Democrats shift – With just over five months until the midterms, climate change is losing some of its place in Democratic messaging as candidates lean harder into affordability and cost-of-living themes. A Syracuse geography professor argues the strategy reflects what voters pr
For Democrats gearing up for midterm elections, the climate pitch is getting quieter. Inside Washington and across campaign stops, the party is trying to move voters toward what they’re more focused on right now: cost-of-living issues.
Matt Huber. a professor of geography and the environment at Syracuse University and the author of *Climate Change as Class War*. argues Democrats may be better off de-centering climate change from their platforms—at least for now. He made the case recently in an essay for *The New York Times* titled “Democrats Don’t Have to Campaign on Climate Change Anymore. ” speaking on *Today. Explained* co-host Sean Rameswaram about why the pitch is shifting as the calendar turns toward the midterms.
Huber said he’s trying to mark the end of what he described as a 20-year period in Democratic Party politics. when many Democrats treated climate as an urgent issue that could help galvanize a broad coalition built around green jobs. But he doubts that centering the climate crisis rhetorically will be effective at building power when most Americans don’t rank the climate crisis as a top priority—while they do prioritize other cost-of-living concerns.
He traced climate’s rise as a Democratic cornerstone to 2006. the year Al Gore’s *An Inconvenient Truth* was released. and he linked the timing to the financial crisis that followed a couple of years later. In his telling. climate offered the urgency for large-scale public investment and jobs—an idea that echoed feelings he compared to the Great Depression. when many believed major programs were needed to respond to economic collapse.
When the Green New Deal became a defining moment—spread by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others—Huber said it was widely viewed as another route to win politics similar to the original New Deal in an era of economic shock. Still, he argued that the “apocalyptic existential” framing isn’t motivating enough to build the majorities Democrats want.
He pointed to what happened when Ocasio-Cortez announced the House resolution on a Green New Deal in 2019. In his account, she and her team launched a media blitz and released an FAQ document. The language. he said. included stream of consciousness references—such as being “not quite ready to ban farting cows and airplanes.”.
Huber said that language was quickly picked up by the “Fox News culture war machine. ” and the Green New Deal became polarized—reduced. in the public imagination. to claims like “We’re going to ban hamburgers” and “We’re going to ban air travel.” In that shift. he said. a once broad-based message aimed at working-class voters became absorbed into culture-war conflict.
The irony. Huber said. is that President Biden can’t use the same Green New Deal marketing style to push legislation through Congress. Yet Biden passed a far-reaching climate law: the Inflation Reduction Act. Huber said that when the legislation was being debated. it was described as the most consequential environmental legislation in American history—then. in 2026. he said. it has largely disappeared from the conversation.
He also argued the Inflation Reduction Act reflects an underlying strategy connected to the Green New Deal idea: that jobs and investments in the green economy can deliver real material benefits and help win back some working-class voters who had been moving toward Trumpism. He described a policymaking approach that relies on tax credits to incentivize private-sector investment in projects.
Huber said he cites a study in his essay showing that communities where those investments are going don’t necessarily identify them as a Biden political project. Instead, people associate the changes with the private firm making the investment.
At the same time. he said. inflation has been hammering the working class and cost-of-living concerns have surged into the No. 1 place for voters. He pointed to the Biden administration’s message that the economy was doing well—citing unemployment and GDP figures in that claim—and said it left the administration with “no answer” for the cost issues that shaped the 2024 election.
When “Trump in office” returned, Huber said, the response was to repeal a good portion of the Inflation Reduction Act. He added that U.S. emissions in 2025 went up, describing the outcome as “a real disaster on a number of fronts.”
Huber said the shift away from climate change is visible with particular candidates now. He described working-class candidates—many of them union members—who are fighting for parts of the progressive agenda such as taxing the rich. public investments. and Medicare-for-All. but steering clear of the climate issue. Even when climate appears, he said, candidates link it directly to cost-of-living concerns like energy affordability.
To illustrate the point, he described profiling someone named Sam Forstag in Montana. Forstag is a smoke jumper who parachutes out of planes to fight forest fires in the West. Because Forstag is a government employee. Huber said. he is also a union member and is fighting on the working-class agenda. Huber said Bernie Sanders and AOC have endorsed Forstag.
Huber said he also profiled an iron worker in Oklahoma and a flight attendant in Minnesota. He said that some of these candidates’ websites don’t mention climate change at all; when climate is discussed, he said, it’s brief and tied to energy affordability and jobs.
He called the contrast telling: people he said would have been “front and center” for earlier Green New Deal-style messaging—union members and blue-collar workers building the energy transition—are increasingly not serving as the central messengers.
He also mentioned Zohran Mamdani. Huber said Mamdani ran a successful campaign. and he pointed to reporting suggesting Mamdani barely discussed climate change during his run. Huber said that was notable because Mamdani had been a climate activist in the Democratic Socialists of America and had run on climate change and public power in his assembly campaign in 2020. Huber said he believes the affordability message—seen in Mamdani’s campaign and adopted by others—became a way to build a mass coalition and win.
Huber said the emotional sting of this evolution doesn’t come from despair so much as from the way it reinforces his broader argument. Asked if it “breaks” his heart that he had to write an opinion piece in *The New York Times* urging politicians to Trojan horse climate into their platforms. he said it didn’t really break his heart. Instead. he said it reinforced what his *Climate Change as Class War* book argues: that the climate challenge is ultimately a question of power.
He said he wrote in the book four years earlier that the sectors that need decarbonizing—energy. transport. and housing—are end-of-month concerns for working-class people. He said linking decarbonization to those needs can connect climate goals to the material priorities of the people Democrats are trying to persuade.
Since writing the book. Huber said he has become less convinced that “shouting about the climate crisis” as an existential threat should be the central motivating force. He argued instead for focusing directly on material needs. saying that once power is built. investments can be made in ways that lead toward decarbonization.
The debate inside the Democratic Party now turns less on whether climate change matters and more on where campaigns place their emphasis between now and Election Day. In Huber’s telling, the climate message isn’t disappearing because the crisis is gone. It’s being pushed aside because the politics—and the voters’ immediate arithmetic—are demanding a different order of urgency.
Democrats midterm elections climate change Inflation Reduction Act Green New Deal affordability cost of living union members Matt Huber Syracuse University Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Zohran Mamdani Bernie Sanders