In today’s episode – the first of a two-part dispatch – the Political Climate team takes us behind the scenes of the 2024 Democratic National Convention to chat candidly with lawmakers and leading activists about Democrats’ strategy for pitching climate policies in the lead up to November’s election.

Although Vice President Harris barely mentioned climate policy in her marquee speech, clean energy advocates from the public and private sectors are championing the economic impacts of the IRA and other policies. 

In this episode, we hear from a range of experts and leaders – from climate champions like Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts and former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, to activists like Saad Amer and congressional leaders like Representative Sean Casten of Illinois – who explain what’s working, and how to use climate issues to appeal to swing voters.

Credits: Hosted by Julia Pyper, Emily Domenech, and Brandon Hurlbut. Produced by Max Savage Levenson. Edited by Anne Bailey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor.

Transcript

Rep. Sean Casten: I think one of the things that’s hard, and I say this as someone who ran and won on climate, is that if you go and look at any good poll out there and say, “If you’re a single-issue voter, what’s your top issue,” climate doesn’t usually crack it very high, among likely voters. Cracks it among young people, but young people are, of course, less likely to vote. Because of that, you don’t see as many people with political profiles who are stepping up to say, “I need to learn and get educated on this,” because they’re focused on the things that voters say really matter.

I would argue that, and I’ve had this conversation with many people, including our fantastic president, Joe Biden, that if what’s scientifically necessary is greater than what’s politically possible, then our politicians are failing us, and so we have an obligation to lead and move that envelope. I think one of the things that we have to do with the IRA is not tell people, “You need to care about climate,” but to say, “What do you care about,” and “Let me connect the dots for you for why that’s a climate issue.”

Julia Pyper: Welcome, everyone, to a special episode of Political Climate. I’m Julia Pyper. At last week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago, amidst the excitement and the hubbub, one issue is largely missing from the marquee speeches: climate change. In her acceptance speech, Vice President Harris only mentioned climate once.

Vice President Harris: In this election, many other fundamental freedoms are at stake: the freedom to live safe from gun violence in our schools, communities, and places of worship, the freedom to love who you love openly and with pride, the freedom to breathe clean air and drink clean water and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis.

Julia Pyper: Yet despite the lack of climate messaging, the convention was nonetheless full of passionate activists and advocates who were keen to move the conversation forward, even if they weren’t doing so on stage at the United Center. Last week, all three political climate hosts, Brandon Hurlbut, Emily Domenech, and myself, along with our producer Max Savage Levenson, were on the ground at the DNC. We walked the halls of the convention center and listened to the speeches, we checked out a bunch of clean energy events taking place around the city, and yes, we stayed up late for the Climate Community DNC Watch Party featuring the amazing Wyclef Jean and Shaggy concert. They’ve still got it, guys.

[MUSIC] I heard from Bill Clinton. Yeah, I bring the drama. I kind of cried when I heard Oprah. Put your hands up. Everybody, hands up.

Julia Pyper: In today’s episode, the first of a two-part dispatch from the DNC, we’ll go behind the scenes with influential climate change-makers like Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts and former EPA administrator, Gina McCarthy. We’ll learn about the goals of activists like Saad Amer and talk shop with experts like Representative Sean Casten of Illinois. That was Casten you heard at the top of the show.

In the first half of our DNC coverage, we’re going to focus on the role of climate issues and the IRA in the November 2024 election. What do lawmakers and activists think about the lack of climate language in Harris’s election strategy? How do they go about framing the IRA in economic terms that will resonate with voters? And what are some of the tangible local impacts the bill has already brought to communities around the country? Lastly, what does the effort around climate voter mobilization look like in practice? That’s all coming up on Political Climate.

As per usual, I’m joined by my two delightful co-hosts, Brandon Hurlbut and Emily Domenech. Brandon served as chief of staff in President Obama’s energy department and went on to found Boundary Stone Partners and Overture VC. He’ll also be joining me as a co-narrator of this episode. Emily served as senior energy advisor to Speakers of the House, Kevin McCarthy and Mike Johnson, and is now a senior vice president at Boundary Stone. Brandon, how did it stack up for you? You’ve been to DNCs before. What did it feel like this year?

