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Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. Today, Monday, July 31st, marks the last day of what all indications suggest will be the hottest month on record, going back to 1850. June was already the hottest June.
Now, heat records have been breaking across the country, with Phoenix in particular seeing 31 days in a row of temperatures over 110 degrees. If you're listening to this podcast from Phoenix, my heart goes out to you. And the heat has reached far beyond the southwest. This past weekend, heat indices were in the triple digits across the Midwest and Northeast. And of course, that's just the U.S. Records have been broken across Europe.
Europe, and Asia as well. Sanbao, China provisionally recorded the country's all-time hottest temperature of 126 degrees, and Sardinia, Italy recorded the continent's hottest July temperature of 119 degrees. But this is a politics podcast, so why are we talking about the weather?
Well, today we're going to look at public perceptions of climate change, how extreme weather shapes those views, and whether it's in turn shaping our politics. And here with me to do that is Anthony Lazarewicz, the director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Welcome back to the podcast. Hi, Galen. It's great to be with you.
I'll also say that later on, we're going to chat with a couple of my colleagues about some of the latest GOP primary polling and how changes to election law in both red and blue states will reshape how Americans vote in 2024. I'll also say that I know we are still on watch for news of a possible third Trump indictment from the Department of Justice. If and when that happens, of course, we will cover it. But for now, let's talk about the hottest month on record.
So, Anthony, I think the first question that maybe skeptical people ask when we talk about discrete weather events in the context of climate change is, okay, well, how do you know that this is the direct impact of human-caused climate change? You know, the weather is awfully complex. Extreme weather and disasters have been happening since the dawn of time. How do we assess whether this record-breaking heat wave is the result of carbon emissions?
That's a great question, Galen. So basically for about the past 10 to 15 years, scientists have been developing a whole new approach to answering that question and it's called attribution science. And so it's now become a pretty large literature around this.
But in essence, what they do is they take computer models that basically say, if we take out all the carbon pollution that we've put up in the atmosphere that's acting like a heat-trapping blanket, trapping heat on Earth, that's what causes global warming. If we remove all of those and then run the model to see what would the world have looked like without that heat-trapping blanket –
And then we rerun the model with all those gases up there, as we know that they're up there, and they are trapping heat. And then compare those two different kinds of model runs to see what's the likelihood that these types of events would have occurred in the absence of all that pollution. So that's essentially the technique. And what they're finding is that, for instance, the heat waves that you just described here in the United States and northern Mexico would have been virtually impossible without
that heat trapping blanket. Likewise, China just experienced record setting heat that would have only happened once every 250 years in the absence of that heat trapping blanket. And so you can use this technique for a whole variety of different types of weather events. For instance, the Pakistan floods they found was very much associated with climate change a couple of years ago and so on. The other thing to say is that, of course, our ability to do this is much stronger for heat waves
than it is for, say, an event like tornadoes. Tornadoes are incredibly localized. They're very small. They happen very quickly. That's a much harder kind of event to be able to associate with climate change. The key thing that we're just beginning to see in the data that suggests that it might actually be having effect is that some of the belts, the main areas, tornado alley, as it's often called in the United States, may be actually shifting increasingly to the north and to the east. That may be a sign of
climate change. But like I'm saying, those types of events that are hyperlocal are much harder to connect than say these really big events like the heat waves.
You've been fielding surveys for over a decade on what Americans think about climate change, whether what they believe is evolving. And so can you give us a little bit of an overview of where we stand today in terms of both whether Americans think the climate is changing to the extent they think humans are responsible and what direction the trends have gone in in recent years?
So you're right. So we've been doing a project we call Climate Change in the American Mind, and that's two surveys each year, every spring and every fall for the past 15 years. And so we've seen a lot of change over that time period. But in the past 10 years, we've really seen these numbers starting to move quite substantially upwards. So basically, near an all-time high of about 74% of Americans now accept that climate change is in fact happening. 61% understand that it's human-caused.
But I do want to put this a little bit into global context because we do global scale studies as well. And so, you know, if we were talking about Brazil or Japan, 95% of the country would say, yes, global warming is happening or more.
And likewise, the human causation would be seen as much more likely elsewhere. So you still have about three in 10 Americans. And of course, not surprisingly, they tend to be conservative Republicans. They're the ones that still think, ah, it's not happening or it's not human caused. We didn't do anything to affect it. So we can't do anything about it, et cetera. So it's just to say the U.S. is a bit of an outlier. Well, is a very, is a big outlier in terms of public reactions to climate change globally.
Now, of course, the United States isn't the only country with, you know, a right left axis. So when comparing us to other countries, what stands out? Is it simply that this hasn't become a polarized partisan issue in other countries to the same extent? And if not, like, why? What is going on in America that's so different?
Fascinating question. So really, we only see four countries where there's organized climate denial. And likewise, we've segmented the American public and we are able to use this technique around the world. So we basically find six different Americas that range on a spectrum from at one end, a group we call the alarmed, who are fully convinced this happening, human-caused, urgent, strongly support action, and we can talk more about them.
All the way to the other end of the spectrum is the dismissive, who are in the United States, usually about 10% of the population, who are firmly convinced it's not happening, not human-caused. And essentially, they quite literally tell us they're conspiracy theorists. It's a hoax. It's scientists making up data. It's a UN plot to take away American sovereignty. It's a get-rich-scheme by Al Gore and his friends and many other such type conspiracy narratives.
Now, they're only 10%, but they're a really loud 10% here in the United States. They're more than adequately represented in Congress, and they've tended to dominate the public square. But we only see even that high of a proportion in just a few other countries, and most notably, that's Canada and Australia.
And what's fascinating about that, so one, to your point, Galen, we don't find this kinds of climate denialism really anywhere else in the world. I mean, there are little tiny pockets here and there, but nothing like what we see in these three countries. Importantly, these are all English speaking countries, which makes it really easy to import and export misinformation because you don't have to translate all your materials into Swahili or whatever other language.
