Harris’ Climate Record Draws Young Voters —and Trump Attacks

It didn’t take long for climate groups, often stringent in their policy demands, to get behind Vice President Kamala Harris’s bid to succeed her boss as president. In the days after President Biden’s announcement that he was dropping out of the presidential race, climate advocates offered praise for Harris that some had offered to Biden only sparingly. Prior to joining the Biden White House, Harris had positioned herself as a supporter of aggressive measures to address climate change like the Green New Deal, and advocates saw a lot to like in her record.

Harris “could be the climate game changer we need,” said the Sunrise Movement, a youth activist group focused on climate change, in a statement. Six weeks earlier the group had publicly declined to endorse Biden’s reelection bid.

Following Biden’s announcement, Harris left little doubt that she wants to pick up the climate mantle and run with it. Some of her first remarks after Biden’s announcement hit the issue head on. “As district attorney, to go after polluters, I created one of the first environmental justice units in our nation,” she said. “Donald Trump stood in Mar-a-Lago and told Big Oil lobbyists he would do their bidding for a $1 billion campaign contribution.”

To many on the right, Harris’s enthusiastic climate record represented an opening. Surrogates for former President Trump touted Harris’s support for a ban on fracking as a presidential candidate and homed in on her support for the Green New Deal, which Trump has taken to calling the “Green New Scam.” In their view, Harris’s record on climate and energy could help erode her standing in Pennsylvania, a critical swing state with a substantial oil and gas industry. 

Before this week, climate change has played a back-seat role in the conversation around this year’s election. But energy and climate’s role in the race may have changed—and it’s not exactly clear how it will play out.   

As a political matter, there are good arguments that might make both sides feel a degree of optimism that Harris’s long-standing climate positioning will aid their campaigns.

In the weeks leading up to Biden’s departure from the presidential race, polls consistently showed declining support for his candidacy among young people, a critical voting bloc in his 2020 victory. Climate isn’t necessarily the only issue—or even the primary one—on young people’s minds. But it matters quite a bit to young voters in the Democratic base who helped elect Biden in 2020. Sunrise alone says it reached approximately 3.5 million young voters. Many of those voters soured on Biden after, among other things, the administration approved a massive oil drilling project in Alaska. Harris’s campaign turned over a new leaf with these groups, benefiting from enthusiasm from climate-motivated voters that Biden had lacked thus far.

For his part, Trump has for months sought to move the energy issue to the center of the electoral conversation. Talking points taking aim at Biden’s energy agenda have featured at rallies in Michigan, where the auto industry is transitioning to electric vehicles, as well as at the Republican National Convention last week. “They’ve spent trillions of dollars of things having to do with the Green New Scam," Trump told the audience.

The political logic is simple. Americans consistently rank the economy and inflation as their biggest concerns. Clean energy policies make an easy foil in the fight to bring down costs. Much of this talking point is untrue. When deployed, clean energy is typically cheaper than its fossil fuel alternative. But that doesn’t mean that the message doesn’t work.

Recent opinion research from Third Way, a centrist D.C. think tank whose policy prescriptions align more closely with Democrats, found that voters by and large prefer candidates who say “we cannot address climate change until inflation is under control” over candidates who say climate change needs to be dealt with immediately.

Perhaps more important, oil and gas play a significant role in Pennsylvania's economy with significant fracking operations in the state’s north and western regions. The state is all but a must-win for Harris. 

In the last few days, journalists and commentators have struggled to assess what Harris might mean for the future of climate policy. They have pointed to her harsh language condemning oil and gas as an indicator that she might take a more aggressive posture as president. They have pointed to her longtime embrace of environmental justice to suggest that the concerns of vulnerable communities might get an elevated position in the fight against climate change. And they have pointed to her engagement on international climate issues to suggest a redoubling of U.S. commitment on the issue abroad.  

The truth is that at this juncture it’s hard to assess the full shape of a Harris climate agenda. Her climate policymaking would likely be constrained by complicated politics in Congress and a federal judiciary that is increasingly skeptical of climate measures. Surely, some part of her time in office would be spent defending and continuing to implement Biden’s biggest climate moves.

But, in contrast to Trump, one thing is clear about a potential Harris presidency: climate policy, in one form or another, would survive.

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