Brandon Hurlbut: It felt like some 2008 vibes, which I was not sure I was ever going to see again. That was such a special convention, but you still had… In 2008, we had a very contentious primary with Hillary Clinton, and even that summer at that convention, there was still some recruiting going on, trying to get the Hillary supporters on board, and so this convention… In the past, we’ve had the Bernie contingent back in 2016. I’m not sure there hasn’t been a more united convention that I’ve ever seen, and so that’s really exciting. And just the energy and… I remember in 2008 being in Grant Park and walking out of the park that night and seeing people’s faces on Michigan Avenue, that moment, just the best of America.

Julia Pyper: And it was so much louder in the arena than I think you could really glean off of the television. It’s pretty wild, just that energy in that room at that time. But I don’t know. I wasn’t at the RNC. Emily, did it have a similar vibe? Was the energy palpable there too?

Emily Domenech: It really was. And I would say the one thing I noticed about the RNC versus the DNC is that at the RNC there was a lot more happening in the margins. The hallways of the convention center were full of side events and people talking and mingling and socializing, and the DNC had a lot more folks who wanted to get there at seven and be there for the whole programming, sitting in their seats. And that was just wild to me because it’s just a really different cultural dynamic. But when I looked at it, to me, it’s like a little bit of, okay, it doesn’t surprise me when you have this many celebrities performing in your regular programming. I’d probably want to sit down early too.

Julia Pyper: All right, well, we’ll all meet up for takeaways at the end of this episode to discuss what we heard. For now, without further ado, here’s part one of Political Climate’s dispatch from the 2024 Democratic National Convention.

Brandon Hurlbut: During the convention, the New York Times ran a front-page story with this headline, quote, Harris Goes Light on Climate Policy. Green Leaders are Okay With That, end quote. We were curious to hear if pro-climate lawmakers agreed. We asked Representative Casten about the time story at a Cleantech event thrown by Evergreen and LACI, the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator. A scientist and seasoned clean energy entrepreneur, Casten argued that the choice between the political parties is clear, even if Harris hasn’t offered many specifics on her climate plans.

Rep. Sean Casten: I think the Democrats as a party, let’s just review the scoreboard over the last few years, right? We worked up the biggest climate bill in the history of humankind, which was not as good as we all wanted, but was sufficient to get the support of everybody from AOC to Joe Manchin. We did that without the support of any Republicans, but we got that done. Pick any policy you want. If you’re looking at the choices right now and saying, “Boy, I sure wish I knew more about your critical minerals policy before,” that’s not the shtick. So I don’t fault the campaign for saying, “What are the things that we need to roll out now?” I think look at the character of the people and say, “Who’s the team around you? Who are you bringing in? Who are your advisors?”

And the truth is, this is a handoff from a White House that passed the biggest, most significant climate bill in our country’s history that pushed for much more, but was constrained by the Senate because of parliamentary rules, that the Build Back Better was whittled down to become the Inflation Reduction Act, so we know what more we have to do. You got the good people who can do that. And I don’t get bogged down too much in, do I know exactly what the details of their policy are? I think that’s a third-order issue.

Brandon Hurlbut: We also spoke to Deb Haaland. Although Haaland was speaking in her personal capacity, she currently serves as the secretary of the interior. Haaland made an explicit distinction between the two candidates.

Deb Haaland: If we think about the alternative, Kamala Harris’s opponent thinks that climate change is a hoax. It’s 2024, folks. We know it’s not a hoax. It hasn’t been a hoax for decades now. So we are all about the future. In fact, the theme for the Democratic National Convention is for the people, for our future. This is one of the most important issues that all of us need to care about, and I believe that Kamala Harris does.

Julia Pyper: Brandon and I caught up with Gina McCarthy at an afternoon bash thrown by the League of Conservation Voters and Climate Power. It was held on the top floor of a downtown office building with amazing views of the city on the other side of a rooftop garden. She’s a climate change OG. McCarthy served as President Obama’s EPA administrator and the first ever White House National Climate Advisor in the Biden administration. During our interview, she vouched for Harris’s ability to make progress in the climate space by recounting an example of how the VP operates.

Gina McCarthy: We were trying to frame the Inflation Reduction Act, but one of the first things we did was really talk to the car companies about the EV shift, and that was not an easy conversation. A couple of them were fine, a couple of them, it was too fast, it was too much to do, blah, blah, blah. You’ve heard it all before, right? Actually, and she may not remember this, but Ali Zaidi, who was my deputy then, we both just sat down with her and said, “Can you make some calls for us on this? Because it’s really important,” and she did. She made calls to the CEOs, and it changed everything. And she didn’t do it with pressure; she did it with seriousness, because that’s what you have to do when you really want someone to listen to you. But she also had all the benefits laid out because we had looked at all the ways in which this would be good for them and really changed the dynamic considerably, and it worked. When I asked her to intervene on issues, it was because it was important, and she never questioned it and she delivered every time.