And in fact, many of the main purveyors of this misinformation do laps from one country to the next, doing talks and giving presentations to express their view. The other is, of course, that they are all major fossil fuel producing states.
So, you know, obviously the United States, lots of oil, lots of coal, lots of natural gas. Likewise, Canada, likewise, Australia, huge coal reserves. So you've got an industry that has a very strong profit motive to maintain the status quo as long as possible. And then the other really interesting thing from a public opinion perspective is that you also see in these three countries what we call radical individualism.
an underlying political ideology that is really about individual liberty, individual freedom, individual autonomy that is over and above all other values. And so in other words, this often gets framed as anti-government, right? So, and the discourse of government's too big, it's too intrusive, there's too much taxes, too much regulation. Like we know this discourse because we've been steeped in it for a generation.
So, people with that worldview are, of course, I mean, like climate change is the mother of all collective action problems because we can't solve this as individuals. Like you and I and everyone else in the world, if we just do all the good things, it would help. So, not dismissing that, but we can't solve this without this particular, the institutions we have to coordinate behavior. And that's called government in most cases.
And we can't do it individually. We can't do it locally. We can't even just do it in the United States. We have to do this coordinated across the world. And what's the main institution we have to do that? The United Nations. Well, you say that word to some of these people and they immediately get visions of black helicopters in their head.
So it's just to say that climate change is almost perfectly designed or constructed as an issue to just set off the minefields of people who have this deep anti-government worldview and ideology.
Yeah, I want to get back to America, but you bringing up other countries makes me wonder, I mean, how do countries like the US, Canada and Australia compared to the Gulf states and China? Because, of course, the Gulf states are massive producers and their economies rely more on fossil fuels than the United States, Canada or Australia. Although they're diversifying some, China relies heavily on coal and has pretty...
clearly stated that they don't plan on following international protocols and things like that when it comes to cutting carbon emissions and are going to sort of go their own way and make their own plans. So it's not the case that outside of the United States, Australia, and Canada, there's some sort of climate change consensus, utopia, et cetera, et cetera. How would you describe what's going on in those countries?
Well, I certainly wouldn't call the current situation utopia. So, yeah, I think we'll agree about that. But I think it depends greatly on which country you're talking about because the political economy of these countries is so different. Like you can't really compare the United States to Saudi Arabia, which isn't really a democracy. Right.
You can't really compare the United States to China, which is certainly not a democracy. That said, the Chinese actually have agreed internationally as part of their international commitments that they're going to try to eliminate CO2 by 2060. They're still a giant developing country. True, they do depend a lot on coal, and that is something that we hope that they will reduce much more quickly than they currently are. At the same time, they're the world's single largest producer of clean energy, and not just
domestically, which they are, but they're also the primary manufacturer now of clean energy technology, like batteries, like solar panels, increasingly electric vehicles, all technologies that were actually invented in the United States. But unfortunately, we've let the manufacturing go there. And they have been like, this is the biggest economic opportunity the world's ever seen. We want to own as much of that market as possible.
So it's not to, I don't think it's fair to say that the Chinese aren't doing anything. They're actually doing quite a bit, especially given the fact that they're a population of one and a half billion people. And they know how vulnerable they are to climate change. Like they have that big of a population on a third of the arable farming land that the United States has. So like they have challenges. Okay. So anyways, just to say that it really does depend now, what,
where you're looking and what the particular political economy of each of these different countries is. Yeah, of course. When it comes to the public opinion piece, it probably makes most sense to compare American public opinion to that of other Western democracies, if you want to do a sort of one-to-one comparison. That makes sense. And on that topic, I'm curious, you mentioned the 74% of Americans who now acknowledge the reality of
climate change and 61% of Americans who say that it's primarily human caused. Why has that number grown? Why are we at an all-time high right now? Is it because our politics are changing? Is it because of extreme weather conditions like we've seen? What are the
motivating factors there for a change in public opinion? Yeah, wonderful question. So of course, this is a complex system. There is no one answer to this. And in fact, what you see is that there's relationships between the public, the media,
and political leaders, and then direct reality. Okay, so I'm just going to take four. We could come up with more examples, but those four are all interrelated with each other. So what we've seen in the past 10 years is a number of things changing. Yes, public opinion has been changing, and that has an influence on what political leaders say. That has an influence on how often the media reports it because their readers want more information.
But likewise, you can reverse that arrow and say, well, the more the media reports it, the more politicians pay attention. And the more the media reports it, the more engaged the public is, right? And likewise, the more leaders lead, the more the media covers them. And the more leaders lead, their followers pay attention and learn and get more engaged. And so all of that has been happening. At the same time,
is direct experience. And that's, I think, really what we're all living through now is that, unfortunately, the reality, the impacts of climate change, which many people wrongly presumed for decades now that this was a distant problem, distant in time that we won't see impacts. Maybe our kids or our grandkids will experience this. We're distant in space. This is about polar bears or developing countries, but not the United States, not my community, not my friends or family or me.
That's just not true anymore. Like it is blaringly obvious. Climate change isn't just in the backyard. It's in the basement. The call is coming from inside the house. And that lived reality is increasingly starting to really dawn in American consciousness. We first detected that signal of direct experience kind of rising out of the noise of our politics, which have been really mucking this up for a long time.
in about 2016. And that little signal has started to grow and grow. And it grows the more we actually talk about it. Yeah, I've been trying to track down some polling on this, you know, as we've seen these record temperatures, especially across the Southwest. Are Americans saying, hey, I'm experiencing this. This is the result of climate change. Climate change is affecting my life.
And what I've seen in some polls is that a majority of Americans attribute this prolonged heat wave to climate change. Now, it's a bare majority. It's not an overwhelming sort of two-thirds or three-quarters majority.
And also attribute other extreme weather events like flooding also to climate change. And then we also see a majority of Americans say they're doing things like spending more time indoors. Their energy bills are higher and things like that. But when you ask them, you know, is this year different from past years? Are you seeing the weather in your community changing significantly? No.
There's a strong relationship between answering yes to that question, things are changing, and being a Democrat. And so there are still quite stark partisan divides on this.
