Democrats Mask Their Climate Agenda — For Now

Faced with the general craziness stemming from voters’ decisions to nominate far-left radical DSA candidates to represent the party in congressional races in half a dozen states now, Democrats are working overtime to mask their party’s true agenda from the general public. The fear that the party’s increasing radicalism will alienate independent voters in the November mid-term elections has party officials worried it could cost them the chance to win majorities in the House and/or the Senate.

The issues of prominent concern are obvious: Abolishing prisons without a viable alternative; de-funding police and ICE simultaneously; reopening the borders a la the Biden autopen presidency; Medicare for all; packing the supreme court; ending the filibuster; abolishing the electoral college and even the U.S. Senate. Taken together it’s an agenda so nutty that it has Axios speculating whether even Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is just too “moderate” now to sign onto it all.

If you saw that coming as 2026 dawned, you should quit your day job and play the betting markets.

Now, we find out that AOC’s original pet issue during her first few months in congress – the climate change narrative – is among the agenda items the Democrat party’s leaders want candidates to mask. Readers may remember that, in just her 2nd month of serving in the U.S. House of Representatives, Ocasio-Cortez teamed with leftwing Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey to sponsor the massive, $90 trillion reorganization of the U.S. economy they called the Green New Deal.

It was a monstrosity of Soviet-style command-and-control regulation and central government planning which would relegate all Americans to give up their cars, abandon vacation travel, eliminate personal airline usage, build a fantasy network of high-speed rail lines, and relegate the masses to living tiny, immobile lives in 15-minute cities while their central government elites lived the high life as if nothing had changed.

The proposed legislation went nowhere, of course, being laughed out of the room by Republicans and independents alike, but the seed had been planted. Joe Biden was installed into the White House in January 2021 and, aided by a massive propaganda campaign free of charge in the legacy media, embarked on a set of energy and climate policies designed to at least get the camel’s nose under the tent to stake the ground for a form of Green New Deal to come.

But my, what a difference five years makes. Democrat candidates are being advised now to avoid the climate change topic at all costs in this year’s midterms. Sen. Markey himself barely mentions the topic in his primary campaign against Seth Moulton, preferring to focus on other more mainstream topics.

“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, told PBS. Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director at the far-left climate alarm group the Sunrise Movement, says in the same piece that, “It has felt less like people care less about climate and more like people are increasingly freaked out about other issues.”

That makes sense, given that freaking out about all manner of things is a core competency of leftwing activists and politicians. But the party’s vow of omerta about climate change doesn’t sit well with every Democrat. One dissenter, Democratic Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, believes the party’s tactic of hiding its climate agenda amounts to a 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.”

The problem, of course, is that climate change does not poll well — it never has. It always ranks at or near the bottom of issues voters most care about in poll after poll. Politicians interested in winning elections naturally tend to want to focus on issues people do care about. In this year’s Democrat party primaries, the voters heavily tilt towards leftwingers who are freaking out about anything President Donald Trump is in favor of.

For Democrats, masking their real agenda on climate change makes sense until the election season ends. After that, all bets will be off.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.