With a little over five months until the midterm elections, Democrats in Washington and on the campaign trail are trying to show voters they care about cost-of-living issues.
To make that pitch, some parts of the party’s usual message may be going by the wayside. That includes the conversation about combating climate change. Once a pillar of the Democratic agenda, it may now be fading into the background. According to Matt Huber, a professor of geography and the environment at Syracuse University and the author of Climate Change as Class War, Democrats, and the climate, might be better off for it.
Huber, who recently wrote an essay for the New York Times titled “Democrats Don’t Have to Campaign on Climate Change Anymore,” spoke with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about why Democratic candidates can and should de-center climate change from their platforms and streamline their campaigns on affordability issues.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
What made you want to write this appeal to Democrats to essentially shut up about climate change right now?
I try to argue that it’s the end of a 20-year period in Democratic Party politics where a lot of Democrats were thinking that climate would be this urgent issue that could galvanize this mass majoritarian coalition around green jobs.
What I’ve come to in the last few years is that I’m just not sure that rhetorically centering the climate crisis as the impetus of this kind of politics is actually going to be effective in building that power, building that majority. Most Americans don’t really prioritize this as an urgent issue, and they prioritize other cost-of-living issues much more.
When did fighting climate change become such a core issue for the Democratic Party?
2006, which was 20 years ago, was a big flashpoint where Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was released. And that did coalesce in the zeitgeist with a massive financial crisis a couple of years later.
There was a lot of feeling, just like in the Great Depression, that there had to be this mass jobs program, public investment program, and that climate change actually provided the urgency and impetus to center around that kind of large scale investment program and it could create jobs and appeal to these more economic concerns.
When the Green New Deal became a big deal, spread by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others, I think they too were thinking it would actually be a more effective politics in the context of a large-scale economic crisis like the original New Deal was.
“To win and to campaign, they’re realizing that talking about the apocalyptic existential nature of the climate crisis is not going to really inspire and motivate people to support them.”
Unfortunately for them, I think we never really entered that kind of crisis since the Green New Deal politics took off. We did have a recession, but it was this Covid recession that was a strange kind of economic shutdown and not the kind of crisis that called for this big jobs program.
That label,“Green New Deal,” became so polarizing. And it was a strategy to make it so, obviously. Do you think anything like that kind of messaging is just bunk now?
I’m really sad [about it]. I was a big Green New Deal stan, if I can use that word. I really loved this broad vision and a positive vision. I think a lot of climate politics can be pretty doomer-ist.
It did go wrong, though. I think when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced the House resolution on a Green New Deal in 2019, she did this media blitz around it and she released this FAQ document — or her office released this very bizarre FAQ document — with the sort of media blitz about the Green New Deal. And in the document it had some very stream of consciousness language about how we’re not quite ready to ban farting cows and airplanes.
Of course, as you would expect, that language got taken up by the Fox News culture war machine and almost immediately the Green New Deal became “We’re going to ban hamburgers. We’re going to ban air travel.”
What was supposed to be this broad-based majoritarian politics that could appeal to working-class people became yet another kind of polarized culture war issue, unfortunately.
Biden clearly realizes he can’t use this Green New Deal marketing to get this kind of legislation through Congress. But he does get this kind of legislation through Congress, weirdly called the Inflation Reduction Act.
Here we are in 2026 and no one ever talks about [the IRA], even though when they were doing it, they said it was the most consequential environmental legislation in American history. How did that happen?
In many ways the Inflation Reduction Act was based on this Green New Deal idea that jobs and investments in the green economy will lead to material benefits and help win back some of these working-class voters who had been shifting to Trumpism.
Of course, a lot of these investments were very long term. The style of policymaking that has been in vogue for a while in the Democratic Party is to incentivize these investments through tax credits, which means you’re incentivizing the private sector to do a lot of the building of these projects. I cite a study in the piece that found, basically, when you survey communities where these investments are going, they actually didn’t identify it with a political project coming from Biden. They just associated it with the private firm that is investing.
Meanwhile, inflation is really hammering the working class and the cost of living is skyrocketing as the number one issue voters care about. The Biden administration was saying that the economy was actually really good. If you look at unemployment, if you look at GDP numbers, everything’s going great. And so you really had no answer for the core material cost-of-living concerns that really shaped the 2024 election.
Of course, with Trump in office, they’ve repealed a good portion of that legislation. Emissions in 2025 in the United States went up, which is very depressing. It was a real disaster on a number of fronts.
You write in your opinion piece in the Times about how we’re already seeing Democrats shift away from climate change. Where do you see it specifically?
You can see a lot of working-class candidates that are union members that are fighting for this progressive agenda of taxing the rich, public investments, Medicare-for-All. But they are steering clear from the climate issue. And if they are talking about climate change, they’re linking it directly to cost-of-living issues like energy affordability. To win and to campaign, they’re realizing that talking about the apocalyptic existential nature of the climate crisis is not going to really inspire and motivate people to support them.
I profiled someone named Sam Forstag in Montana. And he is a smoke jumper — someone that literally parachutes out of planes to fight forest fires in the west. Because he’s a government employee, he is a union member too, and he is fighting on this kind of working-class agenda. Bernie Sanders and AOC have endorsed him. I profile an iron worker in Oklahoma. A flight attendant in Minnesota. Some of their websites literally don’t mention climate change at all, and if they do, it’s just very brief and links it to energy affordability jobs, things like this.
That’s a real shift. These are exactly the types of candidates that I would say five or six years ago would’ve been the central messengers of this kind of Green New Deal message of unions, jobs, blue-collar workers that are going to kind of build the energy transition. These would be the kind of workers that’d be front and center, but they’re not, and I think that’s telling.
One thing I mention in the piece is Zohran Mamdani, who ran a very successful campaign. But there’s been reporting showing that he barely talked about climate change in his campaign. And that’s after he had really been a climate activist in the Democratic Socialists of America and ran on climate change and public power in his assembly campaign in 2020. The whole affordability message, I think, came out of his campaign and people realizing that’s a way to build a mass coalition. And that’s a way to win.
As someone who’s written the books, who’s done the research, who’s a college professor talking about these issues, how much does it break your heart that this is where we’re at, that you have to write an opinion piece in the New York Times that tells politicians that they need to Trojan horse climate issues into their platforms?
It doesn’t really break my heart. It actually reinforces what the Climate Change as Class War book was arguing, which is that the climate challenge is really a question of power.
I mentioned in the book four years ago that it’s convenient that the sectors we need to decarbonize are energy, transport, things like housing. These are end-of-month concerns for working-class people. So if we can kind of build a decarbonization agenda around those sectors, we can link climate to those working-class needs.
Since the book, I’ve become less convinced that shouting about the climate crisis as this existential threat is going to be the central motivating impetus of that kind of politics. Why not just focus directly on those material needs? Once you build the power, you figure out how to really make those investments and build towards decarbonization.