And it seems like that's shaping, like you may say that personal experience changes the way you view these things, but also your own partisanship may change the way you describe your personal experience. So how entrenched is this? Like, as we've seen those numbers tick up, is it, are Republicans also sort of increasingly saying, yes, climate change is real and human caused? Or is that mostly independents and Democrats that are just taking it more seriously? Yeah.
So it's a bit complicated. So like I said, we first- I guess listeners can probably guess by how much explaining I just did there, but yeah. Yeah. So I mean, look, the politics have dominated the public discourse and public thinking about climate change now for a few decades.
But like I said, in 2016, we finally saw the first beginning of a signal emerging out of that. Or if you can think about it, a single note in a larger cacophony of sound, emerging of direct experience actually beginning to take hold. We have seen that growing. It isn't limited just to Democrats, though Democrats and independents are more likely to listen to that signal, to hear what people are saying, to say, oh, yeah, wow, I don't
I'm not a denier. I believe climate change is real, but I just never connected the dots. I didn't think it was happening yet. So, yes, they're farther along in their learning journey, but we are seeing actually a fair number of Republicans. Now, again, they tend to be the liberal moderate Republicans, which is about a third of the Republican Party. They're moving more than, say, the conservative Republicans, two thirds of the party, who are still pretty consistent Republicans.
in either thinking climate change isn't real at all, or there's just that it's not really a problem. It's a democratic issue. So it's just to say, you've really got to start looking under the hood to see which particular demographics are moving.
When it comes to how the two parties approach different issues, I think there's some issues that we consider to be really driven from the bottom up. Voters really care about this. And so politicians have to care about it, too. And on the Republican side, I think it's clear that one of those issues, for example, is immigration. You know, if Trump decided tomorrow that he didn't really want to talk about it anymore, didn't want to build a wall anymore.
Republican voters wouldn't just go along for the ride. They would be actively upset with him. And then there are other issues that are more elite driven. Oftentimes we think about foreign policy, for example, unless there's a war that, you know, there's a draft and people are dying and maybe, you know, it's taking a toll on aspects back at home. Where would you place climate change? Is it voter driven or elite driven in terms of how we think about it and how we prioritize it in American life? Yeah.
Yeah, I'm going to go back to my prior answer and say it's both. Elites respond to what their voters in particular are saying and doing and thinking and concerned about. But likewise, voters listen to what their leaders have to say.
Most people fully recognize they are not experts about this. They're not talking to, you know, a climate scientist over the backyard fence. People are looking for trusted spokespeople, people they look to to help guide them through this increasingly dangerous situation.
and scary and uncertain landscape that we all inhabit. It's not just climate change, it's everything. Like, should we be afraid of AI? Should we be afraid of COVID? Should we be afraid, right, of Russia? Like, these are all big questions that most of us aren't very well trained for. So we look to people that we like and trust to help guide us. And that is one of the most important roles that leadership plays. They lead. They help people understand this is an important issue. So look, it
I'm going to live in a fantasy world for a second and just say, if Republican leaders, most of whom are fully aware that climate change is happening, most of whom actually understand that it's human caused. I mean, I've talked to them. I've had colleagues that have talked to them. They will tell you in private, they get this. This is already hurting their own people, their own communities, their own districts, and they understand that. But they cannot understand
put their head out of the foxhole because they're afraid that they're going to get primaried, okay? That they will pay a political price if they are so bold as to speak. So the real question is, at what point does that political calculation shift? And that, I mean, my crystal ball is very cloudy, so I don't claim to have any predictions here.
Right. And it's worth saying they say it in public, too. As far as the Republican primary field is concerned, the one standout is Donald Trump in terms of saying that it's a hoax and perpetrated by the Chinese for national gain, etc., etc. But pretty much everyone else acknowledges that the climate is changing, that humans are responsible to some degree. They just don't.
disagree on what to do about it. And it seems like conservatives generally prioritize carbon capture initiatives. Even Trump has said that he supports planting a trillion trees globally, which scientists suggest would be very helpful, but also not address the entire issue. But it does also look like this has become a more polarized issue. If you look back to the 90s or earlier, there wasn't such a divide between Democrats and Republicans on whether climate change is...
real or a challenge that we should take seriously? When did this all really become polarized the way that it is today? Yeah, great question. So there are two critical moments. We could pick many more, but I'm going to pick two. One was back in the 90s, because you're right, back in the 90s, Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives all pretty much said, yeah, it's probably a problem. We ought to do something about it. There really wasn't much of a gap between
until Al Gore, and this is Vice President Al Gore, is sent by then President Bill Clinton, who at the time in 1997 is being threatened with impeachment, has become, I mean, it seems quaint in today's politics, but at the time as a highly divisive president, Al Gore goes to Kyoto, negotiates this protocol, this little treaty that's going to finally commit countries to targets and timetables to say, we will reduce X amount of pollution by this time.
comes back and the Clinton administration never puts it up for a vote in the Senate. They already know that they can't get the votes from Democrats or Republicans. And the fossil fuel industry and the allied politicians and other manufacturers all had spent millions of dollars to demonize this potential policy because now there was real policy on the table. This wasn't just abstraction. And so as a result, you start to see the parties really divide. The
The next major moment, though, you have to fast forward to 2008. The nominee for the president of the United States of the Republican Party was Senator John McCain, who for years had been one of the primary champions of climate action in the U.S. Congress. He had sponsored multiple bills.
And in fact, his party, his presidential platform was climate change is real, it's human caused, it's a serious problem, and we're going to solve it with our conservative principles. In fact, he and Obama basically agreed so much about climate change, it wasn't even a campaign issue because they really weren't that far apart. Long story short, he loses that election, Obama takes power, and you see that the Republican Party, which also had as part of its national party platform, climate change is real, human caused, and a serious problem,
in the space of 18 months, suddenly takes a hard right turn. You see the rise of the Tea Party, and suddenly they go from saying climate change is a serious problem to saying, as a common talking point, climate change is a hoax. So that's another of those really kind of critical turning points in American politics.