Brandon Hurlbut: Even if Harris herself didn’t hype the IRA, we spoke to lots of clean energy advocates who believe the bill is making an impression on voters, albeit sometimes indirectly. Representative Mike Levin, who represents a swing district in Southern California and is an environmental attorney, argued that climate is just one of voters’ many concerns. He made the case for tying climate policy to economic incentives, jobs, and even flashy cars.

Mike Levin: Climate is part of the mix. I hear a lot that costs are still too high for things like gasoline, groceries, and food, and I remind folks that we save a tremendous amount of money when we transition to a clean energy economy. It’s not just about the environment, air quality, water quality. Obviously we care about all that, living in coastal Southern California as we do, but we care a great deal about how much the electric bill is and how much the transportation costs are. I always make the economic case first, both from saving money and also from the job creation and the economic opportunity that’s presented by the clean energy economy. So I think if we couch it that way, there might be some Republicans in our districts, in these swing districts.

One of my neighbors, he bought himself an electric car, and it’s one of the very fast ones. When he bought it, it was replacing a Hummer, an old-school Hummer, and he said to me… I said, “That’s amazing that you got this car.” He said, “I didn’t get it for the environment, I just want you to know. I got it because it’s fast, it looks cool,” and I said, “Hey, man, whatever it takes.”

Brandon Hurlbut: Gina McCarthy expanded on that argument. She pointed out that a majority of the IRA funds have gone to conservative-leaning states.

Gina McCarthy: One of the things that’s happening here is that the Inflation Reduction Act is benefiting Republican districts disproportionately. Now, I can’t say that we did that on purpose. We were very conscious of that because we wanted environmental justice communities to get that 40%, which a lot of them are in rural communities. They’re having difficulty. But what’s remarkable is all of a sudden the Inflation Reduction Act feels like it’s bipartisan. People understood, even Republicans in these districts, that it’s to no benefit to them to play games with the Inflation Reduction Act because they’re getting all the rewards. They have more than 280 billion that’s invested in their communities with a couple hundred thousand jobs. I mean, give me a break. They’re not going to tolerate it, and I love it.

Julia Pyper: One afternoon we checked out an event held at the local union hall of IBEW Local 134. There was deep dish pizza, ice cream galore, and one big-name guest, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who appeared in his personal capacity. He didn’t make climate the focus of his speech, but he had pointed words for skeptics of clean energy’s ability to be an economic driver.

Pete Buttigieg: But now we’ve got it done, and there is not just a manufacturing renaissance, but also an infrastructure renaissance, the likes of which we have not seen since before I was born. We got to keep that going. And importantly, we’ve got to double down on something else that was achieved in the last two years that so many workers and so many union organizations have been part of, which is breaking down the old false choice that the only way to take care of climate change was at the expense of jobs, and that the only way to grow our economy was at the expense of the environment. You are all at the forefront of demonstrating otherwise because I have seen from myself in some of the same Indiana counties that had double-digit unemployment when I went into politics, some of the very same places where they told us we were all done making things and the union jobs were all gone. I have seen factories rising out of the ground, both in auto-making and in clean energy and technology industries that didn’t exist in the days when Studebaker was making cars in South Bend, Indiana. That is what has been achieved. And right now, this election will decide whether those clean energy economy benefits are either developed or are destroyed.

Julia Pyper: We wanted to hear more about how the IRA has impacted states and cities. On the sidelines of the union hall event, we met up with Gil Quiniones, the president and CEO of the Illinois utilities company, ComEd.

What are some of those achievements since you’ve come to ComEd that you would highlight, and specifically ones that maybe have benefited from the Inflation Reduction Act? I’d be curious to know if you’re taking advantage of that in a very real, tangible way you could describe.

Gil Quiniones: Well, first and foremost before that, just here where we are, very close to here at Bronzeville, is the first neighborhood micro-grid in the nation. We just cut the ribbon and we turned it on a few months ago, and it’s really a demonstration on how to be able to transform the grid and make it more distributed.

In terms of the Inflation Reduction Act, we actually got investments, or incentives, and grants to build the second community of the future in Rockford, Illinois, which is just northwest of where we are here in Chicago. We have $50 million and we will modernize that grid to make sure we can integrate all the distributed energy resources and clean energy technologies there. So we’re very excited for that project.

