Democrats Go Quiet On Climate After Biden-Era Regulatory Blitz

Democrats are increasingly dropping climate change from their midterm messaging after spending the Biden years pursuing an aggressive environmental agenda.

Climate change has largely disappeared as a defining issue for Democratic candidates ahead of the November midterms, a striking reversal from the 2020 election cycle, when proposals such as the Green New Deal occupied a prominent place in the party’s political agenda. The retreat comes as Americans rank affordability and the cost of living among their top concerns, pushing Democrats to campaign on pocketbook issues after years of pursuing an aggressive climate agenda, according to a July Pew Research Center survey.

“Democrats aren’t abandoning their climate agenda because they suddenly discovered affordable, reliable energy. They’re abandoning the language because voters have discovered the price tag,” Jason Isaac, the CEO and founder of the American Energy Institute, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“Very few voters have ever cared about climate change, and now all the other oddities on the Democratic side, DSA, DEI, etc., have become more important, which gives people permission to ignore climate,” Michael McKenna, a Republican strategist and former Trump White House official, told DCNF. “Part of it is definitely that there was never really a pathway to ‘solve’ whatever people imagined the climate crisis to be. Hard to ring a fire bell unless you have fire trucks.”

The shift has become pronounced enough to earn its own label “climate hushing.” The Searchlight Institute, a Democratic think tank, has recommended that Democrats stop talking explicitly about climate change because voters do not consider it a top priority.

The Sunrise Movement, the progressive organization that helped mobilize young voters around climate policy, has meanwhile expanded its organizing into issues beyond environmental policy, including immigration enforcement and opposition to the Trump administration.

“After years of restricting reliable energy and spending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars subsidizing politically favored technologies, the Green New Scam has collided with the reality of higher electricity bills and growing concerns about reliability,” Isaac continued. “Changing the campaign rhetoric doesn’t change the policies, and voters shouldn’t be fooled by the rebranding.”

High-profile Democrat governors, like Pennsylvania’s Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro and New York’s Kathy Hochul, have shifted their talking points to take aim at data centers.

Shapiro has recently imposed strict new restrictions on data center development, requiring developers to pay the full cost of new electricity infrastructure, meet water conservation standards, engage with local communities and make legally binding commitments to meet the state’s requirements. Shapiro also removed all AI data center proposals from Pennsylvania’s fast-track permitting program, a shift from his previous embrace of the industry that the Daily Caller reported in August.