Kamala Harris Doesn’t Have to Run on Climate

Two years ago this month, President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which both his allies and adversaries agree is the most significant climate legislation in the country’s history. Yet despite this accomplishment, the urgency of the crisis, and the consensus within the Democratic Party on the need for aggressive climate action, you would have had to listen carefully to this week’s Democratic National Convention to catch much discussion of the issue.

It’s not that none of the speakers mentioned climate, but “mentioned” is about as far as most of them went. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an original sponsor of the Green New Deal, didn’t mention climate in her DNC speech. Nor did Tim Walz, who has been one of the most aggressive governors in the country on the issue; among other things, he signed a bill requiring utilities to provide 100% clean electricity by 2040. Barack Obama, whose Clean Power Plan so angered his opponents that they set out to destroy the entire U.S. regulatory state, said only that “America can be and must be a force for good, discouraging conflict, fighting disease, promoting human rights, protecting the planet from climate change, defending freedom, brokering peace.”

There were meetings on climate strategy that occurred around the convention, but it wasn’t until the convention’s final night that climate really took the stage, with presentations from Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Rep. Maxwell Frost of Florida, the youngest member of Congress. In Kamala Harris’ acceptance speech, it received only a single line, in which she said that Americans deserve “the freedom to breathe clean air and drink clean water and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis.” That was all.

One might conclude (and some certainly have) that as a policy priority, climate has fallen a few rungs down on the Democratic agenda. But to my mind, that wouldn’t be quite correct. There has been an undeniable change in the party’s political calculus at moments like this one, but it needn’t cause those who care about the issue to panic.

Every activist would like their issue to be at the top of the political agenda, but especially in our current state of polarization, that usually means a big fight, with high stakes and the chance of both victory and defeat. At the moment, abortion is the issue Democrats want to elevate into that kind of fight, since they believe it can be used to pull voters from the middle and even the other major party into their camp. Republicans believe the same thing about immigration.

Democrats may not believe climate change has the same kind of power in voters’ minds. But that may not be such a bad thing.

After all, starting a big fight on an issue is only one path to policy change. Another is to place it within a broader agenda, keeping the part of your coalition that cares about it on board and ready to move forward should you win, without generating too much energetic opposition from your opponents. And that’s what climate wound up being at the Democratic convention: not a main course, not even a side dish, but rather an appealing political crouton tossed into a salad full of other policies and priorities.

That’s partially a product of Democrats’ legislative success: The passage of the IRA may have encouraged them to place the climate issue somewhat to the side. Many in the party feel that they got away with passing a sweeping law without the kind of knock-down, drag-out battle we saw around something like the Affordable Care Act, another important bill that squeaked by without a vote to spare. The debate within Congress over the IRA may have been intense — remember all the wrangling over whether Joe Manchin would give his assent? — but most Americans barely noticed. It was too complicated and too fraught with dull procedural details. That’s one reason that today, most voters say they haven’t heard much about the law (and some who claim they have are probably lying). Yet when its provisions are described to them, it garners overwhelming support.

In some ways, the IRA resembles the ACA, which Democrats correctly believed would grow more popular as its effects were felt. In climate as in health care, Democrats don’t have much appetite for another big battle; they’d rather make incremental additions in future legislation that build on what they managed to put into law. And they hope the Republicans who tried to defeat the bills won’t want to take the political risk of unwinding them.

Kamala Harris’ slogan may be “When we fight, we win,” but she doesn’t seem to want too much of a fight on climate. Likewise, environmental groups are pouring millions of dollars into ads supporting her candidacy, but many of them don’t actually focus on climate and mention “clean energy” only in passing. The people producing them have clearly calculated that what’s most important is not having their issue discussed in the campaign, but rather getting an administration that will allow the IRA and other laws with climate provisions such as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to continue to unspool, while regulatory agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency keep working on reducing emissions. If those bills do what they’re supposed to, they’ll create their own constituencies and political armor.

And if most of the public takes only occasional notice at campaign time? There’s nothing wrong with that. Campaigns are almost always superficial, and this one isn’t any different. It’s what happens afterward that matters.