Democrats Aren’t Talking Climate Any More

Climate policy is decidedly unfashionable in 2025 — among Democrats.

The party isn’t embracing climate change denialism like many in the GOP, nor is it endorsing the Trump administration’s attacks on clean energy. But as Democrats continue groping for a way forward after their 2024 defeat, they’ve clearly decided they need to change how they talk about climate and energy issues. And in some cases, it goes beyond rhetoric to the actual policies they’re promoting. The bottom line for Democrats: Climate is out, affordability is in.

With Donald Trump having won back the presidency amid broad frustration with high prices, it’s perhaps no surprise that Democrats are trying to make gains in the affordability debate. But it’s still striking to see longtime climate champions in the party shift gears, and it speaks to concern among Democrats that their focus on climate change has weighed them down.

“It’s an issue that I think we need to continue to engage on and speak out on and work to legislate on, but it’s not a top three issue right now,” Sen. Chris Coons, the Democratic co-chair of the Senate’s bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus, told me.

In a recent op-ed, Coons pinned Delaware’s rising electricity costs on Trump — and didn’t mention climate once.

Indeed, party leaders are trying a two-pronged affordability-centered strategy: tying higher electricity bills nationwide to Republicans’ dismantling of their signature climate package, while also downplaying climate policies within the states Democrats do control.

Coons, one of former President Joe Biden’s closest allies, added, “Let’s put it this way: American voters clearly didn’t give the Biden-Harris administration and Democrats the credit we hoped they would for transformational investments in energy, and that sent a signal to Trump that he could reverse, defund or cut lots of investments in new energy generation, grid stability, energy research, new energy sources for the United States.”

In other words: While climate legislation didn’t lose Democrats the election, it didn’t not lose it, either.

Sen. Brian Schatz, perhaps the Democrats’ most articulate orator on climate right now, is also preaching a message of affordability.

“The way to victory is to talk about price,” the Hawaii Democrat said at a New York Times event last month. “You could talk about the planetary emergency and mitigation and adaptation, and you could throw in some environmental justice rhetoric, and by the time you’re done talking, people think you don’t care about them.”

There will be plenty of opportunities to test out messaging. Electricity prices are projected to continue climbing, partly on the back of more and more AI data centers but partly on utilities’ increased spending to upgrade aging grid infrastructure.

It’s also notable that electricity tends to be cheaper in states with higher-than-average concentrations of wind and solar power, as my POLITICO colleagues Zack Colman and Catherine Allen reported. And Republicans’ repeal of much of the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax credits for renewable energy are estimated to raise electricity rates by 5-7 percent by 2030, according to the think tank Resources for the Future.

Democrats are already getting some wins under the affordability banner. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a potential White House contender, signed a package of energy bills in May, including to speed up solar permitting, all while touting the ability to curb utility costs.

Sometimes climate can even slip in alongside affordability, as in a legislative package that California Gov. Gavin Newsom, another likely 2028 aspirant, signed last month at a podium emblazoned with “Cutting utility bills. Cutting pollution.”

“This is not an ideological endeavor,” Newsom said in signing the bills, which extend the state’s carbon-trading program and direct some of its proceeds to electricity bill rebates while also easing permitting for new oil wells. State Republicans voted for that part, but some also voted for another part that broadens the state’s electric grid to make it easier to trade power across state lines.

“We’re in the practical application business,” Newsom said. “We’ve got to manifest our ideals and our goals. And so this lays it out, but it lays it out without laying tracks over folks.”

California environmentalists say it’s an example of how to keep talking about climate change, particularly in the current political climate.

“Our position has always been that addressing climate change is the cost-effective path forward,” said Victoria Rome, director of California government affairs for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “I don’t think the answer is to stop talking about it. I think the answer is to show people how the solutions are actually good for them, for their health, for their pocketbook.”

No affordability discourse these days is complete without a discussion of power prices in the mid-Atlantic, which have risen by as much as 35 percent since last year and are feeding into New Jersey’s tight gubernatorial race.

The obscurity of the actual culprit — the regional electric grid operator’s lack of urgency in connecting new energy projects — is letting both candidates get in their hits, as POLITICO E&E News’ Adam Aton and Timothy Cama note. Energy policy may not have decided the presidential election, but it could determine the next governor of New Jersey.

Republican Jack Ciattarelli is blaming outgoing Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy for closing power plants, and he’s proposing to pull the state out of a regional carbon-trading program; Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill is blaming Trump and pledging to freeze utility rates and reform the regional grid operator. But she’s also engaged in some self-flagellating.

“Sometimes our messaging in the Democratic Party — not great,” Sherrill said in a March interview. “For years we’ve said, ‘We need to move into clean power.’ And there’s almost been this understanding, ‘It’s going to cost you an arm and a leg, but if you’re a good person, you’ll do it.’ So now that we’re actually in that place that we promised — it was going to be cheaper than any other source of power — people are skeptical.”

Ciattarelli weaponized that “arm and a leg” excerpt last month in ads that took Sherrill’s statement out of context.

Slightly removed from the heat of the campaign, there’s actually bipartisan agreement that the grid operator needs fixing. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Democrat and Republican, respectively, who both might be eyeing 2028, are both threatening to pull their states out of the organization that currently operates their electric grid.

But there’s still a risk that action to curb climate change will remain the scapegoat, even as its consequences have long since arrived.

David Hill, executive vice president of the energy program at the Bipartisan Policy Center, noted that when electricity supplies were ample, there was less of a need to focus on reliability and affordability when talking climate. Now, those are the public’s key concerns and so climate advocates are facing “some pretty severe pushback,” even as there’s only so much they can do.

“In the end,” Hill said, “power flows according to the laws of physics, not according to the laws of politics or economics.”