Now we are where we are today and looking at polling from Gallup, for example, you know, everyone, it's easy to say, yeah, I think climate change is a big deal, like especially on the left. But then the question is, well, how important is it to you? And that's probably going to go a long way in determining how much the United States actually does about it.
And we see that when Gallup has been asking this question for a long time, what's the most important issue to you today? And it's 30 some percent say that it's the economy. 18 percent say it's poor leadership. 8 percent say it's immigration. 6 percent say it's unifying the country. Only 3 percent of Americans say that climate change is the most important issue facing the country today.
So does that mean that it's fair to say that this is not really a priority for Americans, not even for Americans on the left of the political spectrum?
So we've been asking that question repeatedly through to the past election cycles. And what we've been finding is actually fascinating. So first of all, you're right. Those numbers of registered voters, climate change has historically been kind of in the middle of, we ask about 29 or 30 different issues. So crime, education, economy, etc.,
It's usually right in the middle. It's actually maybe dropped just a little bit in the past few years. But what's fascinating is when you then look at how liberal Democrats, moderate conservative Democrats, liberal moderate Republicans, and conservative Republicans each respond,
And what we've seen over the past 10 years is that this issue has soared among liberal Democrats. In other words, the base of the Democratic Party, where consistently it is in the top two, it's either number two or number three out of 30 different issues. And that is, we've never seen that in American political history, where one of our major two political parties, this is now a crucial issue, voting issue for those critical primary voters.
And I think it's not an accident that that's why you saw in the 2020 presidential race, all 272, or at least it felt like 272 candidates who were running for office that year all had climate plans. They were all competing with each other to say, my climate plan is going to be better than yours. And even more fascinatingly, and I have no inside info here, but Joe Biden's climate plan as a primary candidate actually gets stronger as a general candidate.
Okay, now that's usually the opposite of the way things work, right? You run to your base in the primaries and then you run to the center to pick up the three swing voters left in America and so on. He does just the opposite. - Hey, 9%, 9% of Americans. - All right, I'm kidding.
So why would he do that? Because this is an election and increasingly, as you well know, elections are not just about appealing to those undecideds. They're also about getting out your base. And he needed young people,
women in the suburbs and minorities to come out and vote for him in record numbers because, and it turns out, that climate change is an issue that they all care about. So I don't think it's an accident that he had a stronger stance on climate change as a general candidate than he did as a primary candidate. And we've also seen that Democrats were just barely
strong enough in terms of political power in the Senate, most notably, to now finally pass, which is, especially the Inflation Reduction Act, the single largest investment ever made in the United States and arguably globally to address this issue. So it's just to say that underlying social, cultural, and political climate of climate change has shifted in the United States pretty dramatically towards action.
Yeah, I think that's really significant what you described there in terms of, you know, public opinion shifting just within the Democratic Party. And that ultimately led to the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which is somewhat of a misnomer. I mean, largely has to do with, um,
climate change as far as new spending goes. Of course, there were also taxes associated with that plan. And so, yeah, it doesn't necessarily always make sense to just look at broad public opinion if you want to know what's going to happen next in American politics because these segments of political parties can have significant sway once the party gets power.
Can I just say real quickly, I just want to amen to that because I think people too often just focus on what does the majority of public think. And that's always valuable, of course, right? No politician wants to get crosswise with their voters. They need at least the silent permission of their constituents.
But that's different than what we call in political science terms an issue public, which is always a relatively small minority of a population that is passionate about a particular issue and is organized for power.
And, you know, we all know what issue publics look like. It's the pro or anti-immigration movement. It's the pro-choice or the anti-abortion movement. It's the, you know, gun control versus the NRA. So like, let's just take the NRA. The NRA is only 4 million members in a population of 300 million, but they're organized for power and they have clearly been quite effective at shaping the national agenda.
You know, when I was looking at polling on this issue, I did actually think of gun control as a point of comparison. I'm curious if you see something similar, which is that in the wake of high profile mass shootings, we see that
Public support for gun control goes up, whether it's background checks, closing particular loopholes, restrictions on ammunition, things like that. We see in the polling time after time a clear increase in support, but it fades with time. And so I'm wondering, you know, Americans may increasingly be saying today that the effects of climate change are unbearable.
are actually personal. They're experiencing them in their homes. But come winter, does that all just kind of fade? Or of course, this is an El Nino year, so future summers may not be as hot. And once they aren't, does it all just kind of fade to the background, much like the gun control debate? So I think there's... And it's really hard to compare the two events because they're obviously, they're very different in the sense. But what they share is a lot of what we call focusing events. That's again, political science term.
And that focusing events are critical occurrences, critical events that galvanize and attract public attention, media attention, policymaker attention. And they're usually because something has gone wrong, right? So Chernobyl, Fukushima had huge...
Three Mile Island had enormous consequences for the development of the nuclear industry, right? Even though most people, you know, they haven't thought about Fukushima for a long time. Well, at the time, Germany like got rid of all of its nuclear power plants, right? Japan shut down most of its nuclear power plants at the time. Now they're starting to open some of them back up again. So it's just to say that these events are often important.
and this is just maybe a fundamental aspect of human nature, is that we often just won't respond to something until we're literally getting hit upside the head with a two by four, with something that's gone wrong and broken.
Unfortunately, these two issues, climate change brings moment, event after event after event. And I'm sorry, but we are now on an escalator to more misery because we've only warmed globally 1.2 degrees. If we're incredibly good, we might hold the warming to 1.5, which means that it's going to get worse before it gets better.
And these events are happening more frequently. They're more intense. They're more destructive. They're more damaging. We're going to see more of these events, I'm sorry to say. And likewise on guns, I mean, I think we can predict that there will be more mass shootings. There will be many thousands of Americans gunned down because of this particular system that we have chosen to set up. So the real question is, at what point might that make a difference? And I think there is where we go back to issue publics.
