voters’ endorsement questionnaire and it’s bad.

Democratic presidential hopefuls raise their hands to signal support for a policy popular with the party’s left flank but a liability in a general election. (Photo by Saul Loeb)

I know many people find discourse about “the groups” — a conversation that I’m probably largely responsible for elevating — to be annoyingly vague and non-specific. But I worry that digging in too much on individual cases will create a misleading impression that some specific group is unusually influential or pernicious, when the relevant dynamic is quite general.

The non-specific phrase “the groups” is itself something that I picked up from talking to people who work on Capitol Hill. They often invoke the concept to explain Democratic Party decision-making, and they normally do it in precisely those terms — what matters is not one group (that’s easy to blow off) but a collective of groups who form a pseudo-consensus.

Still, specifics can be illustrative. And as it happens, last week a few different sources sent me the full questionnaire that the League of Conservation Voters is sending members of Congress who are seeking its endorsement in the 2025-26 cycle.

These endorsements are important for two reasons.

One is that sometimes, in a contested primary for a frontline seat, the endorsements of progressive groups manage to tilt the primary toward someone who’s less electable (the 2022 House race in Oregon-5 comes to mind) and that can throw the race to Republicans.

But I think the other, more significant reason is subtler. Most politicians hold safe seats, and most politicians want upward mobility, whether that’s chairing committees or running for higher office or being considered for executive branch appointments. If you hold a safe seat (as most elected officials do) there’s very little short-term downside to embracing demands from these groups, even if they don’t perfectly align with voters’ views. And interest groups like the League of Conservation Voters (L.C.V.) can meaningfully impact your odds of being considered for upward mobility.

This creates an incentive to say “yes” to whatever they happen to ask for. Moderation-skeptics keep making the point that it’s increasingly difficult for individual members to distinguish themselves from national party brands, but that just means that the groups’ sway over safe seat members is a big deal, even if they’re more pragmatic in their attitude toward frontline races. The groups define the national policy agenda, and the national policy agenda influences the fate of the whole party.

And looking at the L.C.V. questionnaire, it’s clear that for this particular group, at least, nothing has changed since the fall election.

The affordability skinsuit

Democrats in all factions agree that the path forward on energy politics is an ironclad focus on affordability. One reason is that it’s a top-of-mind concern for voters. Another is that inflation was a killer in the 2024 election. A third reason is that electricity prices specifically are rising right now. And a fourth is that the Trump administration’s anti-renewables dogmatism is genuinely making these problems harder to solve. An administration that acted more like China or Texas and embraced renewables and natural gas would make energy both cleaner and cheaper than Trump’s current posture of trying to kneecap renewables while funneling subsidies toward coal.

But the question I keep asking is whether Democrats are actually changing their policy orientation back to an Obama-style affordability-focused “all of the above” energy strategy … or are they sticking with Biden-style “try to extinguish fossil fuel production but then don’t actually because of courts and Joe Manchin, and then refuse to talk about record oil and gas output” and trying to put an affordability skinsuit on?

The L.C.V. questionnaire is pretty clear.

They want members of Congress to “support a transition to 100 percent clean electricity by 2035,” with clean defined as wind, solar, and advanced geothermal (no nuclear) as an interim step toward net zero emissions. Net zero to them means that “carbon sequestration using natural climate solutions” is allowed, but presumably ideas like direct air capture or rock weathering would not be.

So are they encouraging a focus on speeding up renewables deployment? Not really. They want politicians to “oppose any legislative and administrative efforts to undermine or sidestep NEPA” — the National Environmental Policy Act — and, in fact, to support an environmental justice bill that would create “new environmental review requirements.”

After all the dozens and dozens of articles and books about how solar panels and batteries are cheaper than ever, and getting cheaper all the time, and how the important thing now is to facilitate the deployment of this amazing, new clean technology, there’s basically nothing in L.C.V.’s list of asks that would actually facilitate the deployment of clean energy.

They do want to roll back the Trump administration’s impediments, which is good. But we know that when Biden was president, it was still frustratingly hard to actually get new renewables on the grid because of issues with siting, permitting, transmission, and interconnection. There’s no proposal in the L.C.V. policy wish list to do anything about this, in part because they don’t care that much and in part because passing new legislation on this stuff requires getting the votes of members who are from states and districts that produce fossil fuels. And that means doing a deal that also meets some of the oil and gas industry’s permitting concerns, which green groups don’t like because their fundamental focus is on shutting down the fossil fuel industry.

There is a whole “fighting dirty energy” section of the questionnaire that asks respondents to commit to halting all new offshore drilling and all new fossil fuel projects on western federal lands. They also want to halt liquefied-natural-gas exports, even though it’s not even clear doing that would reduce climate change. Indeed, to the extent that the environmental community has any real ideas on affordability, it’s the too-cute-by-half argument that banning exports is affordability policy, because it depresses the price of domestic natural gas. The point, though, is that this is just the same agenda to kill the fossil fuel industry. There’s no real concern for cost of living, and not even consistent prioritization of climate change.

