The environmental movement has a voter turnout problem: 8 million environmental voters did not vote in the 2020 election. Eight MILLION! In a presidential election decided by thousands of votes. This 2024 election is similarly (stressfully!) close. So what can we, climate voters, do?
On September 20th, at Bowdoin College (where I teach), I sat down with Whit Jones, founder and executive director of Lead Locally, and Nathaniel Stinnett, founder and executive director of Environmental Voter Project for a conversation on climate and voting. We got into it, got nerdy and specific, about: fixing this MASSIVE voter turnout problem, how climate voters can influence policy, election wins we should celebrate, and why local elections matter very, very much.
It would be reckless to be on a book tour in September/October 2024 and not use every event to encourage people to #VoteClimate. So I’m taking Environmental Voter Project and Lead Locally on tour with me, at each stop registering volunteers to help with their worthy efforts. 30 days to go… join us!
Sudeikis v. Johnson dance off at our LA Climate Variety Show. Lead Locally programmed Dance Dance Revolution boards so that every step sent a text to a voter to remind them to #VoteClimate – when we’re texting climate voters, everyone wins! (Photo: Elisa Ferrari)
EVP and Lead Locally volunteers talk with attendees at the book launch at Brooklyn Museum. (Photos above and below: Kisha Bari)
This episode was produced by Nora Saks and me, Ayana, with support from Jenisha Shrestha. Special thanks to Bowdoin College for hosting and producing this event.
TRANSCRIPT
This content was originally created for audio and the transcript has been edited for clarity. Please note that some elements (i.e. music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text.
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: Hi everyone, welcome back to the WHAT IF WE GET IT RIGHT? podcast, where I’m inviting you to join me on my book tour and listen in on all of the awesome conversations I’m having with incredible people all across the country who are helping me to imagine answers to this crucial question: What if we get it right?
As you may have heard, there’s a pretty big election coming up, and the climate stakes could not be higher.
So for Episode 2, I’m sharing highlights from a recent conversation about politics and the election that I had close to home, with two of my favorite cutting edge election and voting nerds, who I didn’t get to interview for the book, but I really want you to hear from.
One is Nathaniel Stinnett, the founder and executive director of Environmental Voter Project, which is all about getting people who prioritize environmental issues to turn out and vote.
The other is Whit Jones, founder and executive director of Lead Locally, an organization I discovered back in 2020, when I was so frustrated and terrified about the presidential race. Lead Locally is all about electing local candidates who are running on a strong climate platform. Super duper important stuff.
In fact, both Lead Locally and Environmental Voter Project are coming on my book tour with me. It would be very ridiculous for me to do a tour in September and October of 2024 and not use that as an opportunity to sign up volunteers and get people engaged in supporting the best climate candidates up and down the ballot during this election season.
So one of the first stops on my book tour was with Whit and Nathaniel at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. That’s where I teach—and some of my students were in the audience, which was very special for me.
Okay, here’s our conversation about politics and the 2024 election.
Just to set this up, on the stage behind me, Whit and Nathaniel was a big and very worrisome statistic: over 8 MILLION “environmental” voters did not vote in the 2020 presidential election. That’s wild, right?
And so I started by asking Nathaniel to break that number down for us.
Ayana: What does this mean and what are you doing about it?
Nathaniel Stinnett: Yeah, I think probably all of you are very aware that the climate crisis is moving a hell of a lot faster than our politics is. And probably you assume that what's leading to that problem is that there aren't enough people who care deeply about climate change. And that's a common misconception. The truth is there are tens of millions of Americans who care deeply about the climate crisis, clean air, clean water, environmental justice issues. And there are probably 22, 23 million registered voters who care so much about climate and the environment, that it's literally their number one priority.
So why aren't politicians paying attention to these people's priorities? Well, because most of them aren't voting. And so what this fact is here, we identified in the 2020 presidential election that there were 8 million already registered voters who listed climate or some other environmental issue as their number one priority. They just didn't show up on election day. An election that was decided by 43,000 votes in three states. That has an enormous impact on how politicians lead.
What we do at the Environmental Voter Project is, we're not in the mind-changing business. We're not in the opinion-changing business. We don't try to persuade people to care more about climate and the environment. Instead, we just find that people who already care deeply and aren't voting, and we make a purely behavioral intervention.
