It seems entirely possible that the upcoming presidential election will be decided mostly on feelings, or what we now call vibes. In a poll released this week, for instance, almost exactly half of voters said American unemployment was at a 50-year high, which is odd since it’s actually near a 50-year low.
Given data like that, I imagine it’s hard for U.S. President Joe Biden’s team to figure out how to make the case for a second term. So far they’ve focused on abortion rights and on protecting democracy, both of which are not just right but savvy: They focus on places where former President Donald Trump has weaknesses that most people recognize. (Most people—somehow a fifth of voters blame Biden for the repeal of Roe). If it were up to me, I’d open a third of these fronts: climate change.
Memories of Dobbs and of January 6 may be slowly fading, but right now in America people are sweating.
There’s three reasons for that.
One, it’s popular. Something—some combination of fire, flood, and movement-building—has persuaded Americans that climate change is real, and that the government should take action to slow it down. Across surveys the polling is clear. And voters perceive Democrats as much better on climate: Indeed, some new polling indicates it may have played a crucial role in the last election.
Two, it gets way more popular when you explain it. A new survey of young voters from Data for Progress showed that “approval for Biden’s handling of climate change and the environment improves by 17 percentage points among young voters after respondents hear more about his climate action. Approval of Biden’s handling of climate change and the environment reaches 69% among 18- to 34-year-old voters after respondents read a series of questions about his climate achievements.” Biden put enormous political capital into winning passage of the IRA; he might as well get political gain from all of that.
And three, people hate Trump’s positions on the issue. The highest profile climate action he took in term one was withdrawing America from the Paris accords, and less than a third of voters approved. And this time around he’s doing everything he can to cement his reputation as the corrupt candidate of fossil fuel. Yesterday, amid the ruins of the city’s greatest windstorm, he held a fundraising lunch with leading frackers in downtown Houston. As Emily Atkin reminds us in a typically piquant column, the hydrocarbon cartel is already supporting Trump over Biden by a 40-1 margin. He wants more, of course, which is why he held his billion-dollar extortion dinner in D.C. earlier this month. And what do you know—when they were told about his efforts to shake down fossil fuel........