You have to have an organization. You have to have a community organized to build the movement that is ready to go into action once that critical focusing event happens. Yeah. And when it comes to specific mitigations on climate change, you mentioned that
All of the Democrats running for president in 2020 had their own plans, and they've been publicized and politicized in many ways. Some of the things in those plans were very unpopular with Americans. Some of them are very popular with Americans. And I'm curious from the polling that you have done.
ranging from cutting back how much meat we eat or banning gas stoves in houses to simply moving to more solar or wind power. What are the kinds of mitigation efforts that Americans are...
enthusiastic about or willing to embrace maybe across the political spectrum, like a clear majority of Americans? And what are the kinds of things that Americans are just like, no, I'm sorry, like Democrat, Republican, whatever, I'm still eating hamburgers or whatever. I mean, I know that one because I've looked at the polling myself, but what are the other things that fall in line like that?
Yeah, it's fascinating because it depends on the policy. So as an example, we're finding that there's enormous bipartisan support for what we would call nature-based solutions. For example, helping farmers change farming methods to store more carbon in the soil. So instead of being a source of carbon pollution because of the way that they plow and the way organic matter in the soil decomposes pollution up into the atmosphere, carbon, to actually things like no-till agriculture, which actually helps farmers
the land store that carbon underground, making it more fertile. So like everybody supports that. Likewise, building more parks, you know, bike lanes, you know, improving public transit. Conservative Republicans like that stuff too. So like there is a consensus for some of that kind of stuff.
It's when you start turning to things like, say, putting regulations on industry that, again, we're running right into that buzzsaw of the underlying political ideology we were talking about before. If you're, well, to quote Grover Norquist, if your worldview is that I want to shrink government to the size of a
to the size that I can drown it in a bathtub, then you're already predisposed to be against anything that has to do with government regulation or intervention, taxation, et cetera, to try to encourage a faster transition to clean energy, which is happening. It's just a question of how fast. Can it happen at scale and speed enough to actually forestall much, much worse climate impacts? So again, just totally depends on what kind of policy we're talking about.
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the most high profile aspects of climate mitigation today in America is where our electricity comes from, where our power comes from. And from what I understand, the largest producer of clean energy in the U.S. today is Texas.
And by and large, conservative Republicans support the expansion of solar and wind energy. And, you know, obviously Democrats do, too. What are the politics of that? So a facet is what they are. And actually, to give credit where credit is due is.
Texas oil man and President George W. Bush, as governor of Texas, put down some of the fundamental legislation that led to the boom in the clean energy industry. Because in the end, it was about producing more energy. And Texas has lots of different sources of energy, not just fossil fuels.
So yes, the politics of this can get really funny in some cases. Like you find conservative ranchers in the Great Plains who love clean energy because it means they can now get a steady income stream. Like every month they get a check in their mailbox of thousands of dollars from the four or five wind turbines they put on their land. They still can farm. They can still ranch. It doesn't take up that much of a footprint on their land. But now they have a steady source of income that
protects them no matter what happens to world food prices as they gyrate up and down, which can, I mean, many of them are under enormous financial pressure. So it's just to say the politics of this can run in all kinds of funny ways. And you're right. Texas is the single largest producer of clean energy in the United States.
Yeah, I mean, one thing that I've spent a decent amount of time in upstate New York and some of the more conservative rural communities and actually solar power grids can be relatively common in more conservative rural parts of the country because it's a way of taking yourself off the grid, being sustainable on land.
Ones that like you have a well, you have solar panels on your roof. Kind of doesn't matter what happens with the rest of the world. You got yourself taken care of in a sense. I mean, not literally, but yeah. This is a deep, not just conservative, but American set of values is independence and self-sufficiency, right? So this totally aligns with that underlying political ideology I was just telling you about is who is the government or some business to tell me what I can and cannot do with my property? This is, I have the freedom to...
produce my own electricity, and ideally to sell my electricity back into the grid. So that really does work with a number of actual, I mean, we've seen it work with tea partiers in Georgia, for example. What's that example in particular? Oh, gosh, this is like 15 years ago. One of the founders of the tea party allied with the Sierra Club
Okay. Let me say that again. The Tea Party partnered with the Sierra Club to fight the utility's basically rejection of the ability of homeowners who put solar panels on the roof to sell their electricity in the grid. The utility didn't want the competition. Obvious why they did that. So why did the Sierra Club support that? Because they're greenies and they care about climate change and so on. Why did the Tea Party support that? Because it was about individual freedom. Who's-
An open market. Yes, an open market. Exactly. So like, why shouldn't I be able to do what I want with my castle and to be a player in the market? So again, there are possibilities. There are places where even conservatives and liberals can come together. Final question here related to this exact topic. You're the director of the Yale Program on Climate Communications. So part of your job is getting people to care about this. I mean, what are...
have you found are the ways that make people kind of concerned about climate change? Like that's your goal, of course. You know, other people have different goals, but what do you find when it comes to those questions actually works?
So the best thing we'll answer that is we actually have a national radio program and podcast called Yale Climate Connections with a brand new minute and a half story every day that plays in over 700 stations across the country. And it's called Climate Connections because what we find over and over again is that this is really about helping people connect the dots. How do you take this abstract concept for most people in their mind, climate change, which they don't think about all that much,
and help it connect to the people, the places, and the things that they already care about.
And for all of its problems, this is the one thing climate change has going for it, is that it's all-encompassing. We're talking about the life support systems of the planet. Every single human being, every non-human critter on this planet has a direct and real stake in this outcome. And so you can find the connections everywhere. Do you care about sports? You should care about climate change. Do you care about chocolate? You should care about climate change.
Faith and religion, like the world's religions from Christians to Jews to Muslims to Buddhists to Confucius, they've all taken this issue on and said this is raising fundamental questions about who we are and how we're supposed to treat one another and the world of which we're part of.
So it's just to say, you don't have to become a climate scientist. You don't have to become an environmentalist. You can be a conservative in Oklahoma, and you can still care about climate change because it relates to the people and the places and the things you already care about. All right. Well, we're going to leave it there for today. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks, Galen. As always, great to be with you.
