Polling: Politicians Shouldn’t Hide From Climate

The climate hushers get this one mostly right. We retested Claim 1, and confirmed that climate change is not the top priority for most voters. Respondents were asked to weigh issues against one another in terms of importance, and climate landed twelfth of fifteen. Cost of living, the economy, and healthcare were the top three issues.

However, this does not mean that climate is a problem to campaign on. Caring about an issue and voting on it are separate things. An issue can be popular but not move votes. Raw prioritization numbers do not predict what will happen at the ballot box. The next several findings aim to understand which issues actually drive people to the polls, the backbone of the climate hushers’ argument.

To test the hushers’ claim that climate loses votes, we looked at who is actually motivated to vote based on their priorities. If climate supporters are motivated and opponents are quiet, it would still be safe to run on. Our surveys measured two things: 1) how much a person supports or opposes a policy intervention, on a scale from 0 to 100 and 2) how much a candidate’s position on that issue would drive the respondent’s vote.

Climate supporters and opponents were sharply mismatched. Supporters rated the pull of climate on their vote at nearly 75 out of 100. Opponents rated it as under 38 out of 100, a gap of 37 points. Clean energy follows a similar pattern, with a 36 point gap. These findings suggest that supporters will reward climate candidates, while climate opponents will remain relatively indifferent.

In the following figure, each respondent is placed according to how much they support or oppose different policy interventions, and how much it moves their vote. For “government action on climate change,” 56 percent of voters support it and will vote based on that belief. The upper left can be thought of as the “backlash” corner, where only 11 percent will oppose it and vote accordingly.

Climate’s “backlash corner” was among the least populated across all issues that we tested. Even with voters open to voting Republican, motivated climate supporters outnumber motivated opponents by nearly 4:1. The climate hushers would expect to see a pattern closer to “restricting abortion access,” where supporters and opponents are more similarly motivated to vote on the issue. This is the recipe for backlash. But even though climate is not often a voters’ first priority, it does not appear to drive opponents to the ballot box. The gap is even larger when only looking at voters open to voting Democrat, suggesting that much of the motivated opposition are committed partisans that were never winnable in the first place.

The issue maps above do not prove causation. For a causal test of Claim 3, we ran experiments within the survey. We showed respondents several pairs of hypothetical candidates and how they prioritized issues. Across thousands of responses, this tests how prioritizing different issues affects candidate support.

Climate advocates are motivated to vote when the issue is prominent, and climate opponents do not change their behavior.

Across all respondents, making climate action a priority increased the candidate’s likelihood of being chosen by 2.7 percentage points. Making climate a top priority increased the likelihood by 4.5 percentage points. The pattern is nearly identical for all persuadable voters. And for only those open to voting Democrat, the effect is even stronger: 7.2 points for making climate a top priority. For the voters Democrats hope to win over, leading with climate change makes a candidate more favorable. Committed Democrats rewarded candidates with the biggest bump — 9.5 points for climate leaders.

For those open to voting Republican, prioritizing climate change has little to no measurable effect. The only group that penalized climate was committed Republicans, whose votes are not winnable by Democrats in the first place. These findings reinforce the asymmetry — climate advocates are motivated to vote when the issue is prominent, and climate opponents do not change their behavior. Contrary to the hushers’ Claim 3, prioritizing climate can win voters over.

It is also useful to understand how voters feel about the actual instruments of climate action — technologies that cut pollution. We asked respondents to rate nine clean, carbon-free technologies, such as rooftop solar, heat pumps, offshore wind and nuclear power, as favorable or unfavorable. Most technologies received strong support on net. Rooftop solar was rated as 69 percent favorable against only 20 percent unfavorable. Onshore wind, large solar farms, and heat pumps followed closely behind with similarly wide favorability margins. Home batteries and induction stovetops had large shares of respondents who were not familiar enough with the technology to offer an opinion. These findings suggest that climate messaging can be grounded in clean technologies themselves, which are broadly popular with voters.

Climate hushers’ Claim 2 is that the word “climate” is itself a liability. If this were true, we would expect to see identical policies garner more support if framed without climate. To test this, we showed groups of respondents an identical government program that would invest in solar and wind energy. But each group saw a different framing on the program’s goal: addressing climate change, developing new energy sources, or reducing pollution and protecting clean air.

