But for how important this election will be for Planet Earth and the humans who live on it, the issue itself isn’t getting much airtime. Earlier this month, The Guardian examined the campaign websites of Democratic and Republican Senate candidates in eight battleground states. Of all the candidates surveyed, only two explicitly mentioned climate change.
This retreat hasn’t happened by accident. Over the last two years, some of the Democratic Party’s most influential strategists, donors, and think tanks have been explicitly telling candidates to shut up about climate change and focus on the economy instead—as if those were two separate issues.
It’s a strategy known as climate hushing. And with the midterms fast-approaching, it’s worth asking: Who convinced Democrats that ignoring climate change was a winning strategy? Does the evidence actually support that argument? And what is that silence costing the rest of us?
Climate change is already culture war BS and has been for a while. Anyone who would buy this is already lost to the Democrats anyway. Like we have decades of data on the subject; for large parties elections are won or lost by motivating one’s base of support to turn out not by competing over a mythical median voter, and evidently 90% of the Democrats’ base of support wants more to be done about climate change.