Anthony Lazarewicz is the director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Next, we're going to take a look at how election laws have changed since 2020 and what that means for 2024.
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My colleagues Kaylee Rogers and Nathaniel Rakich have recently taken stock of just how much the way we vote has changed since 2020, and I want to dig into it. But before we do that, a big new poll came out this morning, so we're rearranging the show. We hadn't planned on talking about this, but we are going to.
So the New York Times and Siena College published their first poll of the 2024 election. Now, they are, according to our pollster ratings, one of the best, if not the best pollsters in the country. And they didn't just do a regular horse race poll where they try to figure out who's leading and then, you know, go on down from there. They really focused on the question of, is there even an opening for a non-Trump alternative in the Republican primary? So that's what I want to talk about.
And just to start off, I am going to share the numbers that they got for the actual horse race poll. Trump, according to their poll, is at 54%. DeSantis is at 17%. Pence at 3%. Scott at 3%. Haley at 3%. Ramaswamy at 2%. And Christie at 2%. If you have been following the Republican primary polls in our averages, you will know that that's not so far off from where our averages are.
stand, which is, you know, nice to know. Anyway, here with me to talk about this a little deeper is senior elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich. Welcome to the podcast, Nathaniel. Hey, Galen.
And also here with us is tech and politics reporter Kaylee Rogers. Welcome to the podcast, Kaylee. Hey, how's it going? It's going well. And I hope I'm not like spoiling any surprises here. But from what I understand, this is going to be probably your last podcast with us for a while. You got some big news coming up? Yeah, I'm going to be stepping away for a little while because I'm going to have a baby. So not sure exactly when it's coming, but it's any day now. Yeah, so this will be my last pod for a bit.
Well, we're all very excited for you and can't wait to celebrate the good news. But now back hard pivot here back to electoral politics. So I am curious to hear from you all what you thought of the way that they broke down the Republican electorate from core MAGA to persuadable to.
clear anti-Trump divides within the Republican Party. And what conclusions you came to about the opening for a Trump alternative, Kayleigh? Yeah, I mean, the thing that really stood out to me is I think people can kind of get caught up in like, well, it's still early. There's a lot of, you know, people still running that could maybe consolidate behind DeSantis if he gets enough momentum or something. But they asked a question later on that was straight up
If the primary was just between Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis, who would you vote for? And Trump got 62% to DeSantis' 31%. So that's quite striking. It's not as if everybody anti-Trump is just kind of divided and eventually they'll coalesce. Like, it really seems like he still has such a firm grasp on the party base, uh,
And yeah, I mean, when you compare to it's a little tricky, you know, obviously there's a lot of differences between the Democratic primary in 2020. Trump, you know, it was is the most recent Republican president. He was a one term president and lost and is now running again. So it's obviously different from the completely open primary that we had in 2020 for the Dems. But still, if you want to compare to that, like this is not.
This is still different. You know, Biden was getting about a third of the support at this point in the race prior to 2020. So it's, you know, a significant lead that Trump's got here. Yeah. Nathaniel, what did you make of this?
Yeah.
So that's good. Good to see. But yeah, I mean, I think it basically, you know, it's just further evidence for something we already kind of knew, which is that like Trump is the strong front runner in the primary. You know, DeSantis has some support, but he'll need something to go right for him or very wrong for Trump in order for things to reverse. And of course, that could happen. You know, like we're theoretically waiting on two indictments here for Trump. And obviously, I think there's a lot of reason to doubt whether that's going to hurt him the way that it would hurt
a normal candidate, I think. But yeah, but like, I think we've known for a while that like something would have to fundamentally change about the race in order for Trump to lose. And the poll did kind of ask, you know, some interesting kind of sub questions, which I assume we'll talk to talk about in a minute. And those didn't really show any signs of weakness for Trump either. But but I do I think that that doesn't necessarily mean that something can't change, because I think we've talked in the past about them on the podcast about like
voters can change kind of what they say they want in a leader based on like who they are favoring. Right. And like in, you know, in, in 20, what was it? 2015 voters initially said that they like, weren't looking for a businessman. They were looking for like an experienced politician or an experienced leader. Uh, and then Trump came on the scene and kind of captured their hearts and they kind of flipped that around. And so, you know, yeah, like it, it's not like it has provided some kind of new evidence of like, okay, yeah, Trump definitely has this wrapped up now. Um,
he was already like the strong favorite, but, but, um, you know, and now we, you know, continue to have that confirmed.
Well, we're not going to just talk about it in a minute. We're going to talk about it right now. According to the poll, they segmented the GOP primary electorate into three groups, which was the MAGA base, the persuadables, and the not open to Trump MAGA base, 37% of the electorate. And to your question about could anything really change how people view Trump, et cetera, this was the segment of the electorate where they said no, quite clearly no, 0% of that electorate.
category of the electorate saw Trump criminally liable, thought that what he had done was wrong. It's like, this is, he's going to get 37% as the floor is basically the conclusion that they came to in this Republican primary. Then the 37% persuadable, there was a solid chunk that were leaning Trump, as you can tell by the fact that he got 54% overall, but that, you know, that's not
their only motivation here. And then the 25% that were not open to Trump are people who may have even supported Biden in the 2020 election, are people who support like Chris Christie, somebody who has basically zero chance of being the Republican nominee. So I guess breaking the Republican electorate down into those three camps, was that illuminating for you? Like, did it put numbers to what you already knew? I mean, how do you process that?
Yeah, I mean, again, I think that, you know, it's good to have further confirmation from a high-quality source of things that we already knew. Like, you know, there we had their— Put it on my tombstone. I thought wait and see is going to be on our tombstone. Galen Drew, it's good to have high-quality confirmation. Or no, it's Nathaniel Rakich. It's good to have high-quality confirmation of things that we already knew.
