Climate Is on the Ballot, Even if It’s Not in Candidates’ Campaign Messages

In the final stretch of their midterm drive to gain control of Congress, Democratic candidates are talking mostly about the pain of high energy costs, not the risks of climate change.

But advocates of climate action view the Nov. 3 elections as a crucial moment for the movement. U.S. voters will decide whether to upend the compliant Republican-led Congress that stood by as President Donald Trump’s administration took unprecedented steps to bolster fossil fuels and choke off support for alternatives. 

Environmentalists argue that it is especially urgent to put a check on the president in order to tackle the monumental new challenges posed by the rise of artificial intelligence and data centers. The world is close to overshooting the Paris Agreement’s 1.5-degree Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warming threshold, increasing the risk of large-scale and potentially irreversible change.

“These elections are … starting to set the groundwork for 2028,” environmental author and activist Bill McKibben said in a recent interview with Democracy Now. “And that’s going to be, at least in climate terms, probably, maybe the last election that happens in a timeframe when we still really have an opportunity to affect some of the outcomes of these things.”

McKibben has been traveling across the country to mobilize voters with Third Act, the senior citizen-led group he founded. He does so, he has said, with an understanding that the Trump White House will have the power to quash any attempts at new climate action by Congress. Even if Democrats manage to flip four seats in the House and four seats in the Senate to gain control of both chambers, there are not enough seats in play to give them veto-proof majorities.

Nevertheless, even a bare majority in the House for the Democrats—and some projections show them gaining 15 seats or more—would give them power to seize back some of the control the Trump administration has assumed over government pursestrings. Gaining an edge in the Senate—a more difficult goal, but achievable—would give Democrats power to vote down presidential appointees, including Supreme Court justices, or prevent them from getting to the floor for a vote. 

History is on the side of the challengers; the president’s party has lost ground in the House in 20 of the past 22 midterm elections. The only exceptions—1998 and 2002—were years when presidential approval rates were exceptionally high. Trump’s approval rate this month hit a record low of 33 percent.

Still, Republicans are pouring money into Senate races. The GOP has an overwhelming cash advantage, fueled in part by the one-sided giving of the fossil fuel industry. The oil and gas industry so far has spent $172.8 million on candidates or partisan political committees in the midterm elections, with 97 percent going to Republicans or conservative groups, according to a tally provided to Inside Climate News by the nonprofit group OpenSecrets. The tech industry, including cryptocurrency, online betting and artificial intelligence firms are together investing even more money in electing anti-regulation candidates, mainly Republicans, according to several analyses, including by Reuters and the watchdog group Public Citizen. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has become one of the biggest political donors in history, directing a reported $276 million toward helping struggling Republicans like Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in his bid for U.S. Senate.

The environmental movement can’t hope to match the combined spending of the industry groups supporting Republicans, but they have sought to muster an historic effort. The LCV Victory Fund, the super PAC of the League of Conservation Voters, last week announced it was more than doubling its planned investment in the midterm elections to $110 million, a figure that includes spending by 30 affiliate organizations across the country to elect pro-environment governors and state legislatures. That places it among the largest outside issues groups supporting Democratic candidates.

LCV Action Fund, a separate group that coordinates with candidates to get out the vote, has invested $3.5 million in its longstanding GreenRoots volunteer member mobilization program and a new paid canvass program, Clean Energy Corps. In addition, nearly $27 million in donations have gone from environment-focused voters directly to candidates’ campaigns through GiveGreen, a bundling platform sponsored by LCV Victory Fund and NRDC Action Votes. The political affiliates of Environmental Defense Fund have a goal of spending a combined $18.2 million on independent ads run by the EDF Action Votes and in grassroots mobilization efforts coordinated with candidates through EDF Action PAC.

Climate: Hushed or Hidden?

In the midterm elections of Trump’s first term in office, the drive for action on climate change was a galvanizing force that helped flip the House to the Democrats. With the Green New Deal as a rallying cry, young voter turnout surged nearly 80 percent that year compared to the prior midterm election. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York was just one of a slew of climate action champions elected to Congress in the so-called “Class of 2018.”

In 2026, however, climate advocates are focusing on high energy costs and the threats of data centers. A recent Inside Climate News analysis showed mentions of climate change have plummeted over the past year in press releases issued by Democrats in the House and Senate. The trend indicates there’s been at least some embrace of the advice offered earlier this year by the Searchlight Institute, a think tank founded by centrist Democratic strategist Adam Jentleson: “The first rule about solving climate change: don’t say ‘climate change.’”

Another factor may be that climate advocates see a need to broaden their mission in the Trump era. Earlier this year, the youth-led Sunrise Movement announced it was taking a “strategic pivot” to broaden its base and work to tackle corruption and end the outsized influence of the fossil fuel industry and other monied interests. 

“We basically realized that we couldn’t be pushing for federal climate legislation without a functioning democracy,” said Sunrise executive director Aru Shiney-Ajay.

Data centers have been a big target for Sunrise, not only due to their environmental impact but because their proliferation—despite widespread opposition—demonstrates the role of money in politics, Shiney-Ajay said. “I see the backlash against data centers as, in part, a climate backlash,” she said. “The AI industry’s growth is making fossil fuels increase and is extremely bad for the climate crisis. But it’s also part of the way in which billionaires and tech executives have been able to make choices about our land, our air, our water, our neighborhoods without everyday people having any say whatsoever.”

Sunrise Movement co-founder William Lawrence, the Democratic contender for Michigan’s 7th congressional district, has made data centers and “Stop[ping] Tech Overreach” a pillar of his campaign to unseat Republican Rep. Tom Barrett in one of the nation’s closest House races.

