Corporate Dems Are Climate Scapegoating

Corporate Democrats have spent the last year and a half trying to deflect blame for their party’s 2024 losses away from themselves and towards their ideological opponents. Perhaps the most consistent target of these factional attacks has been the Democratic Party’s commitment to climate action, with multiple billionaire-funded groups like WelcomePAC and Searchlight Institute issuing calls for Democrats to stop talking about climate change.

This climate hushing kicked into gear again recently, with a New York Times op-ed (one of many such pieces the Times has run in the last year) originally titled, “Forget Climate Change. Democrats Need to Talk About Other Issues,” which argued that the “way out” of Democrats’ current unpopularity is to “stop elevating” issues like climate. While that piece was going to press, centrist Democrats were convening in Canada to discuss, among other topics, the need for “less climate talk.” As Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., said during the conference, “The average American is going to struggle to care about climate change if they can’t figure out how to pay their rent.”

The assumptions here are that climate action is deeply unpopular among American voters, that Democrats consistently put climate at the center of their messaging, and that that messaging is a major reason for their losses in 2024. But none of these assumptions are true.

A recent Gallup poll found that climate concern is near an all-time high. A 2025 Pew Research Center poll found that a majority of Americans believe climate change is a major threat to the United States, while only 19 percent believe it is not a threat. And a series of peer-reviewed studies from the 89% Project found that 74 percent of voters in the U.S. want their government to “do more” about climate change.

As these numbers make clear, there is actually super-majority support for clean energy and climate action in this country. And no climate hushers have provided any evidence to the contrary. The best they have been able to show is that climate does not make the top of the list of most motivating issues to voters. But that makes sense: Climate shows up in people’s lives not as an issue unto itself, but in the form of rising insurance costs, the health impacts from heatwaves, or a need for greater disaster preparedness.

Advocates have long known that the best way to talk about climate is in the context of people’s everyday concerns. If Democrats were talking about climate in isolation, vaguely gesturing at the need to limit global temperature rise, and doing this to the exclusion of other issues that voters feel to be more pressing, no doubt that would be a mistake.

But here’s the thing: Nobody—literally nobody—has been doing that. Democrats called their big Biden-era climate law the “Inflation Reduction Act.” Kamala Harris barely mentioned climate in her campaign. It’s not like she refused to talk about rising rents because she was obsessed with the Green New Deal, as Slotkin’s comment seems to imply. Indeed, it’s been well-reported that Harris was pushed to deemphasize her affordability agenda by corporate advisors and Wall Street donors, not climate activists. But corporate-backed Democratic politicians and think tanks see the climate movement as a much more convenient scapegoat.

In the 2024 election, climate simply wasn’t an issue at all. Biden’s age, the war in Gaza, inflation, and Harris’s inability to articulate a clear vision for her presidency were all much more determinative factors. In fact, most voters hadn’t even heard of the Inflation Reduction Act—and when they were told about it, they loved it. That suggests that more messaging on climate, not less, would have helped Harris and Democrats.

Indeed, climate change offers major political opportunities for the Democratic Party. Discussing climate action is a way for Democrats to simultaneously rally the base and win over moderates who overwhelmingly trust Democrats more on this issue than Republicans. It’s also a way to wedge the GOP: A majority of young Republicans care about climate, most MAGA voters support solar, and the Make America Healthy Again wing of MAGA is concerned about the health impacts of fossil fuels (which is worrying climate denialists).

Yes, Democrats need to be smart about connecting climate to affordability—something the IRA failed to do, with its long time horizons and indirect benefits that were removed from people’s daily experiences. But this isn’t rocket science. A majority of voters say they believe climate change will have a direct financial impact on their families, and a strong majority of Americans are struggling with rising electricity prices, a problem that voters primarily blame on corporate profits (38 percent), data centers (14 percent), and grid pressures from extreme weather (11 percent).

On the flip side, expanding clean energy is the fastest way to produce cheap electricity needed to lower utility rates—and Democrats hold a massive trust advantage over Republicans when it comes to clean power. By articulating how climate action can address these bread-and-butter concerns, in contrast with Republicans—for example: Democrats want to expand cheap, clean energy to secure lower utility rates, while Trump is spending billions of taxpayer dollars to cancel these projects; Democrats want to make polluters pay for increasingly costly climate disasters, while Republicans want us to pay for the damage Big Oil caused—Democrats can leverage their advantages on these issues to win voters’ trust on some of working people’s most significant affordability concerns.

These are not complicated ideas, as populist policy frameworks like the Climate and Community Institute’s recent “Stop Greed, Build Green” agenda make clear. And it’s worth noting the element of class condescension that is woven into the climate hushers’ apparent belief that working class voters are too stupid or poorly educated to care about these issues. In the recent Times op-ed, the author claims that only highly educated and affluent voters—the “Brahmin Left”—prioritize climate action. This is factually incorrect—polling has repeatedly shown that more Latino, Black, and lower-income people say climate change is important to their vote than rich white people do. The idea that the “little people” aren’t sophisticated enough to care about a global crisis that they are disproportionately on the front lines of should be closely interrogated.

Finally, in addition to all these messaging considerations, we should not forget the substantive urgency of addressing climate change. Again and again in recent years, what had previously been considered worst-case scenarios for the escalating speed and destructive effects of global warming have been proven, if anything, to be too conservative. Record-breaking wildfires, extreme heat, and drought are already causing severe misery across vast swathes of our country, and the monstrous El Niño currently building up in the Pacific could literally kill millions.

If we want safety and security for ourselves and our children, we need to take serious climate action. And we can’t actually do that obliquely. Yes, clean energy economics are so good at this point that we’re going to see a degree of decarbonization even without building an explicit pro-climate coalition. But this laissez-faire approach won’t be enough to break through fossil fueled rightwing opposition—at least not at a speed and scale necessary to have a good shot at avoiding the most horrific climate outcomes that we are currently on track to experience.

Whether or not Democrats talk about climate, the other side certainly will—Fox News and the Koch network and the fossil fuel industry, flush with war profiteering cash that can be funneled into lobbying campaigns to further rig the game against renewables, will keep spreading disinformation and polarizing against climate action. And in the absence of a potent social demand for that action, the political will for real decarbonization—in the face of obstacles, trade-offs, and entrenched opposition interests—risks collapsing.

There are lots of important questions and debates we can and should be having about how to rebuild an explicit popular climate discourse over time. But the argument that we shouldn’t be trying to do that at all contradicts the polling data and is an argument for accepting climate catastrophe. That is something all people of good conscience should resist.

This piece was co-authored by Jamie Henn, executive director of Fossil Free Media. A version of the essay appeared in Jacobin.

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