This story was originally published by Grist.
Nearly a year after the 2024 election, Democrats are still trying to figure out what went wrong. In the midst of this soul-searching, a new piece of advice has appeared: “Don’t say climate change.”
That’s the takeaway from a recent poll by the Searchlight Institute, a new Democratic think tank. Americans said they see climate change as a problem, but it’s rarely one of their top issues — voters in battleground states are more concerned with affordability and health care. But when asked which issue they think the Democratic Party prioritizes, climate change was number one.
This mismatch might explain, at least in part, why Democrats often get portrayed as out of touch. “Advocates and elected officials should understand that their messages are actively weakened by a focus on ‘climate’ over affordability and low energy prices, and that voters are looking for immediate help with rising costs rather than solutions to abstract problems,” Searchlight’s post about the polling said.
The results didn’t surprise Representative Sean Casten, an Illinois Democrat and longtime climate champion who’s been making the case that clean energy can lower electricity bills. Casten recently unveiled draft legislation called the Cheap Energy Agenda, along with Representative Mike Levin, a California Democrat.
“There’s no obvious electoral upside in being really smart on energy and climate policy,” Casten said. But he’s still talking about climate change all the time. “Polling doesn’t tell you what you talk about,” he said. “It tells you how you talk about it.”
Advocacy groups are on board, too, with the League of Conservation Voters, Climate Power, and others running an ad blitz this summer blaming Republicans for increasing energy costs.
Over the last decade, activists and organizations pushed Democratic politicians to take climate change seriously. The youth-led Sunrise Movement rose to prominence as a force in climate politics in 2018, when activists stormed into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, demanding a Green New Deal. They eventually succeeded in helping to elevate climate change in the party’s platform. Democrats even passed the country’s most ambitious climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, in 2022 to accelerate the adoption of clean energy through tax credits and incentives — a sweeping effort dismantled by Republicans this year.
Searchlight’s pragmatic, follow-the-polls approach has been interpreted by some Democrats as a push to abandon what they believe in. Tré Easton, vice president for public policy at Searchlight, sees it differently. “It’s not that Democrats should just jettison their long-held policy beliefs and their values,” he said. “It’s that there needs to be a recalibration of how they make those pitches to voters. Because clearly, I think the results of the 2024 election would demonstrate that something’s not working.”