Brandon Hurlbut: We also spoke to Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, a veteran proponent of climate policy and environmentalism. He gave what he calls a mega example of the impact of the IRA in his home state.

Senator Ed Markey: Amongst other things, it’s created a guarantee of funding for the Vineyard Wind offshore wind project, which is the first utility scale offshore wind project in the history of the United States. It is going to be producing enough electricity to power 500,000 homes in Massachusetts. So as the company is looking at their long-term investment horizon, they know that tax break is there for 10 years. And they also know that as they begin to expand, because they’re going to move from 800 to ultimately 5,000 megawatts of offshore wind off of Massachusetts, that there’s a $10 billion offshore wind manufacturing provision, which I was able to build into the legislation, which is going to make it possible for corporations to be able to take that benefit and then produce the component parts that are necessary in order to deploy offshore wind. So that’s one good mega example of something that the IRA helps to make possible.

Julia Pyper: I also had the pleasure of speaking with Detroit mayor, Mike Duggan. He offered a personal take on the potential of electric vehicles in Detroit and outlined the city’s ambitious and novel solar program. As Duggan explains, the program was made possible by the IRA.

Mike Duggan: I grew up in Detroit in the 1970s when the foreign high-mileage cars came in and Detroit brushed them off. The auto industry was devastated, and eventually the United States had to figure out fuel-efficient cars. Now we have the same thing. China is producing electric vehicles at a very cheap price in big numbers. If we do not get ahead of this technology here, what could happen to our manufacturing base in five or ten years is scary. We’ve lived this once, and so nobody has to explain it to us in Detroit. We went through the recessions. I’m very excited about what GM and Ford in particular are doing, but we need to be building solar panels competitively in America. We need to build electric vehicles competitively in America. We need to build batteries competitively in America. We’re still behind the curve, but the Biden-Harris administration are pushing us in the right direction.

There was a time in which Detroit had 1.8 million people, and today we have 700,000. So there are acres of vacant land, and the most abandoned neighborhoods have maybe one house per block. So you might have a 15, 18-block area, which is now going to be fenced, and we’re going to build a solar field on, say, 20, 30, 40 acres at a time. And there’s going to be six of those that total to 200 acres in six different parts of the city.

Detroit’s moving forward very quickly in real action steps. I’m not a great believer in setting goals for 2050. For example, when the Inflation Reduction Act passed and we realized we could build solar fields at 30% less cost, we went to the community and said, “Let’s power all 139 city buildings with renewable energy,” and invited the neighborhoods to say, “Pick your neighborhood for solar fields.” And in Detroit, we got some blighted areas that have maybe only one house per block. And last month, City Council agreed we’re going to take 200 blighted acres in Detroit, we’re going to build solar fields that will power all the city buildings, and in the adjoining neighborhoods, we’re putting in $15,000-a-house community benefits, so the neighboring homeowners will get energy efficiency. They’ll get new furnaces or new hot water heaters or stronger windows. So it’s very exciting to have the city be able to address this issue within our own boundaries.

Julia Pyper: How does that work on a local level? So you make this move, we’re doing a big solar deployment project, but of course there’s a lot of rubber hits the road that has to happen; houses maybe need to be vacated. Talk to me about how the community responds to that and how you get something like that done when people have to move, for instance.

Mike Duggan: Well, that was the key thing. The neighbors came up and they literally proposed the boundaries. And I think we had in the first phase 22 single-family homeowners, and I said, “I am not going to seize somebody’s property for solar fields.” But in each one of the cases, the homeowner, all 22 of them, signed a volunteer agreement to sell us the house. And this is a hard part. These are the worst areas of Detroit. Our neighborhoods 40 years ago were full. One lady said to me, “I’m the last house on the block. My husband’s sick. Nobody was willing to buy my house. Now, I’m going to get a fair check and be able to move to another neighborhood.” And so we’re doing it with 100% support of the homeowners who are being bought out.

Julia Pyper: We also caught up with Lauren McLean, the mayor of Boise, Idaho, in the chaos of the convention center. She explained how the IRA has benefited her city.

Lauren McLean: The Inflation Reduction Act has helped me as a mayor deliver more and faster on our climate goals than I would’ve been able to without it. We have received grants to install charging stations throughout our city and make them publicly available to our residents. Our school district received grants for electrified buses, so they’re going to have electric buses in the future. And we’ve, working with the federal government, been able to implement our climate plan where we are electrifying buildings and electrifying our fleet and only building all-electric buildings. We’ve got two fire stations being built right now that will also have solar on top because of the cash-back provisions on the IRA. So we are feeling the impacts already of this game-changing legislation that’s going to help this whole country achieve our climate goals.

