5 minPolitics
Democrats increasingly avoid climate talk as other issues dominate midterm races
Climate change has faded as a top Democratic campaign issue ahead of the midterms, with strategists and candidates focusing instead on affordability, Israel policy and confronting President Trump.
Climate change has largely disappeared from the top of Democratic campaign messaging ahead of the November midterms, replaced by voter concerns over affordability, U.S. policy toward Israel and the broader fight against President Donald Trump. The shift has become so pronounced that some researchers now describe it as “climate hushing.”
The change is visible in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, where incumbent Ed Markey, 80, faces a challenge from U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton, 47. Markey, who once made the Green New Deal a centerpiece of his political identity, now spends more time emphasizing his readiness for the job and his broader left-wing record. “Six years ago, Green New Deal was every phrase out of Ed Markey’s mouth every chance he got. That is not the case now,” said Mary Anne Marsh, a veteran Democratic strategist in Massachusetts. “It’s about who’s best to fight. Period, full stop. Everything falls under that.”
Charles Hughes, a college student in Massachusetts who chairs the state’s chapter of the College Democrats, said global warming rarely comes up among his peers. “Honestly, it doesn’t come up as much,” he said. That marks a notable reversal from the 2020 Democratic primaries, when climate proposals like the Green New Deal were used to rally young voters and fuel sweeping demands to remake the economy.
The Searchlight Institute, a Democratic think tank, has urged the party to stop mentioning climate change altogether, arguing that voters see it as an intimidating and complex issue. The group’s recommendation was blunt: “The First Rule About Solving Climate Change: Don’t Say Climate Change.” The Sunrise Movement, a left-wing group founded in 2017 to mobilize young voters around climate issues, shifted its mission last fall to a broader fight against what it calls “fascism.”
“We just live in a significantly more authoritarian country. Because of that, a lot of the Democratic primaries are about more existential questions,” said Aru Shiney-Ajay, the group’s executive director. “It has felt less like people care less about climate and more like people are increasingly freaked out about other issues.”
About 6 in 10 Democrats say climate change is “a very big problem” for the country, according to a Pew Research Center poll from April, roughly the same share as in 2016. Yet climate has often taken a back seat to other priorities in Democratic voters’ minds, including inflation, healthcare affordability and the role of money in politics.
McKenzie Wilson of Blue Rose Research, a Democratic data firm, said voters have called for sweeping changes in response to economic discontent, demonstrating a level of anger not seen in years. “In that kind of environment it’s hard to think about long-term, existential problems,” Wilson said. “If we don’t talk and focus our attention on the number one thing the electorate wants to talk about, as we saw in 2024, we’re not going to be connecting with the electorate.”
Even as the political conversation has quieted, the planet has not. Scientists say there is an increasing chance that 2026 could be the hottest year on record, or at least come close, with a strengthening El Nino forecast to spike global temperatures. Some advocates expect the issue to return to center stage if Democrats retake the U.S. House in November and climate-sparked disasters dominate the winter.
U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, a prominent Democratic voice on climate change, called ignoring the issue a major strategic “blunder.” “Climate change has moved from the science department into the economics department,” he said. “It’s now battering people’s home insurance, property values, pocketbook concerns. So I think it’s a very powerful argument.”
Leah Stokes, a political scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara and author of “The Carbon Wave,” said it was “galling” when politicians made the issue less of a priority. “The climate crisis is accelerating and we can’t really not talk about it for like a decade, because the planet will be even more on fire if we do that,” she said.
