Oh, this should be good
If So Many Americans Care About Climate, Why Don’t They Vote Like It?
11.2 million.
That’s the number of American citizens who rank climate change as their top issue but didn’t vote in the 2024 election, according to research by the Environmental Voter Project. For context, Donald Trump won the presidency in 2024 by less than 2.3 million votes.
Weird that it doesn’t really ever show up in polls when put up with real issues, eh?
For a little over a decade, EVP has been working to get these climate-first Americans to the polls. Over the years, through canvassing, phonebanking, and postcard writing, they’ve helped turn 2.2 million climate-first nonvoters into voters who consistently show up at the polls every election, for candidates at every level of government.
“We work in [21] states because we feel that there are important gains that the climate movement can make, not just at the federal level, but the state and local level there,” Nathaniel Stinnett, the founder and executive director of EVP told CCNow in an interview.
This year, EVP is getting help from Patagonia. In September, the outdoor apparel company launched The 11.2 Million Vote Project offering a $100 credit to 112,000 people who signed up three of their friends to encourage them to vote. The coupons were snapped up in just four days. (The tool is still live for folks who want to nudge their friends.)
Isn’t it illegal to do this? That could be interesting as a legal case, but, if cultists have to be paid to get friends to vote is it really that good?
So why don’t these people who care so much about climate change vote with that issue in mind? It turns out, many people still falsely think that the top two most effective actions they can take to combat climate change are to recycle and change their consumer habits, according to recent EVP polling. “For 30 years, the fossil fuel industry has been teaching us to ignore the coal-fired power plant back there and instead just obsess over the plastic water bottles in our hands,” says Stinnett. “So, of course the public feels this way.”
Oh, that’s good, really top notch, guys, fail to take responsibility for your own actions. Not that we haven’t seen this same Talking Point before, ad nauseum.
“Everybody is failing climate concerned Americans in not helping them realize that this is a systemic political problem that requires systemic political solutions,” says Stinnett. “It’s not just about buying the right clothes and eating like climate-friendly donuts, or whatever. It’s about taking political action.”
It’s about getting Government to force Everyone Else to do things Warmists won’t do voluntarily. Really, as always, Doing Something about ‘climate change’ is popular in theory, but, when real world issues intrude it’s way down at the bottom in practice.