The everything bagel

L.C.V. isn’t interested in making solar and wind as cheap as possible, not only in terms of permitting and environmental review issues, but just on a basic production level. They say that 100 percent clean energy by 2035 should be achieved “in a manner that creates family-supporting, union jobs.”

Conceptually, I think it’s correct to say that Democrats should temper their enthusiasm for environmental causes with consideration of competing interests. And labor unions can often be a useful voice for those other interests.

Again, though, what’s striking about this L.C.V. questionnaire is that they’re happy to defer to union coalition allies when doing so makes renewable energy more expensive, but they’re not generally interested in a labor perspective on things.

Unions, for example, tend to be very supportive of nuclear power and carbon capture as climate solutions (L.C.V. is not). The United Auto Workers is really not a fan of making people buy electric cars. The Big Three have about 38 percent of the American light vehicle market, but only 20 percent of the electric vehicle market in which Tesla is a huge player and Hyundai/Kia punches above its weight. Phasing out production of new gasoline-powered cars polls terribly (34-65), so if you’re looking to throw labor unions a bone, it might make sense to avoid banning gasoline-powered cars.

I think L.C.V. understands that asking candidates for office to commit to a ban is unreasonable — it’s unpopular, unions hate it, and the financial benefits flow primarily to Elon Musk, who is widely hated in the Democratic Party.

But instead of deciding that they’re going to stop asking for this, they bury the ask in jargon about how “the Biden administration’s EPA set strong cleaner-cars-and-trucks standards, and granted Clean Air Act waivers for states to implement the Advanced Clean Cars II (ACC II), Heavy-Duty Vehicle Omnibus (HDO), and Advanced Clean Truck (ACT) rules” and we should go back to that. But what they’re saying here is that they want to pull regulatory levers to make it illegal to produce conventional cars and trucks, because “without both federal incentives and rules, we will not reach our goal of eliminating emissions from all new cars and trucks by 2035.”

Of course, L.C.V. also wants to show that they care about racial justice. Their way of doing that is to tout “the Justice40 initiative, which directed 40 percent of the benefits of infrastructure and climate investments to environmental justice communities.”

Another way of looking at this would be to say that Black and Hispanic Democrats are lower-income than white Democrats, and thus more sensitive to things like electricity prices or the costs of being made to replace your old truck with an electric one. But instead of maybe just being a little more chill about ideas that generate conflict with coalition partners, L.C.V. has decided to have no chill, and instead lard down their own policy proposals with union and racial targeting requirements that make them less effective and further increase polarization.

Leaders need to halt the doom loop

One reason these interest group checklists are important is that primary voters don’t have a ton of information about the details of candidates’ policy positions, but they do care about endorsements. Jacqueline Colao, David Broockman, Gregory A. Huber, and Joshua Kalla find that, contrary to conventional wisdom, primary voters aren’t particularly extreme in their views. But they do have positive affect toward partisan-aligned groups like L.C.V., and L.C.V. is under no obligation to release their full questionnaire or explain their reasoning. So even if you’re a candidate who thinks it’s more important to get a bipartisan deal to maximize clean electricity than to do ineffectual position-taking against the oil and gas industry, all the voters will hear from L.C.V. during a primary campaign is that your opponent is good on the environment and you’re bad.

After the 2024 election, Third Way undertook a postmortem process that generated recommendations for how Democrats could do better in the future. It included some contentious ideas that made people mad online, but I think one of their least controversial proposals was the idea that this kind of checklist exercise is counterproductive — as witnessed by the now-infamous A.C.L.U. questionnaire that proved so troublesome to Kamala Harris.

What we’re seeing here, though, is that nothing has actually changed.

L.C.V. has not changed any of its substantive commitments, which I suppose is understandable if they truly don’t think they should. But they haven’t even made tactical adjustments about the wisdom of making candidates compete in this kind of checklist-a-thon.

And to be clear, though this is just one organization, it’s an important one; L.C.V.’s constellation of PACs spent upwards of $150 million on the 2024 election.

So Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer are in an awkward position. On the one hand, what they really ought to do is discourage candidates from participating in this sweepstakes and outline a midterm policy agenda that is genuinely focused on lowering costs. But on the other hand, leftists are right when they say that Democratic efforts to embrace a populist economic agenda are hobbled by donor interests. The hobbling here, though, isn’t from right-wingers who hate taxing the rich (in fact, all Democrats in office support this), it’s from progressive ideologues who want to make normal cars illegal.

That said, I do think that the overwhelming majority of donors to L.C.V.-aligned PACs, and L.C.V. staffers themselves, probably sincerely want Democrats to win a majority.

The Trump administration and its policies are terrible for the environment. Their approach to energy is much worse for climate change than an “all of the above” approach would be, and they’re rolling back basic air-pollution rules to allow more mercury to poison people. I bet the people working on environmental issues have lots of progressive non-climate commitments, too. They probably also care about the rule of law and the basic integrity of American democracy, so I wish they would behave in a less dysfunctional manner.

But fundamentally, it’s the elected leadership of the party that needs to lead — to outline a national agenda for the party that blows off these questionnaires and can plausibly compete across a large map of states. Then get the groups and the donors and everyone else on board. It’s a difficult job, but the groups left to themselves aren’t going to do it.