What we do is we poll tens of thousands of people, isolate the ones who tell us climate's their number one priority, then start working with data scientists to try to find other people like them. And we take it to an outside polling company. And we say, ‘hey, can you test the accuracy of this list?’
Every time we've ever done that, the polls have come back and at least 85 percent of the respondents have said off the top of their heads, ‘Oh, yeah, climate's my number one priority. Why do you ask?’
Right now, this is how presidential and U. S. Senate campaigns are targeting all of you. If you still have in your heads that campaigns target soccer moms and NASCAR dads, forget it. No one targets by demographic group anymore. They will look you up in the main voter file and they'll say, ‘okay, well, based on all of our predictive models, we think that Ayana has a 92 percent likelihood of voting, and a 62 percent likelihood of caring about this issue, and a 73 percent likelihood of caring about this candidate.’ And they'll mix and match their messaging just towards that. And this is what we do to try to find these super environmentalists. And then we just match it back to their public voter file and see who isn't voting.
A: So that’s what Nathaniel and the Environmental Voter Project are up to. Then I asked Whit how he came to targeting the down-ballot, local elections piece of the puzzle. And he told us that after years of working in D.C., trying to convince members of Congress to lead on climate by passing bills and legislation, he got pretty discouraged. There were some victories, but most of what they wanted to see from Congress wasn’t happening.
So back in 2012, Whit started volunteering on local initiatives, one right in southern Maine, actually. A community group was protesting a proposed Tar Sands pipeline that would have run right through Casco Bay, a really important and gorgeous body of water, and the plan was for it to end in South Portland. The residents did not want it coming through their town.
Whit Jones: And they started organizing locally around their city council elections. They endeavored to pass ballot measures and also to get the city councillors on board for stopping this Tar Sands pipeline. And the election day came. We organized really hard. The ballot initiative ultimately failed, but the city councilors saw this local movement of voters who were demanding action on climate and stopping this Tar sands Pipeline. And the first act they took when they were sworn in as city councilors was to pass an ordinance which blocked the Tar Sands pipeline. And I saw that happen in six months with a little budget and a very powerful group, and thought to myself, why aren’t we doing this everywhere?
Lead Locally launched to recruit local climate champions to run for local office and ultimately support them to get into power where they can make key decisions on public transportation, on cleaning up the grid, on getting EV buses into schools. These are all incredibly necessary and practical solutions that we can do in our own communities and don't have to wait on politicians in D.C.
We've been doing this now since the 2016 election cycle and have elected a network of hundreds of state and local elected officials who are leading on solutions across the country.
Ayana: So, I think this is very exciting because not only can we not expect what's happening in Washington, D. C. to go super well, given the state of Congress, right, and handle all the climate stuff from there. Even if they were perfectly aligned with climate science and doing their very best, we still need local politicians implementing solutions locally, right? D.C.'s never going to support municipal composting programs in Brunswick. Or the expansion of bike lanes in Portland. We need local politicians to be championing and prioritizing those sorts of things. So it could never be from the top down in that way. And I think that's sort of one of the exciting things about this moment of transformation - or hope - that we're in, from a fossil fuel-based economy to a regenerative one, is that we need so many leaders. This is absolutely not just about the president, right? We need leaders in every town, in every city, in every industry, in every sector, who are all helping to make this transition to clean energy and beyond. And so it's in some ways bolstering, because it's not like you need just one person to be the one.
Although, let's talk about the stakes of this presidential election.
Nathaniel: So we're not legally permitted to support or oppose particular candidates. But, speaking in very unscientific terms here, if the climate crisis is speeding along at 60 miles per hour, and we've just finished like maybe the best four years of federal policymaking we've ever had on climate, and it's only going at like 30 miles per hour…
Ayana: Let's put a pin in that, because I think a lot of people in this room don't really know the details of how good it's been.
Nathaniel: The Inflation Reduction Act, I think by any objective measure, was the largest climate policy victory the world has ever known.
Ayana: $370 billion for climate solutions and some other stuff we don't like, but we'll get to that later.
