Climate change did not cost Democrats the 2024 election
Some Democratic and activist rhetoric probably alienated voters, but the climate change issue hurt Republicans, not Democrats. Voters want a common-sense approach that takes the issue seriously.
The Democrats have released their much-anticipated 2024 election autopsy report. It is deservedly getting harsh criticism for dodging many of the obvious factors contributing to the Democrats’ election loss—Biden’s cognitive state and late withdrawal, Harris’ weaknesses as a candidate, and the party’s unpopular positions on immigration and cultural issues, for example.
All the report had to say about climate change was: “Climate change and green energy transition messaging created anxiety among workers in traditional industries worried about job losses.” This is probably accurate, as stated.
However, I want to push back on parts of the broader “Why did the Democrats lose in 2024?” discourse which frame climate change as a losing issue for them overall. Kate Yoder wrote a good piece for Grist with a summary and links to recent contributions to this debate.
The “climate is the problem” discourse usually starts from one or more of the following observations:
Many Americans find climate activists annoying (and ineffective), especially the ones who use extreme tactics like vandalizing art and harassing commuters.
There is cross-pollination between progressive climate activism and other types of progressive activism (e.g., on immigration, cultural issues, and Palestine) that many Americans find annoying.
Greta Thunberg and the Sunrise Movement are Exhibits A and B here.
Most Americans prioritize affordability and other kitchen-table issues over climate change.
My issue is not with these observations, which are backed by empirical evidence. (See links above for non-exhaustive examples.)
My issue is with drawing the conclusion that climate change is therefore a losing issue for Democrats in elections. That’s also an empirical claim, and all the evidence I am aware of suggests that the truth is closer to the opposite1.
Americans prefer Democrats to Republicans on climate change.
I won’t belabor this point too much since I wrote a previous post summarizing this evidence for the 2024 election (link below), and my research group published a report estimating the effect of climate change on the 2020 and 2016 elections. (tl;dr: The magnitude of the climate change effect is impossible to estimate precisely, but the issue unambiguously helped the Democrats in both elections, likely more in 2020 than in 2016.)
When you ask voters which party they trust more on specific issues, many polls find climate change to have the single-largest difference, favoring the Democrats. (See the graph below for an example from a 2023 poll. Here is a 2024 poll with similar findings.)
When you ask voters what their most important issues are, climate change doesn’t come out on top, but it usually doesn’t come out on the bottom either. (The graph below shows this in a 2024 election exit poll, for example.)
If the Presidential election were run on the question of “Should the President do more to address global warming?”, the “yes” side would have won in a landslide in 2023 (at the height of the Biden administration’s climate policy, and before inflation had come all the way down); see the graph below. This landslide would be considerably larger today (see the graph at the very top of this post), suggesting that voters do not prefer the Trump administration’s approach.
The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)—President Biden’s signature climate law—was not unpopular.
Again, I have a previous post on this.
To summarize some key points:
Polls focused on the IRA tended to find majorities or pluralities supporting it.
Most of the economic benefits of the IRA went to Republican-leaning regions of the country, which is probably why many Republican politicians quietly supported aspects of the IRA and quietly worked to limit the scope of its 2025 repeal.
Republicans have passed policies with qualitatively similar provisions as some of those in the IRA at the state level.
The IRA was not one of the key Biden administration policies that contributed to (unpopular) post-COVID inflation. The American Rescue Plan was probably the main inflation-causing policy.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that all Democratic climate policies are or would be popular. For example, most Americans do not want to ban fracking (which Kamala Harris publicly supported during the 2020 primary, but backed off from in 2024) or phase out gas-powered cars (which some Biden administration regulations seemed to intend). (See below.)
Most Americans want their government to address climate change, while also prioritizing kitchen-table issues.
Climate politics discourse too often gets caught between extremes, whereas American voters are consistent and clear about wanting a balanced approach—one that is serious about climate change and reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, but also serious about affordability and energy security.
Roger Pielke Jr. and Ruy Teixeira conducted a detailed 2025 poll that illustrates these points nicely (and consistently with other polling on these issues). Some of their key figures and tables are shown below.
What advice would I give the parties?
Given all of the facts above, how would I advise the two parties on climate change? Here is what I wrote in my post from last year on the repeal of the IRA. My advice today would be the same.
Advice for Democrats:
1) Stick with the subsidy and industrial policy approach, but be more efficient and targeted with it, given the country’s debt challenges. Alex Trembath and Ted Nordhaus had a good suggestion for how to do this. In short, they suggest shifting subsidies away from solar, wind, and electric vehicles (EVs)—since these are now mature, market-competitive technologies—and focusing subsidies on batteries, charging stations, transmission, nuclear, and geothermal, which are more immature technologies and more important bottlenecks in clean energy expansion. Permitting reform also seems like a good idea that is ripe for bipartisanship. (My colleagues and I discussed some of the IRA’s transmission and regulatory challenges here.)
2) Get climate change as far away from the culture wars as you can. This means distance Democratic climate change policymaking and platform-making from the strands of climate activism that are anti-American, anti-growth, woke, etc. The culture wars were a big part of Trump’s election win, and there have been studies (from my research group and others) showing that injecting identity politics reduces voter and legislative support for climate change policies.
So, no one has to “climate hush”. Just don’t talk about it in a way that makes you sound like extremists with contempt for average Americans and their other concerns.
Advice for Republicans:
1) Keep focusing on national security, fiscal responsibility (moreso than OBBB does), and making energy cheap, but consider the fact that solar, batteries, and to some extent wind, are big parts of these equations now. As Noah Smith put it recently, regarding the OBBB: “Would you rather have cheap energy, or stupid culture wars?” Of course, Smith’s advice applies to the Democrats, too, as I noted above.
2) Don’t forget that a huge majority of Americans do care about climate change, want something done about it, and they support an all-of-the-above approach to energy that supports solar and wind, even if they dislike it when Democratic climate policies raise their energy costs, or they find histrionic and woke climate activism annoying.
3) Don’t decimate publicly funded climate science, nor science in general. Publicly funded climate science produces extremely valuable public goods that far exceed its costs. Publicly funded science has support from large majorities of the public. Publicly funded hard sciences (including climate science) are not the primary sources of the climate alarmism and wokeness that the Trump administration is concerned about. More on this here and here.
4) Don’t forget—when considering whether or not to go along with unpopular hard-line anti-renewable policies—that the President doesn’t have to run for re-election in 2026 and 2028, but many of you do.
For even more information, here is my hour-length talk on where common ground on climate change seems to be in the U.S.:
By the way, unlike many others on both sides of this debate, I am not a Democratic partisan. I am an independent-minded Canadian who doesn’t vote in U.S. elections.