Democrats are increasingly dropping climate change from their midterm messaging after spending the Biden years pursuing an aggressive environmental agenda.
Climate change has largely disappeared as a defining issue for Democratic candidates ahead of the November midterms, a striking reversal from the 2020 election cycle, when proposals such as the Green New Deal occupied a prominent place in the party’s political agenda. The retreat comes as Americans rank affordability and the cost of living among their top concerns, pushing Democrats to campaign on pocketbook issues after years of pursuing an aggressive climate agenda, according to a July Pew Research Center survey.
“Democrats aren’t abandoning their climate agenda because they suddenly discovered affordable, reliable energy. They’re abandoning the language because voters have discovered the price tag,” Jason Isaac, the CEO and founder of the American Energy Institute, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“Very few voters have ever cared about climate change, and now all the other oddities on the Democratic side, DSA, DEI, etc., have become more important, which gives people permission to ignore climate,” Michael McKenna, a Republican strategist and former Trump White House official, told DCNF. “Part of it is definitely that there was never really a pathway to ‘solve’ whatever people imagined the climate crisis to be. Hard to ring a fire bell unless you have fire trucks.”
The shift has become pronounced enough to earn its own label “climate hushing.” The Searchlight Institute, a Democratic think tank, has recommended that Democrats stop talking explicitly about climate change because voters do not consider it a top priority.
The Sunrise Movement, the progressive organization that helped mobilize young voters around climate policy, has meanwhile expanded its organizing into issues beyond environmental policy, including immigration enforcement and opposition to the Trump administration.
“After years of restricting reliable energy and spending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars subsidizing politically favored technologies, the Green New Scam has collided with the reality of higher electricity bills and growing concerns about reliability,” Isaac continued. “Changing the campaign rhetoric doesn’t change the policies, and voters shouldn’t be fooled by the rebranding.”
High-profile Democrat governors, like Pennsylvania’s Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro and New York’s Kathy Hochul, have shifted their talking points to take aim at data centers.
Shapiro has recently imposed strict new restrictions on data center development, requiring developers to pay the full cost of new electricity infrastructure, meet water conservation standards, engage with local communities and make legally binding commitments to meet the state’s requirements. Shapiro also removed all AI data center proposals from Pennsylvania’s fast-track permitting program, a shift from his previous embrace of the industry that the Daily Caller reported in August.
Shapiro took a more aggressive approach to climate policy during the Biden administration, proposing a Pennsylvania-specific cap-and-invest program in 2024 that would set a cap on carbon emissions from large power plants and use the proceeds in part to support clean-energy projects. At the time that any energy policy Shapiro supported by his administration must “take real action to address climate change,” while his broader plan also sought to expand Pennsylvania’s clean-energy standards and attract additional investment in wind, solar and other lower-carbon energy sources.
Texas has also moved to rein in data center development, with Republican Gov. Greg Abbott ordering regulators in August to audit every data center advancing through the state’s grid interconnection process and barring projects from moving forward until the review was completed. Abbott later said the directive had halted as many as 1,800 projects, while requiring developers to protect the electric grid and water supplies and avoid shifting costs onto residents, the Daily Caller reported.
Hochul has gone further by imposing what her office described as the nation’s first statewide moratorium on new hyperscale data centers in July, arguing the facilities should produce their own electricity or pay a premium to use the grid rather than raise utility bills for residents. The Daily Caller reported that the move prompted criticism from President Donald Trump, who contrasted New York’s approach with states encouraging data center development.
“Which one of the Ds running for president have put climate change front and center of their campaign?” McKenna added. “That tells you everything you need to know.”
During President Donald Trump’s first term, Democratic presidential candidates competed over sweeping proposals to reduce emissions and transform the nation’s energy system. At least 15 Democratic presidential candidates supported banning fossil fuel extraction on public lands and 10 supported banning fracking, DCNF reported in 2019. The Green New Deal, introduced by Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey, also appeared poised to become a “centerpiece” of the party’s 2020 campaign against Trump.
Democrats subsequently enacted major pieces of their climate agenda under former President Joe Biden. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act poured hundreds of billions of dollars into green energy and climate initiatives, while the Biden administration pursued sweeping environmental regulations targeting power plants, cars and trucks and oil and gas producers in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
“Six years ago, Green New Deal was every phrase out of Ed Markey’s mouth every chance he got. That is not the case now,” Democratic strategist Mary Anne Marsh told the Associated Press (AP) while discussing Markey’s reelection campaign.
Markey, who co-authored the Green New Deal with AOC, still touts the proposal, but his campaign has placed greater emphasis on other political issues. Climate change more broadly has been eclipsed in Democratic campaigns by affordability and opposition to Trump, according to the AP.
Markey, Shapiro and Hochul did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.
The Searchlight Institute has made the strategic calculation even more explicit. The Democratic think tank published a recommendation titled “The First Rule About Solving Climate Change: Don’t Say Climate Change,” arguing candidates may be more successful campaigning on other issues, winning office and then pursuing climate policies once in power, according to the AP.
Democratic Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, one of Congress’ most outspoken climate advocates, called sidelining the issue a strategic “blunder,” arguing climate change increasingly intersects with pocketbook issues such as insurance costs and property values, according to the AP.
Sixty-three percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents described climate change as a “very big problem” in an April Pew Research Center survey.
“The endless nonsense about an ‘existential threat’ caused a lot of people to ask whether it really was a threat to our existence. Guess what everyone concluded?” McKenna said.
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