Nathaniel: Right. But also just, even more granular stuff. I mean, by 2030, it's going to reduce something like a hundred thousand asthma attacks a year. And these are real victories that we have had. And even though they're real victories, they are nowhere near what we need. And we're coming to a point in time where we might actually start going backwards. When we can't afford to even keep going at the speed we're currently going.
So yeah, this is maybe one of the most important turning points in our climate livelihoods.
Whit: Yeah, I couldn't agree more, and I would add that as we need to focus on keeping climate deniers out of the White House, there are also hundreds of thousands of other local elections that are happening and many consequential ones in the same states that will decide the presidential election.
In addition to Pennsylvania and Arizona deciding whether or not we have more Trump or Kamala Harris, the state legislative elections will decide whether or not there are majorities in those states that are willing to go further or back on climate. And those decisions are complementary and supplementary and absolutely necessary in addition to the big federal wins like the Inflation Reduction Act.
Ayana: Is there any evidence that the work that you do to turn out people to support local climate candidates helps up the ballot too? I know the opposite can be true.
Whit: Yeah, there's emerging research on this, that's often called reverse coattails. And the idea being in some communities, the presidential election or a senate election may not be the most relevant or the most inspiring. And so a local candidate who is listening to voters and potential constituents can actually more deeply hear what folks want and speak to it and run on it and turn out additional people. I think it's still an early body of research on it, but it has shown that where there are strong local candidates, they can increase turnout by a couple percentage points, which in some of these really tight presidential states is, whether or not Trump or Kamala Harris win.
Ayana: And so, tell us where each of you are working, like what's the geographic scope of your work, Whit, and how many candidates are you guys getting behind this election cycle?
Whit: We're really focused in three major places. We know in order to address climate change the first thing we need to do is stop the expansion of the fossil fuel industry. And so we've been working in city council and county commission races, public utility commission races in the oil and gas producing states, and other places where there's infrastructure being built associated with oil and gas development. Places like Texas and Louisiana and New Mexico and Pennsylvania. The second kind of grouping that we follow is places where people are running on really bold and ambitious local climate policy around solutions. And then the third is these places where there are state legislatures that are on the brink of having major significant climate policy, and that are layered with the presidential battleground states, because we know what happens locally translates into the federal elections as well.
Ayana: And how many folks are you supporting right now?
Whit: This has been our biggest year to date. I think we endorsed our 120th candidate on Thursday. And those are probably spread across 15 states.
Ayana: And how much does it cost to run a city council election? Like, what are the budgets for those?
Whit: It's widely varying but in general it is much less expensive and less competitive than the federal elections. So a small town candidate may raise one thousand to five thousand dollars and that would be considered a big haul. There are other bigger cities where candidates still are raising tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Ayana: And we're talking about a billion dollar presidential election this year or more?
Nathaniel: Oh, much more than that.
Whit: Multi-billion dollar presidential election. Every Senate race is tens of millions? Nathaniel probably knows.
Ayana: Yeah, I mean, these numbers knocked my socks off when I first heard them, and that's why it was such a big deal that I was able to help raise money for Lead Locally because $120,000, that's the budget for like 30 or 40 races, right? Like a robust budget compared to what they would otherwise have.
And so I think I just want to encourage you all, if you do political donating, to really think about local races as something where you can make a huge difference for a candidate, whereas donating to the president, it just disappears into the billions ether.
Thank you. How does EVP pick where you work, and where are you working right now? I know it's not all 50 states.
Nathaniel: Yeah, so we're in 19 states and we've identified 4.8 million individual voters in those 19 states who are registered voters, who list climate as a top priority, but they're unlikely to vote this fall without getting mobilized to do so. We are in a whole lot of battleground states, but not just battleground states. We're in the Pennsylvania's, and Arizona's, and North Carolina's, and Georgia's, but we're also in a bunch of red states and blue states. We're in Louisiana and Nebraska, we're also in New York, we are in Maine.
We choose states based on three criteria. First, where are there a whole bunch of non-voting environmentalists? We need to have a lot of targets.
Second criteria is: lots of elections. No matter how clever we think our messaging is, it isn't as strong as just brute repetition. And there are some states like, for instance, Oregon, who for good government reasons have gotten rid of all of their odd year elections. And so their city council races coincide with a presidential election. It's a very good policy, it's bad if you're in the habit-changing business.
Ayana: You're trying to build that muscle of being a regular, every year voter.