The framing did not measurably move support. Differences between the groups were statistically insignificant. The pattern holds for Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. Framing a policy around climate action does not decrease support for that policy. Saying climate is not as politically toxic as the hushers claim.

If the word doesn’t matter, then where does the idea come from that climate-framed policies are unpopular? In the next experiment, we disentangled support for policies and support for policy mechanisms. A voter might oppose a policy because they disagree with the tool, not the goal. For example, someone could oppose a carbon tax because they don’t like taxes, not because they don’t want policy that lowers emissions. To test this, we asked respondents to rate four policy tools: building more, cutting permitting red tape, banning new projects, and adding a fee or tax. We applied each to both clean energy and to fossil fuels to isolate how much support comes from method itself.

Across all respondents, the tool mattered far more than the goal. Policy mechanisms that focused on expanding rather than restricting garnered more support. Building solar and wind to lower bills was nearly 30 points more popular than a new fee or tax on oil & gas. Pro-clean energy policies were more popular across all voters. Republicans showed a slight preference for pro-fossil fuel policies, but still expressed high support for building more solar & wind. Voters prefer expansion over restriction, regardless of the goal.

The claim that “climate change divides” may rest more on attitudes about policy tools than climate itself.

Climate hushers like the Searchlight Institute have argued that Republican energy policies are simply more popular than Democratic energy policies. But this experiment shows that this apparent advantage could be explained by the kinds of mechanisms often associated with each party, rather than the substance of the policy — Republicans cut red tape while Democrats ban development (this despite the fact that Democrats have turned sharply in recent years to pro-development energy policies). The debate, and much of the polling that has gone with it, has compared Republican energy policy with the most popular framing and Democratic energy policy with the least popular framing. The claim that “climate change divides” may rest more on attitudes about policy tools than climate itself.

Climate is not an electoral liability, but rather can make a candidate’s platform more durable.

Climate hushers argue that climate messaging does not hold up under fire. A climate champion could appear out of touch talking about a complex global phenomenon amidst a cost of living crisis, and opponents will not hesitate to point that out. This belief is rooted in real phenomenon — a high-performing message can lose support once it’s attacked. So we tested different messages before and after direct rebuttals.

We showed respondents a single candidate statement about climate, affordability, or a combination of the two. Respondents rated their likelihood of voting for that candidate. Then we showed them an opponent’s attack on that message and retested their support of the candidate. Attacking climate with costs (“you’re ignoring costs”) decreased support by only 0.1 points. Attacking costs with climate (“you’re ignoring climate”) decreased support much more substantially, from 7.2 to 4.5. Compared against a control group, the cost message dropped 1.7 points, while the climate message stayed constant. While cost yielded higher support initially, climate proved tougher under fire. This reinforces the idea that climate is not an electoral liability, but rather can make a candidate’s platform more durable.

When voters think clean energy raises costs, they are less likely to support climate policies. Roughly 37 percent of respondents thought clean energy was a cost-saver, 29 percent said it raises costs, and 34 percent were unsure. Those who think it’s a cost-saver supported clean energy 20 points higher than those who thought it raised prices.

Correcting misconceptions about costs did little to change support. We fact-checked half of all respondents, giving them accurate information on the lower cost of clean electricity. The effect was negligible, moving support by less than 2 points across all groups. Correcting the cost narrative is likely to require sustained, targeted messaging, rather than a one-time correction.

If climate can be shown to motivate supporters while opponents stand idly by, where does the fear of climate leadership come from? We might be able to trace some of that to a misperception about who cares strongly about climate. We asked respondents to guess which issues different groups would name as their highest priorities. Climate reads as a Democratic-elite cause: 27 percent think Democratic leaders rank it among their top three priorities, far and above the 4 percent attributed to Republican leaders, and more than double the 11 percent who think the average American does. In the prioritization exercise at the beginning of this report, 19 percent of respondents ranked it as a top three priority. The public cares more about climate than most people believe. This perception gap undermines Democrats’ understanding of their own constituencies, and leads to unfounded generalizations about the risk of climate campaigning.