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Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for Fortune.com, the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal.
If you were forced to guess the one political issue that will decide the 2024 presidential election based on sheer volume of news coverage, you might pick inflation or immigration. Maybe plagiarism. Or Taylor Swift’s Kansas City Chiefs fandom — almost anything, in fact, besides climate change.
And yet a recent study suggests anxiety about global warming might be what kept Donald Trump from a second term in the White House in 2020, and it could deny him again this year. As far-fetched as that sounds, it’s a reminder, at least, that support for the climate fight runs deeper in this country than many — especially Republican leaders — might think.
It is true that roughly two-thirds of Americans worry about and want solutions to an increasingly chaotic climate. But those same Americans consistently rank that issue well below the economy, health care, crime and about a dozen other anxieties. Just 2 percent of respondents in a recent Gallup poll considered climate change the biggest issue facing the U.S.
But a new analysis of polling data by the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Center for Social and Environmental Futures (C-SEF) suggests the climate issue gave Democrats a 3 percent edge in the popular vote in 2020, more than enough to swing the election to President Joe Biden.
The researchers admit they’re “cautious and circumspect” about that specific number, which they call “unavoidably speculative.” But evidence for some kind of political edge is compelling.
Poll after poll reflect broad, if not deep, public concern about the climate and a desire for action. And Democrats, as the only political party professing to even believe the problem exists, have a huge advantage over Republicans on the issue. They topped the GOP by 26 points on climate in a recent ABC News/Ipsos poll, bigger than their advantage on health care or abortion, and far bigger than the GOP’s edge on immigration or crime.
How could this translate into actual hard numbers on voting day, when all those other issues get so much more oxygen? The C-SEF researchers didn’t come up with any answers, but they suggested a candidate’s views on climate could be a signal of basic competence: Voters “may question the broader judgment of a candidate who does not acknowledge climate change as an issue, and they may assign such a candidate lower trust on other issues,” the researchers wrote.
It’s also possible that voters are starting to realize climate change has a growing impact on the economy, public health, immigration and more. This will only grow more apparent, and more salient as a political issue, as the planet warms. The world just ended the hottest year in human history, a record that may be broken in 2024, threatening more heat waves, droughts, floods, wildfires and other disasters.
Trump and his fellow Republicans, meanwhile, just keep embracing the paleolithic “drill baby drill” denialism of a bygone age. In his first term, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, rolled back environmental regulations, unleashed oil and gas drilling and more. He and his supporters apparently don’t think he went nearly far enough. Politico reports his advisers have plans for “an all-out war on climate science and policies” if he retakes the White House.
Even former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, the GOP’s paragon of climate seriousness according to some, has called Biden’s massive climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, a “communist manifesto” and vowed to “repeal Biden’s green energy handouts” — though most of those benefits go to Republican-run states. Two-thirds of Americans support the IRA, according to a recent poll. Haley, in contrast, couldn’t crack 20% in Iowa’s caucuses.
Denialist rhetoric may turn on hard-core Republican primary voters. But it risks turning off almost every other constituency in a general election, including younger Republicans who increasingly want their party to get serious about the climate. It’s not just good policy; it’s good politics to boot.
