NY Times questions why Democrats have abandoned climate change, global warming messaging for midterms
The New York Times is questioning why Democratic messaging on climate change and global warming has vanishing from the messaging ahead of the midterm elections.
“In an election year that has included alarming portents of global warming — record wildfires in the West, 500-year floods in the East, a president walking away from a global climate accord — the one place that climate change rarely appears at all is in the campaigns of candidates for the House and Senate.”
Health care and the economy consistently top polls of key issues and social security, immigration and guns usually perform well too. The Brett Kavanaugh Senate confirmation hearing has galvanized the nation, dividing voters and energizing the right wing.
Climate Nexus’s in-house database reveals that 161 potentially competitive congressional races, just a “handful” of Democrats have released campaign ads, either on television or the Internet, that talk prominently of climate change and energy issues, Climate Nexus’s in-house database shows, according to the NYT.
“Until voters in the U.S. perceive this as a quite imminent threat, it’s liable to remain mired in the middle of all the other issues,” Climate Nexus executive director Jeff Nesbit, whose group is dedicated to communicating climate change threat, told the NYT.
Influential Democrats such as mega-donor Tom Steyer and former Vice President Al Gore have raised and donated millions of dollars to environmental initiatives.
Environmental issues have gained support from an active minority in the Democratic Party base. The Sierra Club, Earthjustice, and other green organizations have filed dozens of lawsuits against the Trump administration over environmental regulations.
Activists travel across the country to protest prominent oil and gas projects such as the Keystone XL and Bayou Bridge pipelines.
With all of that said, the average Democrat running for a congressional seat in 2018 hardly mentions climate change and the environment because most voters would rather hear about other issues.
photo/ Pete Linforth
