Vice President Kamala Harris’s appeal to moderate voters has included concessions on climate change, including her flip-flop in support of fracking after pledging in 2019 to ban it. Former president Donald Trump, meanwhile, has said he wants clean air and clean water, but denies the science of climate change and has threatened to claw back unused federal funds from a Biden administration climate bill to accelerate the clean energy transition.
But mostly, the issue goes ignored.
“It’s incredibly disheartening,” said Jennifer Rushlow, an environmental law professor at Vermont Law and Graduate School, who said she is disappointed climate change isn’t playing a more prominent role. She’s not alone. Climate advocates around the region said they wish the issue resonated more strongly, but aren’t surprised candidates are focusing instead on the economy.
Some suggest Harris is avoiding the topic because it could alienate moderate swing voters. “There is an incredibly stark choice,” when it comes to climate change, said Paul Bledsoe, adjunct lecturer at American University’s Department of Public Administration and Policy. “Maybe given Trump’s climate nihilism, voters already believe that there’s such a profound difference that there’s not much incentive for either candidate to talk about it.”
Some environmental advocates say they are largely OK with that approach from Harris, especially given the Biden administration’s track record, which includes incentives to spur clean energy production as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. They say they accept the need to do what it takes to defeat Trump.
“Politicians aren’t talking about climate change because it doesn’t poll well, not because it isn’t important,” said Johanna Neumann, a senior director at the nonprofit Environment America.
When the Pew Research Center polled voters on which issues they considered very important, climate change came in last — after the economy, health care, Supreme Court appointments, and six other options. Likewise, in a Globe/Suffolk University poll of 500 likely Massachusetts voters, just 3.6 percent said climate change was their most important issue driving their vote.
That doesn’t mean voters don’t care about it. In a survey of voter attitudes on climate change by Yale University and George Mason University this spring, 62 percent said they prefer candidates who support action on global warming.
There are deep partisan divisions, though: 97 percent of liberal Democrats and 81 percent of moderate Democrats prefer candidates who favor action to combat climate change, compared to 47 percent of moderate Republicans and only 17 percent of conservative Republicans.
Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, said he’s “mystified” climate change is not playing a larger role in Harris’s presidential campaign given those political divides. It’s an issue that, based on the surveys, the Democratic base cares a lot about— and thus could motivate them to show up on Election Day.
“These are people you don’t have to convince that climate change is a serious problem. You just need to convince them to show up and vote,” Leiserowitz said.
That’s the approach being taken by the Environmental Voter Project, a Boston-based nonprofit that uses data to single out the millions of voters who are likely to sit out an election, but who would prioritize climate change if they were to vote.
This election, the group identified 4.8 million potential first-time climate voters in 19 states, which means they are registered but did not vote in 2020 or since, and, based on analysis, are likely to prioritize the environment when voting. As a group, they are disproportionately young, so climate change has the potential to steer a large bloc of new voters in one direction.
“We never even talk about climate change,” said Nathaniel Stinnett, executive director of the Environmental Voter Project. Instead, they knock on doors, make phone calls, send mailers, and more — anything to get climate-minded voters to show up and cast their ballot.
In Massachusetts, the Environmental Voter Project identified 246,361 potential first-time voters. So far, about 12,000 have voted. In some swing states, the numbers are higher. Some 33,521 first-time climate voters have already voted in Georgia, as have 20,930 in North Carolina.
Stinnett stressed that early voting data is not predictive of the ultimate results, but said he’s feeling positive.
“None of these people were supposed to vote — this data is not just exciting, it’s extraordinary,” he said. “We live at a time of absurdly close elections where fewer than 12,000 voters decided both Georgia and Arizona four years ago. So the fact that 33,000 first-time climate voters have already voted in Georgia is incredibly exciting.”
The Sunrise Movement, a youth-led group that supports policies that mitigate climate change, is also using global warming to motivate voters, even if the top candidates aren’t.
“Climate is on the ballot,” said Kidus Girma, campaigns director for the Sunrise Movement. “It’s constantly coming up in our conversations with young people, whether they are talking about the jobs that they want, the temperatures they’re experiencing in their communities, or the future that they’re looking for.”
That demographic — youth voters — tends to rate climate change as an important issue, said Peter Haas, a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Boston, but that’s unlikely to persuade candidates to talk about it.
“There’s the recurrent question of: Do younger voters actually turn out to vote?” said Haas, who has studied environmental politics. “They can think whatever they want, but if it’s unlikely that they turn out, the candidates aren’t going to spend time trying to court them.”
As of Tuesday, Sunrise reported having contacted more than 1.9 million young voters across several swing states.
But as groups such as Sunrise and the Environmental Voter Project race to get climate voters to the polls, advocates are left looking inward, wondering how climate has dropped off the radar of high priority issues.
“The truth is, we need to build more public support for renewable energy and for keeping fossil fuels in the ground,” said Neumann, of Environment America. “And until we do that, political leaders are going to keep reading the tea leaves and going where the public is at.”
Sabrina Shankman can be reached at sabrina.shankman@globe.com. Follow her @shankman. Erin Douglas can be reached at erin.douglas@globe.com. Follow her @erinmdouglas23.