Democrat Mikie Sherrill captured the governor’s mansion in New Jersey last Tuesday in part because her campaign and its allies cast the energy transition as an affordability issue. One reason that electricity bills were going up, they said, was because President Donald Trump was squelching efforts to expand renewable energy in the Garden State.
A little farther south, Jared Littmann won his race by taking a very different tack on climate and energy politics. The next mayor of Annapolis, Maryland, leaned into the existential crisis of global warming and highlighted its immediate dangers — such as how sea-level rise is contributing to frequent floods of his waterfront city.
“What I had been told is to de-emphasize it a little bit or not come out as my top priority,” Littmann said of climate change. “But it’s hard in Annapolis to not be focused on those issues.”
That approach sets Littmann apart from much of his party as Democrats look to build on their electoral successes of last week.
Increasingly, Democratic lawmakers and consultants are urging either a retreat from climate politics or a recasting of its message — even if that means risking a rift with the party faithful.
Caution about climate messaging appears to have informed the winning campaigns of Tuesday’s disparate field of Democratic victors, which included a democratic socialist in New York, a former CIA officer in Virginia and a Navy helicopter pilot in New Jersey.
Gone was former President Joe Biden’s talk of climate change as an “existential crisis.” One thing that united New York’s Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, Virginia’s Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger and New Jersey’s Sherrill was a reluctance to mention climate change. Instead, they largely spoke of clean energy as a pocketbook issue.
These Democrats and others won their elections Tuesday “with a message of affordability — and I think that’s a pathway for us,” said Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, one of Congress’ fiercest climate hawks. “Regular people don’t like that crisis message.”
Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) took a similar view. It’s a winning strategy, he said, to talk about how clean energy investments can lower utility bills.
“I’m not sure having an overall conversation on climate change gets us there,” he added. “But if you could align the investments with the outcomes, I think you’d have a very good argument.”
That perspective is echoed by reports released recently by two centrist Democratic groups.
The reports argue that Democrats have lost elections in recent years because of the party’s hyperfocus on climate change. A voter who is struggling to pay bills, they say, doesn’t have the luxury to care about climate change.
The party’s focus on climate change has helped create a wedge between rich Democrats and working class voters who have drifted away from the party in recent elections, argues one report released last month by the centrist Democratic group WelcomePAC.
“Highly educated Democratic voters and affluent Democratic voters care more than the average American about issues like climate change, democracy, abortion, and identity and cultural issues—and less than the average American about issues like the cost of living, gas prices, border security, and crime,” the group concludes.
That echoes the claims of another centrist group, Searchlight Institute, which released a report in September that showed that even though almost 9 in 10 Democrats view climate change as a very serious problem, the vast majority of voters rank it way below affordability as their primary concern.
Climate messaging contributed to the notion that the party was disconnected from many voters, the report said.
“If the Democratic Party is going to shake the perception that they are focused on issues perceived as out-of-touch to most Americans,” the group concluded, “they’ll need a significant reset beyond just adding talk about lowering costs to climate messaging.”
Challenge for Democrats: Trump’s rhetoric
Not everyone on the left agrees, however, that a retreat from climate politics is the right approach. Some progressives maintain it’s still a potent issue and that last week’s election results proved the electorate was ready for more clean energy.
Among those making that case is Climate Power, an advocacy group co-founded by longtime Democratic insider John Podesta. It backed the idea that Trump’s attacks on renewable energy creates an opening for Democrats going into the 2026 midterm elections.
“To win in the midterms, Democratic candidates can proactively and relentlessly make the strong case that Trump and Republicans are raising electricity bills by gutting cheaper, reliable clean energy options,” the memo notes. “Democrats are fighting for more, less expensive electricity, while Republicans are taking power off the grid and raising costs on American families.”
While moderate Democrats have pointed to climate policy as one cause of past electoral losses, others say the real reason is because Trump and other Republicans frequently attack Democrats with misleading claims.
“Our opponents (Trump and the GOP) talk about climate change all the time—always using relentless disinformation to make Democrats look bad. You HAVE to have a plan for that or else you’re going to lose,” Genevieve Guenther, author of “The Language of Climate Politics,” wrote last week on BlueSky.
While in the White House, Biden signed into law one of the biggest climate laws in U.S. history — the Inflation Reduction Act with its $370 billion in clean energy spending. But he barely mentioned it in the final stretch of his 2024 campaign before he dropped out of the race. And he wasn’t alone; former Vice President Kamala Harris all but ignored climate and clean energy in her 107-day campaign.
But politics abhors a vacuum. As top Democrats backed away from speaking about climate policy, Republicans leaned into it.
During the 2024 campaign, Trump attacked Harris and Biden’s plans to increase clean energy at virtually every rally, frequently calling it the “Green New Scam” and falsely claiming they slowed oil and gas production, when it in fact reached record levels of production in the administration.
As Harris and Biden dialed back discussion of climate policy, Trump framed it as a cost driver, a key piece of the price spikes that occurred throughout the economy during the Biden administration as the world recovered from the Covid-19 pandemic.
“To further defeat inflation, my plan will terminate the Green New Deal, which I call the Green New Scam,” Trump said last September in the closing weeks of the presidential race.
“It actually sets us back, as opposed to moves us forward,” he added.
Trump’s efforts to paint climate policy as a burden were backed by conservative media. Fox News, whose commenters routinely distort climate science and typically align with Trump on the issue, ran more news segments on climate change than any other network except CNN in 2024, according to researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
CNN ran 1,078 segments on climate change, while Fox — the nation’s top-watched news station — ran 332. In fact, Fox covered climate more than all of the other stations, including CBS, ABC, NBC, PBS and MSNBC combined, which altogether ran a total of 326 segments on climate in 2024, the researchers found.
Several Democrats said they don’t want to cede the issue to Republican misinformation and argued that ignoring climate change won’t win back voters.
Kat Abughazaleh, a 26-year-old Democratic House candidate in Illinois, said she’s not backing away from climate policy. Abughazaleh is running in a crowded race in the 9th District, which includes Chicago’s northern suburbs, though some polling shows her near the top of the pack.
Her campaign strategy has centered around issues that motivate young voters, particularly those with concerns around the Trump’s administration’s immigration crackdown.
She said voters of her generation want to hear candidates address climate change and argued that politicians who avoid the topic are “doing a disservice to the people they want to represent.”
“Climate change is an existential issue,” she said. “I’m part of the generation where, when we’re asked what we want to do when we grow up, we have to think about climate change, where we’re going to live, what we want to do, how it’s going to impact us.”
For other Democrats, such as Rep. Sean Casten of Illinois, climate change has already helped them win multiple elections. Other blue-state Democrats, including Schatz and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, have won victories by centering their message on climate.
Casten said Democrats should continue talking about the consequences of fossil fuel consumption and that the new focus on affordability creates a political opportunity. He said it can help voters understand that it is possible to reduce utility costs by building a stronger and more resilient grid with clean energy that’s not subject to the volatility of oil and gas prices.
At the same time, he said lawmakers have a duty to lead on climate policy — and not just follow the polls.
“If something is hugely important and it doesn’t poll well, and so you don’t talk about it, you’re implicitly saying that you’re not really cut out for leadership,” Casten said. “How this polls is the least important question.”
