Democrats’ climate silence tightens as stakes rise

Democrats going – As midterm elections near, Democrats who once foregrounded climate change are talking about it far less. The party’s internal debates, polling math, and a fractured media landscape are pushing climate references out of speeches and social posts—while Senator S

For a while, climate change was supposed to be the defining crisis of the era for Democrats. Now, as the midterm elections approach, a different pattern is showing up in real time: the phrase itself is fading. It’s disappearing from speeches. social media posts. and podcast appearances—an eerie shift in tone that suggests something more than simple messaging fatigue.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, has been the rare exception. Over the past decade and a half. he has delivered some version of his “Time to Wake Up” speech more than 300 times. warning about the dangers of climate change and accusing what he calls “climate hushers” of pressing the party to stop talking about the overheating planet.

Whitehouse’s argument is also more practical than it is abstract. In a statement to Grist, he said climate change is “right now raising costs for families across the country through higher property insurance premiums, grocery and electric bills, and health care expenses.”

That framing runs directly against a growing piece of conventional wisdom in Democratic politics: that mentioning climate change has become a liability.

Last year. the Democrat-aligned think tank Searchlight Institute issued advice that boiled down to one directive: “Don’t say climate change.” In a recent op-ed in The New York Times. the conclusion went even further. suggesting that when it comes to climate change. “for now. it might be better to say nothing at all.”.

And pressure inside the party has also surfaced in documents. An early draft of the Democratic National Committee’s autopsy report of the 2024 election—released under pressure in May—posited that messages about climate change and shifting to green energy “created anxiety among workers in traditional industries worried about job losses.”.

Yet the idea that avoiding the topic helps Democrats doesn’t come with hard proof. Matto Mildenberger. a professor of political science at the University of California. Santa Barbara. told Grist that there’s no evidence that discussing climate change hurts Democrats in elections. If anything, he said, studies and surveys show a modest boost for candidates who talk about it.

That dispute—between fear and evidence—helps explain why the silence has become a kind of political weather system.

The advice to de-emphasize climate change rests heavily on polling that asks voters what matters most to their ballots. Climate change ranks number 24 out of 25 when Americans are asked which issues will be very important to their vote. according to data from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication last year. Other concerns have risen in importance: liberal Democrats are more concerned about protecting democracy. government corruption. and the treatment of immigrants than they were before the 2024 election.

But experts argue there’s a leap embedded in the logic. Mildenberger and other experts told Grist that it’s a mistake to assume climate discussion is politically costly just because voters don’t name it as a top priority.

Even if the electoral math turns out not to be driven by climate messaging directly. other consequences may still be real. Mildenberger warned that when an issue is pushed out of public conversation. momentum for action can slip away—because attention is what builds coalitions and carries policy work forward. “You actually need to have conversation and attention to an issue to slowly build the coalition and policy work necessary to address it. ” he said.

In his view, the party’s choice to step back rhetorically hands ground to opponents. He argued that Democrats are ceding rhetorical space to their adversaries even as polling shows Trump’s agenda is broadly unpopular. That agenda. he said. includes blocking the construction of wind farms. scrubbing public information about global warming from government websites. and pulling the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement.

“All of this is, frankly, doing the service of the fossil fuel industry, ultimately, because it’s helping climate delay,” Mildenberger said.

Whitehouse makes a similar point with a different emphasis: Democrats aren’t just avoiding risk—they may be losing credibility in the fight.

He has argued that Democrats are “poll-chasing. ” repeating what voters want to hear with messages that are “bland” and “backward-looking.” Whitehouse said. “Many Americans don’t believe Democrats are fighters.” He added that the “best way to shed that label is to actually step into the arena and fight.”.

Our climate messaging. he said. “has long been terrible. ” but he framed silence as malpractice: “it would be malpractice to shy away from a fight with Central Casting villains (the fossil fuel industry climate denial fraud and dark money corruption operations) with such high stakes for the economic well-being of American families.”.

The timing and the economic backdrop matter. As people struggle with rising costs and surging gas prices, Whitehouse’s charge points to oil companies raking in billions from the Iran war, a contrast Democrats could seize on.

Another economist. Matt Burgess of the University of Wyoming. agreed with the broader sentiment that Democrats alienated voters on cultural issues and lost sight of affordability—yet he rejected the assumption that climate change is necessarily a losing issue. “There are lots of different lines of evidence that suggest that climate change as an issue overall helps the Democrats and hurts Republicans. ” Burgess told Grist.

In 2024. Burgess co-authored a study that looked at a hypothetical world where climate change had not been an issue in the 2020 election. In that scenario. Burgess said. Republicans could have gained somewhere around a 3-percent swing in the popular vote—enough to hand the White House to Trump instead of Joe Biden.

“If you have any issue that moves the needle a little bit in your favor in a super-close election, it can make the difference between winning and losing,” Burgess said.

Exit polling, however, complicates the story. It suggests climate change wasn’t the central driver of Democrats’ 2024 loss—at least not compared with other issues. Swing voters considered “U.S. efforts to fight climate change” a reason to support Harris over Trump by 21 points. according to a survey of 5. 000 voters from Navigator Research conducted just before and after the election.

But Trump won by large margins on inflation, the economy, and immigration—concerns that were top-of-mind for voters. Bryan Bennett. who runs the independent consulting practice Loft Beck strategies and directed the post-election survey in his previous role at Navigator. said. “The very simple version is. Trump winning those voters won the election.”.

Bennett’s reading underscores another tension: Harris didn’t lose because climate change was absent. or even because Democrats passed climate policies under the Biden administration. A Center for American Progress analysis found that on a county level. federal investments in infrastructure and manufacturing projects were linked to only a very small improvement in Harris’s vote share. If there was a weakness. Bennett said. it was that voters didn’t know enough about the federal government’s involvement to credit the administration.

The question then shifts from whether climate talk changes votes to why the conversation has been shrinking.

Bennett suggested one reason may be the media ecosystem itself. He told Grist that it’s fractured. with many people getting their news from TikTok. YouTube. and podcasts instead of traditional outlets. In that environment, he said, it can be harder for politicians to push a preferred narrative. At the same time. he pointed to Democratic efforts to increase “message discipline. ” a practice designed to keep a central message from getting swallowed by noise.

“So much of the oxygen in the room is taken up by. ‘How do Democrats deal with. and how do progressives deal with. talking about the economy in a way that really meets voters where they are?’” Bennett said. “And I think that inherently detracts from basically every other issue. regardless of whether it’s a good thing to talk about or not.”.

Even where climate remains, it often surfaces indirectly. Democratic politicians who continue to mention climate change tend to do so by arguing clean energy is “cheap energy” and by tying it to rising electricity bills.

Polling suggests there may be appetite for more direct language. Last fall. 41 percent of those surveyed by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication said they wanted political candidates to talk about efforts to reduce global warming more often. almost double the number who wanted candidates to talk about it less.

Still, the trajectory of climate-hushing may be driven by misperception. Studies show politicians and the public alike tend to underestimate Americans’ appetite for action on climate change—from carbon taxes to expanding renewable energy.

Mildenberger described the situation as a kind of empirical contradiction: talking about climate change seems to help. but the surrounding discourse treats it like a major drag. “We have this tension where, I think, empirically, talking about climate change provides a net benefit. It’s a very small net benefit, but it is a net benefit,” he said.

If that’s right, then the fading phrase in Democratic politics may be less a response to voters than a response to fear—one that Whitehouse and others say families will feel in the real world.

climate change Democrats midterm elections Sheldon Whitehouse polling message discipline fossil fuel industry Paris climate agreement wind farms property insurance premiums electricity bills