Sam Forstag, a Democrat running for Congress in Montana, is in many ways a familiar kind of progressive: He is a union worker calling for taxing the rich and expanding Medicare for all Americans.
But there’s one topic he appears to avoid, in his platform and in public forums. When asked recently about the growing threat of wildfires and drought in the West, he discussed a terrible ski season and record-high temperatures, but did not name the climate crisis directly.
The Democratic U.S. House candidates Trey Martin, a union ironworker in Oklahoma, and Chris Reichard, an electrician and veteran running in Missouri, are also steering somewhat clear of what was once a centerpiece of many progressive political campaigns. Even in a blue district in Minnesota, Kaela Berg, a Democratic state legislator who works as a flight attendant, only mentions climate change briefly on her congressional campaign website, linking it to bringing down energy costs.
For the past several months, Democratic elites have been debating how much to talk about climate change, if at all — in part because these new candidates have narrowed their focus to energy affordability to win back the working class. It is a striking shift from a few years ago, when many Democratic politicians thought the promise of a Green New Deal would build a coalition based on green jobs and fighting inequality.
Candidates like Mr. Forstag have the right strategy. The kinds of policies they support — for example, public investments in infrastructure like housing and electricity — will help address climate change, but there is little reason for politicians like them to focus on the issue anymore. The candidates’ first task must be to regain credibility with working people by tackling their more immediate, material concerns.
The voters who already prioritize climate action are firmly in the Democratic camp and highly educated and affluent, or as the economist Thomas Piketty calls them, the “Brahmin Left.” What candidates like Mr. Forstag, Mr. Reichard and Ms. Berg seem to understand is that for blue-collar voters, energy is an “end of the month” issue, and affordability should be the overarching policy goal. This is all the more important today, given rising electricity rates and war-fueled spikes in gasoline prices.
This shift among progressive Democrats on the campaign trail in many ways marks the end of an era. It was 20 years ago when Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth” helped to make concern around the climate crisis go mainstream. Then the 2008 financial crisis solidified the Obama administration’s narrative that economic recovery required a New Deal-like investment program centering on green jobs.
By 2018, after a major report raised the alarm about global warming, young activists joined by the newly elected Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York sat in the Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi’s office demanding a “Green New Deal.”
That policy platform, which made its official debut as a 2019 Congressional resolution, laid out a vision to tackle both climate change and inequality by building clean energy and investing in social programs for lower-income Americans. By 2020, it was a top issue in the Democratic presidential primaries. But it quickly became culture war fodder for Fox News and social media algorithms. President Joe Biden never fully supported the policy.
Even so, the idea of a climate investment and jobs program lived on in his administration. He often said, “When I think of climate change, I think about jobs. Good-paying, union jobs.”
This philosophy became central to his administration’s political strategy: It passed the largest piece of climate legislation in U.S. history, to stimulate investment in battery manufacturing, renewable energy and other green technologies. The political calculus was explicit: Create blue collar jobs, particularly in red states, to win back disaffected working-class voters, lured to Donald Trump’s brand of populism.
This strategy failed. While the bill and other laws led to new manufacturing, a recent study showed that voters did not associate the projects with any kind of Democratic political project. Polls in 2024 affirmed that most Americans had barely heard about Mr. Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. A factory opening here and there, employing thousands, was no match for what really concerned millions of working-class voters: the cost of living. On that front, Bidenomics had no answer, often claiming we had “the best economy in the world.”
Democrats will surely continue to propose policies calling for jobs and public investment, but it’s not clear why climate should be at the center. American voters broadly agree that climate change is a real concern and support addressing it, but they largely do not see it as a top priority.
The Pew Research Center routinely asks Americans to rank their top concerns, and climate change is consistently near the bottom. The Searchlight Institute found that 59 percent of voters in battleground states are “bothered that climate change has become such a political issue,” while only 42 percent are “motivated to do more and support policies to address climate change.” Rather than building a broad coalition necessary to enact something like a Green New Deal, climate change has become yet another issue fueling polarization.
By advancing a more populist message, candidates like Mr. Forstag, Mr. Reichard and Ms. Berg might be able to peel off some of Mr. Trump’s supporters. If Democrats reclaim the House and Senate, their first priority must be to materially improve workers’ lives, rather than propose a grand vision of an energy transition.
To be clear, this does not mean an abandonment of climate goals. Fortunately, as I’ve argued, the heart of any affordability agenda — housing, energy, transportation — overlaps with the sectors we must decarbonize. Even though Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York rarely mentioned climate in his 2025 campaign, one of his core policies of expanding public transit — “fast, free buses” — will reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The Democratic Party remains deeply unpopular. The way out is to stop elevating a litany of single-issue policies that appeal to the already converted. When it comes to climate change, for now, it might be better to say nothing at all.
Matthew T. Huber is a professor in the department of geography and the environment at Syracuse University.
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