Nathaniel: Totally. In Oregon, we can only talk to people twice every two years. In Georgia, where everything goes to a runoff, primaries, generals, they have odd-year elections, even-year elections. There are some years we can talk to an individual voter for six or seven different elections.
Third criteria, we don't just care about changing federal policymaking, we also care about changing state and local policymaking. And this gets a lot into what Whit was saying. Like, we're in Louisiana, because if you change the members of a dinky little city council in some little town, well, city councils have zoning control. They can literally zone a petrochemical plant out of existence. Or in Nebraska, another red state where they have publicly owned municipal utilities, where you have a public utility board election that maybe 1500 people vote in, you change one member of that public utility board, you can shut down a coal fired power plant and save thousands of people's lives.
Ayana: And Whit, I know you're supporting some specific Public Utility Commission candidates. I've scrolled through the glorious list of folks on your roster this year. and it's exciting to see. I don't think about Public Utility Commissioners very often. But they are the ones deciding how fast we do this energy transition.
Nathaneil: It's enormously important and oftentimes people think that when you go from federal to state to local, they think that local climate policy is in between the cracks. It's not. There are literally things that states and local governments can do, that our federal government is not allowed to do. There is an enormous amount of leverage in these small little elections. But, as Whit was saying, a lot of people aren't paying attention to them.
I ran a whole bunch of mayoral and city council races, and boy would I love someone like Whit to come along. Because believe me, when you poll for a mayoral election, the data you get back tells you that people only care about potholes in public schools. That's it.
Ayana: Let's talk about that piece of EVP, and I know this relates to your work too, which is about like - once you have more environmental voters who are regular voters, that starts to shift what candidates are talking about and prioritizing. How does that chain of events actually play out?
Nathaniel: So it starts with something deeply nerdy, but come on, it's Bowdoin.
Ayana: We're ready. We're made for this.
Nathaniel: We're going to talk about voter files guys, buckle your seat belts. All right. Many of you probably know that who you vote for is secret. Many of you probably don't know that whether you vote or not is public record. Not only is it public record, it is quite literally the essential building block to how all campaigns are run and I would even say how all policy is made. And this is why. Let's say Whit is running for city council or running for mayor. The first thing we do in the Whit for mayor campaign…
Ayana: First of all, I'm in.
Nathaniel: Okay, you're in. Awesome.
Ayana: I will tweet about it. That’s not that Twitter works anymore, but…
Nathaniel: Awesome. The first thing we do is we all get in the conference room and we open up our laptops and we look at public voting histories and we decide with a limited amount of time and a limited amount of money, who can Whit afford to talk to, and who is he going to ignore? And it literally looks like that: okay, here are a bunch of people who aren't registered. Screw you. You folks are registered, but, well, you've never actually cast ballots before. Forget you. Oh, you guys do vote, but only in presidential elections. You're probably not going to show up for the city council or mayoral race. Maybe if Ayana raises gazillions for Whit, we'll talk to you. Okay, you guys, you vote in midterms, good for you, but that's still not as low turnout as mayoral. Oh, you guys do vote in mayoral elections. We will absolutely talk to you. And not to be creepy about it, but we literally know you by name and street address. This is the importance of a public voter file.
Ayana: And they will show up at your house, and they will knock on your door, and say, ‘I'm running for mayor, can I please earn your vote?’
Nathaniel: Yeah, but that's why you don't matter to politicians. It's not because politicians are all awful, though many of them are. They are in the business of collecting votes! Why on earth would they care what non-voters think? Yet to get to Ayana's question, if we get more and more of the voters to care deeply about climate and the environment, you better believe that politicians will respond. Not out of the goodness of their hearts and not because they're intellectually honest and want to do what's right, but because politicians like winning elections. They love winning elections. And this isn't just rhetoric. There's been a lot of peer-reviewed studies that show, surprise, surprise, politicians respond to the priorities of voters a hell of a lot more than they respond to the priorities of non-voters. And so we've got to stuff the electorate with people who care about climate.
Ayana: So, we sort of teased earlier in this conversation that there's a lot of behavioral science behind the work both of you do. You're choosing your strategy very thoughtfully, very carefully. You're wording your ways to engage voters. Whit, I'd love to hear - shock us with some weird thing we wouldn't anticipate that's really important for motivating people to support local climate candidates.