Anyway, no. So there was a CNN poll. I guess it was probably several months ago now. I want to say maybe like April or May. So that was like kind of just as Trump was kind of coming into this kind of really firm control on the race. But
but it basically asked like, who are you supporting today? And then also like, who are you open to supporting? And it showed Trump with a huge lead in or a sizable lead. I don't remember exactly what it was on the, who are you supporting today? But like still like about the same number of people said that they were open to supporting DeSantis. And so I think that shows that like, you know, yes, like, you know, you have this, the super majority of Republican voters who are,
you know, like kind of pro-MAGA, like pro-Trumpism. Most of them are with Trump right now. Some of them are fluid between Trump and DeSantis. But of course, DeSantis needs to make the case and win those voters over. And he hasn't done that so far. And like, it's not just enough to be like, you know,
like to have voters be cool with you, you have to affirmatively make the case for them. And then we've seen in like morning consult, we've got, we've seen like favorability ratings of the candidates and you see that, you know, Trump has like that, like 20 ish percent unfavorable rating among Republicans. And that kind of lines up with the, um, the anti-Trump, um, contingent in this poll. And we've also seen from morning consult, the second choice polls of, you know, Trump voters saying that, um,
or like a plurality of trump voters saying that their second choice is desantis and so yeah so i think you know kind of all these pieces of evidence are adding up to the fact that like yes there is this you know there's a floor of support for trump you know 30 40 percent-ish
There's an additional, you know, like, yeah, like 30 ish percent who are like pro Trumpism and are open to voting for Trump and maybe they're but maybe they're fluid. And then the remainder, which is not enough to constitute a majority of the party, again, unless something dramatic changes, is is the ones who are like, no, let's let's move on from Trump definitively. Right. And those favorability, you know.
It's not as if DeSantis isn't well-liked or that people would be completely against or Republicans would be completely against voting for him. But he's really kind of positioned in this polling and other polling that we've seen as kind of the backup candidate. Like if something were to drastically change and, you know, as we've seen, simply being the first president to ever be indicted isn't necessarily enough to be changing anything. So...
on if anything could actually shift it. But if something were to change, there's a sizable chunk of these voters that would be comfortable switching to DeSantis. But, you know, Trump is their preference as of right now. All right. Well, let's move on to the work that you've been doing over the past couple weeks, 202.
to survey how much election laws have changed since, I guess, since 2019. And as a result, how voting will be different in 2024. And I think primarily we're talking about two main buckets of changes. One is in reaction to the coronavirus pandemic and all of the changes that folks probably remember from the 2020 election as a result of that.
And then the other is, you know, former President Trump and his allies falsely claiming that there was fraud after the 2020 election took place and therefore sowing doubt in the way that we administer elections and a lot of states passing new laws in reaction to those unfounded accusations. So first and foremost, I want to ask Kayleigh, since 2019, has it gotten easier or harder to vote in America?
I'm going to give a really annoying, unsatisfying answer, which is that it depends where you live very deeply. If you look at just sort of the top line numbers, overall, there's been more legislation passed, more laws passed that make it easier to vote overall than harder to vote.
But once you get down to the state level, it's a very, very different picture if you're a voter living in Texas versus a voter living in Michigan, for example. There's been a very stark difference in what those state legislatures have pursued, how much they've been passing and what those laws do.
A lot of them are kind of a mixed bag where they've passed some laws making it easier in some ways and harder in other ways. And so you have to really drill down to the individual state to kind of figure out where things are harder and where it's easier.
Right. And there's also a dynamic at play here where certain municipalities or states may have changed things in order to make voting easier in 2020. But then in the immediate aftermath of 2020, there were laws passed that sort of reverted those changes. And so maybe it's basically just the status quo ante. But to get there, there were sort of, you know...
you know, the loosening of restrictions or whatever, and then more restrictions put in place. Nathaniel, I know you've looked specifically at how things have played out this year, and we tracked a lot of the restrictions that were passed in Republican-led states in 2021 and 2022. Has that trend continued? Yeah, so for an article I wrote for the site last week,
I looked at data from the Voting Rights Lab, which is basically a pro-voting rights organization that tracks changes to election law and categorizes it as either making it easier to vote or harder to vote or whether it has kind of like a neutral or unclear takeaway.
Um, and basically, um, you know, I think people listening to this podcast know that in 2021, right, we saw a rash of new voting restrictions, particularly in red States. So according to the voting rights lab, uh, 53 new voting restrictions were enacted in 2021. And people probably remember these very high profile laws in places like Georgia and Texas, um, that really targeted male voting in particular, um, like requiring some kind of ID or, um,
or identifier to request an absentee ballot, for example, or like in Arizona, they got rid of their permanent absentee voting list. And so so that was kind of the big story.
um, that year in 2021, this year in 2023, some States are continuing to, to restrict voting rights, um, particularly red States again. Um, but you really haven't seen those really like big comprehensive impactful laws quite as much. A lot of the changes have been smaller in addition to kind of numerically, the number of laws being smaller. So only 29 voting restrictions have been passed so far in 2023. Obviously the year isn't over yet. Um,
But but that's definitely below the pace of 2021. And instead, the bigger story this year seems to be voting rights expansions, like all of the kind of big omnibus election laws that have passed this year have been in liberal states, expanding voting rights, things like restoring the right to vote to felons as soon as they end their their jail time. So people who are on probation and parole who previously weren't able to vote can now vote in in a couple of states, I believe, Minnesota and
new mexico or the two also some states expanded or established automatic voter registration which is basically the idea that when you go to the dmv or interact with the government in some other way they pass your information along to the um like the secretary of state or whoever is is managing the voting rolls and and you can opt out later but the default is that they register you to vote um
And then a couple of states also, we talked about Arizona getting rid of their permanent absentee voter list. That's basically a list you can sign up for, which is a in perpetuity, you know, absentee ballot request form. So you get one automatically for every election. So a couple of states, including Minnesota,
Minnesota and New Mexico also kind of created those. And so that I think has been the bigger story here in 2023. Sorry for the rant. Well, and just to throw more numbers on top of that, but I think what Nathaniel is describing here also characterizes how
how much it's based on jurisdiction. So you hear that top line number of how many individual laws were enacted that restricted voting, but those were really concentrated in a few key states, you know, mostly Republican led states. So in 2021 and 2022, 23 states,
in general, expanded their voting access versus 11 that in general restricted it. This is also from the voting rights lab. And then six where the legislation was so kind of mixed that you can't really say one way or the other if it was more expansive or more restrictive. So lots and lots of bills in some states doing, you know, a lot to restrict voting and then maybe some fewer or ominous bills in a lot of states that's going to be expanding it.
