The Climate Politics Hiding in Plain Sight

For some reason, people keep moving to Phoenix. The population of Maricopa County, which includes the city and its suburbs, was over 4.4 million in the 2020 Census, double what it had been 30 years before. This is despite the fact that you run the risk of bursting into flames simply by walking down the street there; this summer, temperatures exceeded 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Phoenix for a stunning 113 straight days, and in July the temperature reached a balmy 118.

Climate hasn’t been as hot an issue in Arizona this year as immigration, though the candidates for an open Senate seat have disagreed over the reality of climate change and how to deal with extreme heat. (Democrat Ruben Gallego advocates emissions reductions and more nuclear power; Republican Kari Lake says if we “Drill baby drill” then everyone can keep running their air conditioners.) There is genuine uncertainty about how long the state will have enough water to supply its growing population, but when the election is over it will be difficult to tell exactly how many votes were moved by rising temperatures. Joe Biden was the first Democratic presidential candidate to win Maricopa since Harry Truman, and the slowly baking county is the most important battleground in that battleground state.

While climate may have seemed like a minor consideration amid all the talk of fascism, abortion bans, and fictional pet-eating this election cycle, in some of the states where the election will be decided, it’s still a vital issue. Particularly when a few thousand votes can determine who wins — as will probably be the case in multiple states — it could be far more important than most people realize.

In fact, in most of the battlegrounds, one can identify a climate issue that is profoundly affecting lives and the economy — and might or might not nudge the election results one way or another. The most obvious case may be North Carolina, where the western part of the state was ravaged by Hurricane Helene. In the aftermath, it became clear that Asheville was not the climate refuge some had believed it to be.

Buncombe County, where Asheville is located, is a blue island in a red sea. And while officials scramble to make sure voting sites are operable, Republicans in the state seem to think the hurricane has given them an advantage, since they’ve used it to convince people (often with false claims and conspiracy theories) that the federal government has abandoned them. The county Democratic chair told Reuters they’ve stopped knocking on Republican voters’ doors because “we just don't know about how volatile they might be.” No one is sure how many people have lost access to voting sites due to the storm, though one Republican congressman from Maryland suggested that since many of the affected areas lean red, the state legislature should just award its electoral votes to Trump.

Pennsylvania is another state where Republicans think the climate debate will work in their favor. Both Trump and Senate candidate David McCormick have put much of their emphasis on promoting fracking and accusing their opponents of wanting to ban it, on the presumption that the issue is a guaranteed winner. But the truth is that Pennsylvanians are much more ambivalent about fracking than you might imagine, and there are now more clean energy jobs in the state than fracking jobs. The counties most dependent on fossil fuel production — including McKean, Warren, Venango (where Oil City is the largest town) and others — are small to mid-sized, though heavily Republican; their votes are swamped by those in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and their surrounding suburbs. It wouldn’t be a stretch to think that if Harris wins, the frack attack could fade in the same way coal has ceased to be a major campaign issue.

There are also places where climate politics are even more subtle. Consider Bryan County, Georgia, a rapidly growing county not far from Savannah. It has long been a Republican stronghold — Donald Trump got two-thirds of the vote there in 2020 — but it’s also one of the jewels in Georgia’s recent reinvention as a center of green manufacturing. Production just began at the local Hyundai “Metaplant” in the county, where 1,400 workers are building electric vehicles.

Will people in a place where the local economy increasingly revolves around green manufacturing vote again for a candidate who wants to rescind the subsidies that allow consumers to buy the very vehicles they and their neighbors are making? It’s difficult to predict. But the Republicans who run the state, especially Gov. Brian Kemp, have worked hard to promote Georgia as a green tech hub while tiptoeing around any talk of climate change, in a way that hasn’t seemed to damage either their political or economic fortunes.

The politics in these very different places show that economic transitions can be fodder for arguments on both sides, progress can produce backlash, and disaster can be exploited by almost anyone cynical enough to do so. While advocates of climate action might hope that the candidates who support their favored policies will inevitably have an advantage as the effects of climate change grow in magnitude, that won’t always be true.

It may be inevitable that over time, climate will become more central to campaigns. But the ways it is playing out in this election, low-key though they might be, could be a preview of things to come. The urgency of the climate crisis won’t make the politics any simpler.