Whit: I'm not sure it's shocking. Nathaniel actually just said it, but I think it's really important and actually valuable. Like the potholes in schools? It is universally, deeply cared about. And people remember if their road has been in shambles for years, and nobody has been there to fix it. These small issues may seem pedestrian, but I think it's actually incumbent upon us to see them as climate issues. And to see the potholes and the schools as climate infrastructure, as climate solutions. What we try to do is not run from the fact that people care about their roads and schools, but actually speak to them and speak about the solutions that we could pursue that would have climate impact and benefit.
Ayana: And then what language are you using or choosing to do that? I know you're both really thoughtful - when you're reaching out to voters, what do you say? When you have a script for phone banking, for example, Whit and then Nathaniel, how are you crafting that to try to encourage them or nudge them?
Whit: I think the easiest thing is to probably give an example of a campaign we're in the midst of right now in Corpus Christi, Texas. It's a mid-sized city in Texas that has become the largest fossil fuel export hub in the country. There are dozens of refineries there. People have a wide range of opinions about oil and gas. But, as we were saying, everyone there wants their roads fixed and wants investments in their schools. And right now, the elected officials are making decisions to either invest in infrastructure in schools or to give tax breaks for oil companies. And when you put those two things alongside one another, even if folks work in the oil industry, they know it's not right to give tax breaks to these billionaire corporations that have made record profits for years and don't need more tax breaks. And so we communicate around - do we want corporate welfare or do we want investments in our roads and our schools? It's not necessarily always climate, climate, climate, but we are absolutely communicating about climate issues just in a way that I think is more tangible for people facing those sorts of conundrums.
Ayana: Nathaniel, give us the behavioral science, really nerdy stuff.
Nathaniel: So first, let me say the type of messaging that we do is very different, because we have a different goal than the type of messaging Whit does. We are trying to get people who we already know, like if they show up, climate is top of mind. We're just trying to get them to show up. So it's pure behavior change. And if what you are doing is pure behavior change messaging, probably three decades of behavioral science research shows that you should not try to rationally convince them of the value of their one vote. What we have found works best, and I use ‘we’ in the broadest, most humblest sense, this is decades of academic research, is to treat people as social beings, not as rational beings. You try to figure out what kind of person are you presenting yourself as? What do you want your peers to view you as? What we do is we try to figure out what social norms they buy into and use that to get them to vote. So let me give you some examples.
Ayana: Pure manipulation.
Nathaneil: It's pure manipulation.
Ayana: Just so we're clear.
Nathaniel: Absolutely. I mean, well, first of all, so is using rational discourse to try to get somebody to do something. It just doesn't work.
Ayana: It's not manipulation if it doesn't work.
Nathaniel: I mean, I am going to be a pure down and out manipulative bastard if it helps solve the climate crisis. Like, you better believe it. We are going to use all the tools we can.
Ayana: What are these tools? Spill the beans.
Nathaniel: Yes, okay, here we go. Let's use an example. A door to door canvasser goes up to the door, has a very simple message, that just says, ‘Oh, hi, I'm Nathaniel Stinnett with the Environmental Voter Project, there's an election coming up on November 5th. Do you intend to vote on election day, vote early, or vote by mail?’
Okay, we've already done some really sophisticated things, even though it seems very simple. First of all -
Ayana: Because not voting is not an option.
Nathaniel: Not voting is not an option. That's what a behavioral scientist would call a choice architecture. We're not giving you the choice to say no, even though we wouldn't be at your door unless you were a sucky voter. And so, already, people are like, ‘Oh, you know, I guess I'll vote on election day.’ Okay, now another thing is happening, something called plan-making. It's almost like we're building new neural pathways where people are starting to think, ‘Okay, this is how I'm going to vote. Instead of voting on election day, I'm going to go around the corner of the firehouse, that's my polling place.’ They are now more likely to do that because they are vocally saying, ‘Yep, I'm going to vote on election day.’ We just say, ‘Okay, thank you very much. Thank you for being a good voter.’ But the real magic is we just got someone who we know is an awful voter to say that they were going to vote. And that is like a trap being closed on them because now we can come back to them right before election day and say, ‘Oh, just wanted to remind you that two months ago you spoke to one of our volunteers and you said you were going to vote on election day. That's coming up on Tuesday, and we know it's important to you to keep your promises. And Tuesday's your opportunity to follow through on your promise.