Many green groups vowed to focus on high energy costs after the issue became a centerpiece of last fall’s Democratic victories in statewide races in New Jersey, Virginia and Georgia. Sara Chieffo, senior vice president of government affairs for LCV Action Fund, said the focus on energy affordability ties directly to the group’s larger campaign for cleaner energy, due to the Trump administration’s unprecedented actions to bolster fossil fuels—like ordering uneconomic coal plants to stay open and paying foreign companies to surrender offshore wind licenses.

“The public is really fed up with the nonsensical attack on the cheapest, fastest and cleanest sources of energy, and those are American wind and solar,” Chieffo said. “People know that makes no sense in any context, but especially in the context of rising energy costs.”

In the view of the green groups, Republican vulnerability on energy costs has only grown since Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran and the subsequent run-up in gasoline and diesel prices. A Hart Research survey conducted in early October and commissioned by environmental organizations shows energy costs are a top electoral issue for voters in battleground Congressional districts. That survey also showed voters are blaming Republicans for their rising gasoline and utility bill costs, and opposition to Trump’s energy policies is eight to 12 points higher than average among voters who were undecided on how they would vote for Congress.

“We are reminding voters everywhere of the connection between candidates who have enabled the Trump agenda and the pain that people are feeling around the kitchen table as they try to manage their family finances,” said David Kieve, president of EDF Action, the political advocacy arm of Environmental Defense Fund.

Kieve said EDF Action’s goal is “not to try to make climate every voter’s number one priority.” Instead, he describes the campaign as one “to connect our issues to the things that we know that they care about right now.”

The environmentalists’ campaigns link high energy costs to Republicans’ close ties to the fossil fuel industry. In Ohio, EDF Action and LCV Victory Fund are running ads highlighting FirstEnergy’s past support of Republican Sen. Jon Husted, going back to his time as lieutenant governor. And in North Carolina, the groups are focusing on GOP candidate Michael Whatley’s years as a fossil fuel industry lobbyist, and blame such lobbying for the high prices consumers are paying today. 

What an Opposition Congress Can Do

Even if a “blue wave” knocks Republicans out of Congressional leadership in November, Democrats won’t be able to bring the United States back into the Paris Agreement or get new climate policy passed on their own as long as Trump remains opposed and in the White House.

One reality climate action advocates must grapple with is that if Democrats do take the Senate, it will be because of the victories of a number of politicians who will be reluctant to take positions harmful to fossil fuel energy interests in their home states. In Alaska, former Rep. Mary Peltola, who could flip that state’s Senate seat for the Democrats, has claimed credit for pressing the Biden administration to approve the Willow Project, a large ConocoPhillips Arctic oil project. The Democrats’ drive to flip Ohio’s Senate seat rests on former Sen. Sherrod Brown, one of four Democrats in 2008 who voted with Republicans to prevent bipartisan climate legislation from reaching the Senate floor. And in Texas, Democrat James Talarico’s campaign stressed his support of an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy after the group No Fossil Fuel Money chided him for taking an estimated $30,000 in small donations from fossil fuel industry employees (a small fraction of his $129 million in donations).

Regardless, climate action advocates anticipate Democrats will use the power of the purse string and the gavel to put new restraints on the Trump administration’s most egregious actions to bolster the fossil fuel industry.

For example, Democrats could insert riders restricting environmental rollbacks into spending bills, as they did in the second half of the first Trump administration. (In 2020, the House passed an appropriations bill that included language blocking agencies from using funds to enforce the White House’s gutting of the National Environmental Protection Act.) Theoretically, Democrats also would have more leverage to negotiate restoration of funding that has been cut from the Environmental Protection Agency and other agencies. But Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.), one of the climate action advocates elected to Congress in the Class of 2018, said he anticipates agreeing on new spending will be far more difficult than taking money away from favored Trump administration projects.

“You can take away a bad thing much quicker than you can rebuild a good thing,” Casten said.

He believes one of the key things Democrats will be able to do if they are in charge is lay the groundwork for a future direction in energy policy that is both cleaner and more affordable. Casten and another Class of 2018 climate action advocate, Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.), have been pushing for Congress to consider their  Energy Bills Relief Act, which would expand the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, require large energy users like data centers to pay their own infrastructure and power costs and restore the clean energy and clean vehicle tax credits of the Inflation Reduction Act.

Casten’s view is that it will be valuable to advance such ideas even if they don’t make it into law in the 120th Congress. He said the Republican-controlled Senate never took up the Clean Economy Jobs and Innovation Act that the Democratic-led House passed before the 2020 election. “But that work created the legislative agenda that positioned us so well,” Casten said. “Once Biden came in, all that work was done.”

If Democrats take the Senate, they will also have the power to block top presidential appointees. That is especially important when it comes to the Supreme Court, where the two oldest members, Justice Clarence Thomas, 78, and Justice Samuel Alito, 76, are the most reliable votes in favor of Trump administration policy and part of the 6-3 majority that has sharply limited federal agency authority to act on climate change. One of the Senate’s most outspoken climate champions, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), is expected to seek the Senate Judiciary Committee chairmanship and push for new ethics rules and term limits if Democrats win.  

And if Democrats win control of either chamber, they will gain subpoena power and the ability to hold oversight hearings, including on the costs of Trump administration orders keeping coal plants open, the impacts of cuts to science funding and the attempt to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the failure to spend funds appropriated by Congress at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other agencies. 

“We’re going to see after the November elections much much stronger accountability levers if, hopefully, there is a pro-environment Congress in one or both chambers,” Kieve said. “I think they’re going to be hauling senior members of that administration down every single week and asking really tough questions under oath that will, I hope, constrain some of the illegality of Trump administration actions over the next two years.”