After climate victory, Democrats face harsh November reality

By: Scott Waldman | 08/08/2022 06:24 AM EDT

CLIMATEWIRE | Democrats are feeling the wind at their backs with a series of political victories in recent weeks.

At the top of the list is the reconciliation bill that included $369 billion in climate and energy spending that passed the Senate yesterday. Then there are bipartisan achievements to protect veterans and build out the semiconductor industry, as well as the CIA assassination of a 9/11 mastermind in Afghanistan.

Now comes the harsh reality: History says it won’t matter in November.

There’s not a lot of evidence that voters reward political parties for action leading up to midterm elections, said Kyle Kondik, an analyst with the University of Virginia Center for Politics. Members of the president’s party — particularly presidents with approval ratings as low as Joe Biden’s — typically get trounced in midterms even after securing fresh successes, he said.

“I don’t think any of these achievements matter in the big picture on their own,” Kondik said. “That said, if these things help arrest the decline of Biden’s approval rating and perhaps help him stabilize, perhaps they will have helped in some way. But Biden’s approval rating is bad, and there’s no real indication it’s going to get markedly better before the election.”

Biden’s approval rating is 39.3 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight, the website that averages recent political polling.

History shows that even the hardest-fought political victories in the haze of summer quickly run against the grindstone of the fall campaign season, when the airwaves are blanketed with hundreds of millions of dollars in attack ads that portray every candidate as a threat to the American experiment.

That reality is already creeping in. The American Action Network, the nonprofit arm of the House GOP’s top super PAC, is running ads against vulnerable Democrats, claiming they want to “shut down American energy independence” and are taking away energy jobs.

Add to that an inflation rate of 9.1 percent, and Republicans have a clear advantage over Democrats, whose control of the White House and both chambers of Congress coincides with a period of economic turbulence.

To be sure, not everything is going against Democrats as the elections march closer.

The Kansas primary last week drew the highest voter turnout in state history. It was driven by a ballot referendum that would have stripped abortion rights. The initiative was easily defeated as more than 900,000 people showed up to vote.

Acting on climate change is also being identified as a potent message. At a Democratic National Committee fundraiser last week, Biden told donors during a virtual appearance that the party needs to highlight its climate solutions. He also pointed to a likely attack line: Republicans don’t take the issue seriously.

“Democrats are determined to face up to the climate crisis — which they don’t even acknowledge,” Biden said of Republicans. “MAGA Republicans are climate deniers.”

Biden also said the results of the Kansas abortion referendum were an example of how the party could win new voters.

“People aren’t just going to vote; they’re going to come out in record numbers,” he said. “And they’re going to vote to reclaim the rights that the extreme Supreme Court has taken away from us and said did not exist in the Constitution.”

At a separate fundraiser in Massachusetts last week, Vice President Kamala Harris told donors that the Supreme Court decision in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case that allows states to ban abortion is raising voters’ attention to a broader spectrum of issues Democrats are running on.

“What happened in the Dobbs decision is a moment that is clear about what is at stake,” she said. “But understand how it is connected to so many other issues that are present in our nation right now that mean that there is so much at stake.”

Climate voters?

Polls consistently show that Democrats are expected to lose their House majority in November.

Control of the Senate is still considered a toss-up, which means that a relatively small number of voters in key battleground states will likely to be the decisive factor.

The issue of abortion rights — and some far-right positions taken by Republicans — are shaping the election cycle in ways that might help Democrats retain control of the Senate, said Kondik of UVA. He said some Republicans may have boxed themselves in on the issue of abortion by supporting bans in cases of rape or incest, or when a mother’s life may be in danger.

“Abortion is a potent enough issue that it can matter in some places, particularly because a fair number of Republicans in major races have taken such draconian positions on it,” Kondik said.

The abortion issue can activate single-issue voters more than climate change can, experts say. But people who prioritize the environment might also play a big role in November, said Nathaniel Stinnett, founder of the Environmental Voter Project.

There are millions of people across the country who are climate-first voters, he said. That’s not enough to deliver Democrats a resounding victory in November, but it could help win a close race on the margins, Stinnett said.

One strategy to help Democrats win battleground states is to get low-propensity voters motivated to show up, Stinnett said.

In a survey of more than 3,000 registered voters conducted in July, Stinnett’s group found that inflation, the economy and abortion rights were the top three short-term issues motivating voters in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania. But when likely voters ranked their long-term issues, climate change came third, with 9 percent of respondents saying it was their top concern. Inflation was ranked first (30 percent of respondents) and the economy was second (13 percent).

In the 2020 election, climate activists were highly motivated to vote after former President Donald Trump rejected the tenets of climate change and rolled back environmental regulations. Since then, however, those voters have been less engaged, Stinnett said.

Now, the “Inflation Reduction Act” could be enough to turnout some of those voters in November, he said.

“There are millions of these climate-first voters out there and not only can they swing elections, but they can swing policy, too,” Stinnett said. “The ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ could really boost turnout among climate voters because nothing succeeds like success. It gets the wind in your sails and it makes you think that fighting this enormous existential problem isn’t hopeless.”