Ayana: You gotta see where this is going, right?
Nathaniel: Yeah, everybody, almost everybody - it’s one of the strongest societal norms we have - wants to be thought of as an honest person who keeps their promises. And now we are equating the act of voting with whether you're an honest promise keeper, which is a hell of a lot more powerful than trying to convince you of the value of your one vote over a denominator of millions. Because you really care about the climate crisis and, you couldn't really be bothered about the candidates, but sure, I'll go vote. Like, that just doesn't work. We're essentially using the same stuff that you see on TV all the time and beer commercials. Like, do you want to be like this cool dude? Well then buy the beer. You want to be like Michael Jordan? Buy the Snickers.
Ayana: Do you also do the - your neighbors are voting, so don't you want to be at least as good as your neighbors? Or something like that?
Nathaniel: We absolutely will do peer pressure. We'll text people or call them and say, ‘Hey, did you know last time there was an election, 127 people on your block of Main Street turned out to vote?’ It's like pure juvenile peer pressure. But it works extraordinarily well.
Ayana: Can I admit something to you?
Nathaniel: Yeah, please.
Ayana: I, a few years ago, got a text from Environmental Voter Project, and I was like nooooo. I could only be getting this text if I'm a bad voter. Meanwhile, I'm phone banking, donating, and not showing up in every election. And I remember, there was one day I was in a taxi in Brooklyn, and I was going to an event where I was set to moderate. And it was like, I work from home, I have all day to vote, and so I didn't make a plan. I didn't put it on my calendar. And so I'm just like, doing emails, preparing for the thing, and I'm in a taxi to the event, and I was like, ‘Oh I never went and did the thing.’ And so, even though I care deeply about this, it is actually very common for people who care to not always follow through. And so this work is so, so, so needed.
I'd love to hear about any successes. I know you both have had a lot of success, which is why I invited you and not other people to be on this stage and share the story. We've been talking a lot about the process, and not a lot about outcomes. And so let's talk about winning. I feel like the environmental movement does not talk enough about winning and we're actually winning a lot of stuff. So, Whit talk to us about victory.
Whit: Yeah, wwe're winning a lot. We've helped flip the Minnesota legislature. You may have heard of the Walz Effect, that should really be the Walz and the Minnesota legislature effect. Amazing climate champions who got elected to the state legislature passed some of the most ambitious climate policies across the country. And it was because we were winning primary elections, we were winning general elections with climate champions who were going to the legislature strong and bold on the issues. That's happened in a handful of state legislatures and we're trying to expand the map on that this November as well.
Nathaniel: The victory I'd like to talk about is something that probably many if not all of you are aware of. And that is, after the 2020 election, there were 50 Republicans in the U.S. Senate and 48 Democrats, because there were two U.S. Senate seats going to a runoff in Georgia. One billion dollars, with a B, were spent just in those two U.S. Senate runoffs. Little Environmental Voter Project spent about $550,000. We could see after the fact, in our randomized control trials, that we were solely responsible for boosting turnout among our 330,000 targets by 0.9 percentage points. Almost one percentage point. We were solely responsible for getting 3400, 3500 people to come out who would have been on the sidelines. Not a small number.
But here's what we were most proud of. We use randomized control trials to test our impact in one-off elections. Over the long term what we do is whenever we talk to a voter, we tag them in the voter file and we track them and we see if they're becoming good voters or bad voters or what. Ever since we launched in 2015, we have now spoken with 10.5 million unique individual voters, all of whom by definition were pretty awful voters. As of about three months ago, we could see in voter files that 1.8 million of them had become such consistent voters that they had voted in their most recent federal election, their most recent state election, and even their most recent local election. They had become super voters.
And let's go back to Georgia. When those two U. S. Senate races were happening and those runoffs there, in our randomized control trial we could see in that one election we brought 3,500 new people. But when we looked at the voter file, we also saw that there were 102,000 registered voters who were super environmentalists, who we had spoken to in the past because they were crappy voters, and they had now become part of those consistent voters, those 1. 8 million. So we rolled into those U. S. Senate races, both of which were decided by fewer than 105,000 votes. We know that we helped create 105,000 super environmentalists there, which ended up leading to the Inflation Reduction Act.