Yeah. And one interesting thing is that the states that are restricting voting access are almost entirely red states or states that are run by Republican governments. But the states that are expanding voting access are actually a mix. It's mostly blue states, but there are also a decent number of red states as well. Obviously, these kind of big, expansive
like voting expansions that I mentioned are passing in the blue states. But you've seen states like Wyoming, which added gun licenses to its list of acceptable voter IDs that will make it easier to vote. You saw states like Arkansas making it easier for overseas and military voters to vote by mail. And we saw also obviously during the pandemic, basically every state, no matter who was running it, made it easier to vote. So it's not actually a trend that's quite as red or blue as you might assume.
Yeah, I mean, I think there was a lot made of voting laws in the run up to 2020 and then also a lot made of how voting laws changed throughout 2021 and 2022. And the 2022 midterms seemed to run pretty smoothly. Of course, there was still some delay in getting the ultimate results. But
But, you know, there didn't seem to be too big of an issue in terms of access to the ballot, in terms of tallying, et cetera. Like, have a lot of those fears essentially been allayed? And if not, what are the concerns about how things could still go wrong going into 2024, Kayleigh? I mean, I'd actually counter that. There were examples of these laws already having an impact on
as far as uh you know like mail-in ballots being rejected uh people not being on the voter registration and not realizing and showing up the polls not being able to vote and uh i know that at least in texas there was some preliminary results that showed that that was more likely to impact voters of color and also certain jurisdictions that tend to lean more democrat
So I don't know that I would say there was like no issues at all and it all went swimmingly. And I think that the concern for like voting rights activists is that that's only going to be magnified in a presidential year when you have obviously a lot more people showing up to vote.
And Kayleigh, yeah, that's an important point that you made about there still being complications as far as the voting goes in 2022. I think one area where at least there were not nearly the complications that we saw in 2020 was, you know, votes getting tallied and ultimately certified and sort of the results being the results and people more or less trusting them.
What concerns are there now surrounding administration of elections in 2024? I mean, we've heard cases of, you know, elections workers being harassed or these, you know, previously nonpartisan elections for the people who run elections or appointments becoming very political and very charged. How has that changed the landscape? Yeah, there's a couple ways that it's impacted it, but
Overall, you know, we did see kind of a mass exodus of election administration professionals because of the rhetoric that former President Trump was spreading around. You can't trust elections. You can't trust election officials. You can't trust what's being happening. You know, all of these things.
lies about the election being stolen. People were being harassed. They were being attacked. They left their jobs. And in their place, in some cases, people who believe Trump and wanted to come in and, you know, quote unquote, fix things were being put into these positions of power to oversee these elections. Again, it's a sort of a small handful scattered around the country. But the issue is that it's not just that they talk about this stuff or repeat Trump's claims, but they actually did act in a
at least if nothing else, slowed down the certification of elections. So multiple instances of local election officials refusing to certify the valid results of their county's elections until, you know, ordered by a judge or overruled by other people on a committee.
And so you see how that starts to, it continues to sow distrust because people are like, well, one of them didn't trust it, so maybe I shouldn't. And it also slows things down and could cause kind of a domino effect where you're missing deadlines and making things a lot more complicated for democracy to kind of run in the way that it always has. So this is a real problem that could be exacerbated again by the size and turnout of 2024. It's not going to derail everything. It's not as if every election administration official is now
partisan in some way, but there are a handful of bad actors that are worth paying attention to. For people's actual own experience on election day, or of course the week surrounding it, given that we have early and mail-in voting in the U.S.,
Like, are people going to experience this? Is it going to be clear to people that voting is different in 2020 for like new machines or, you know, different speeds at which the votes are tallied? Yeah, I mean, we're waiting to find out. I think that there's a really good chance, especially in these states where there's been a lot of changes since the 2020 election, that
There, you know, could very well be a different experience for voters. They might be expecting to vote one way and find out that they can't or, you know, have their ballot rejected or, like I said, show up and not be registered like they thought they were. There could be longer lines in some jurisdictions.
Shorter lines and others, I mean, it's all going to really be very variable. And I think what we're waiting to see is because there was so much change, not just legislatively, but also culturally and with the people running elections and sort of beliefs around methods of voting, all that's going to coalesce in a new way. So we're going to have to kind of see what that results in.
Yeah. I think like for a lot of States, the big change was 2020, right? Obviously the way people voted in 2020 was very different. There was a lot more male voting. Um, we see this in, you know, like surveys that almost half, right? Almost half of the country voted by mail in 2020 spike. Um,
from previous years, it had been kind of steadily increasing. But yeah, it was very different. And so you think about states like Nevada, which have permanently moved to vote by mail now. Nevada did that in 2020. So for a Nevada voter, that change has already happened. But then, yeah, like Kaylee mentioned, there are some states that
made things, you know, maybe switch to vote by mail or did some very dramatic thing to make it easier to vote by mail in 2020 that are switching back now in 2024 to the status quo ante. And so, um, you know, that will be, you know, maybe create some whiplash for folks. Um, so yeah, I think it very much depends on, um, as Kaylee said, uh, where people live. All right. Well, we're going to leave things there for today. Thank you so much for chatting today, Kaylee and Nathaniel. Thanks for having us.
Thanks, Galen. Good luck, Kaylee. Thanks. I'll see you next year. Yes, indeed. Can't wait to see pictures. My name is Galen Druk. Tony Chow is in the control room. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet or sheet or heat or zeet.
or thread us with questions or comments. I promise you I'm not trying to be Dr. Seuss. I honestly don't know what they're called anymore. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening and we will see you soon.