Ayana: Now you see why I like these guys, right? I mean, it's not just because they have a good strategy. It’s because it's working. Let's just take like two or three quick questions. If anyone has…
Ayana: Then we took a few questions from the audience. And one had to do with the demographics of those 8 million “environmental” voters that didn’t vote in the 2020 presidential election, and the 13 million that skipped the 2020 federal midterms. Nathaniel and his team have crunched the numbers on who these people are.
Nathaniel: They are disproportionately young, disproportionately People of Color. That's more driven by Black voters, AAPI voters and Native American voters than it is by Hispanic voters, but consistently disproportionately people of color. And this is a little bit weaker of a trend, but disproportionately lower income. This is not the stereotypical environmentalist that I think a lot of people have in their minds of like a yuppy in a Patagonia quarter-zip, driving around in their Prius.
Ayana: Hey, hey, hey.
Nathaniel: In an REI quarter-zip.
Ayana: I think it's important to say also that to your point about the demographics here, in updating my own research for this book, it is now about 70 percent of Hispanics in the U.S. who poll as being concerned about climate. So the concern is they are environmental voters if they would cast their ballots, right? It's 65 percent for Asian and Black Americans who are concerned about climate. And it is 47 percent for white people in America who are concerned about climate. And that number has actually gone down from 49 percent in the last few years. And the number of People of Color have gone up. So there really is this pent up demand for better environmental protections, but unless that power is exerted at the ballot box, it's hard to get that on the top of priorities for politicians once they're in office.
Nathaniel: Absolutely. That nexus to voting and going to the ballot box, I think, brings up a really important thing that a lot of people don't always consider. If the modern environmental movement, and especially the modern climate movement, is disproportionately young, disproportionately People of Color, disproportionately lower income, well those are also the people who are always the target of voter suppression efforts. And people often don't think of ballot access as being important for the climate movement, but it absolutely is.
Ayana: Okay, let's take one last question. We've got a question from the son in the front…
Ayana: This question was from Nathaniel’s son, who was sitting right in the front row, shot his hand high up in the air, and was very eager to know how Environmental Voter Project and Lead Locally had grown over the years, from starting as very small teams to growing into having significant impact on the elections. Here’s Whit again.
Whit: We started in 2016 focusing on three local elections in California, where we teamed up with local organizations and did this voter mobilization work, to win local elections that stopped a gas plant, a proposed oil by rail facility, and banned fracking in a town. And that was our proof of concept in 2016. Obviously, really terrible things happened on the national stage that night, and it gave us an opportunity to say, look, we have four years to push back against Trump and his anti-climate agenda, and we can do it from the grassroots in cities and states across the country. We’ve added probably 20 to 25 elections each election cycle between now and then. It's like a slow and steady build from each election to the other.
Nathaniel: Very similar. We started at pretty much the exact same time. So, fall of 2015, through all of 2016 was our proof of concept in one city in Boston. And then in 2017, we started expanding to other states. We’re now in 19 states. We’ve spoken to 10.5 million unique voters. We've been active in 1,981 different elections since then. We have over 7,000 volunteers who are helping us communicate with voters. And we're probably going to expand even more next year.
Ayana: Volunteers from both of these incredible organizations, Lead Locally and Environmental Voter Project, are coming on tour with me.
I’m so excited about that partnership and continually impressed and inspired by the work that Nathaniel and Whit have done.
Ayana: Thank you so much for coming, and see you at the ballot box. Make a plan to vote!
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[CREDITS]
This episode was produced and edited by Nora Saks, and me, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson.
Big thanks to Whit Jones and Lead Locally. You can find out more about how to elect climate justice champions at www.leadlocally.org
Thanks to Nathaniel Stinnett and the Environmental Voter Project, more info about their work is at www.environmentalvoterproject.org
And thank you to Bowdoin College, for hosting us.
And as always, massive thanks to my chief of staff and tour producer, Jenisha Shrestha, for helping this whole thing come together.
Okay, that’s it for now. See you next week.
Episode 2: Vote Climate ✅