Brandon Hurlbut: Despite the IRA’s impact and the contrast between Harris and Trump, lots of activists seem pretty clear-eyed about the challenges of getting climate voters to the polls. David Kieve is the president of EDF Action and formerly served as the director of public engagement at the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality. He believes the ranks of potential climate voters are strong, but they need a push.

David Kieve: Well, look, if you just take the big green groups like EDF and NRDC and the League of Conservation Voters and the Sierra Club, we collectively represent 15 million people. Some people, like me, are members of more than one group, but there are over 12 million unique members just of a big green group. These are people who’ve already raised their hands and said, “Yeah, I care about climate and I’m active on it.” If we could just get them to show up every election, that would matter tremendously.

The way I think about climate and the way I think about polling is sort of bifurcated. There is a plurality of voters for whom climate is a very top-tier issue, if not the number one issue. We’ve got to communicate with them about the successes and what’s happened and the clear differences between candidates for office when their view on climate and clean energy and environmental justice. For everybody else, for the folks for whom climate is not yet a top-tier issue, I’ve never been a part of an election where the economy was not a top-tier concern for just about every voter. So much, as you guys know, being focused in the clean energy space, so much of the success of our economic turnaround the past couple of years has been because of the creation of good-paying climate, or clean energy jobs. We have a good story to tell, and it’s incumbent upon all of us to go out and help to tell it. And that’s a responsibility I take pretty seriously.

Julia Pyper: Adam Met knows a thing or two about mobilizing people around climate action. We spoke to the member of the platinum-selling, pop-rock trio, AJR, at a DNC site event. Met is also the founder and executive director of the climate advocacy nonprofit, Planet Reimagined. He explained how he and his band have turned concertgoers into climate activists. Going local, he says, is the key.

Adam Mett: We actually measured something specific that’s called collective effervescence. It is a term that was developed by Durkheim, the sociologist, and it originally came out of religion. When people are coming together over a religious experience, there’s so much energy there, there’s so much fervor, and now that idea is being applied to concerts and sports events. You know that feeling when you’re in a concert and everyone is on that same wavelength? That’s the thing we were trying to measure and figure out how to use that for climate advocacy. So we did a massive study.

What we did is we sent out a poll to about 350,000 people who are recent concert ticket purchasers to understand the kinds of actions they’re willing to take and when they want to take them, in addition to how they want artists, athletes, et cetera, to talk about climate and other issues. So we measured everything down to the last detail of where in the concert they want to be taking action, very specifically the kinds of things they’re willing to do. And then on our tour, we implemented it.

And over the last two months or so, from our tour, we had 35,000 unique people take real, concrete civic and political action. And what I mean by that is at the simplest level, registering to vote and checking their voter registration, but it was so much more than that. At every stop on our tour, we had the ability for people to contact their representatives, literally pick up their phone with a pre-written script that we gave them, making calls, asking people to have their representatives vote in a certain way, contacting them through email, signing petitions, voting, asking people to vote in certain ways for certain elections that are coming up. Now, all of that is really important when you’re talking about big, broad climate issues.

However, the key to this study is that the answer is local. And I know you’ve had a lot of people already talking about local issues. So much of climate is decided at the local level. Everything we found out in this study is that people want to have impact on things that are going to affect them in their community. So at every single stop on our tour, we had a different action that could be taken that was focused on people’s local community.

To give you an example, Phoenix was 109 degrees when we were there. The local action was signing a petition to get FEMA to designate extreme heat as an emergency. It blows my mind that extreme heat is not designated as an emergency. But in order to get FEMA funding, it needs that designation. So we got thousands of signatures at our concert for people to fight for that designation. In Salt Lake, it was focusing on restoring the Salt Lake, the Great Salt Lake. In Michigan, it was focused about getting climate voters out. It was very specific issues in each place. That made people connect to it so much more. Local is key.

Julia Pyper: We’re going to end this first DNC episode with Saad Amer, founder of the sustainability consultancy, Justice Environment, and a consultant to the United Nations. Amer has made waves for his fashionable approach to discussing climate, with a recent profile in Vogue magazine. While climate protesters had a notably muted presence at the DNC, he defended the aggressive actions of some youth activists and framed the climate crisis in a way that our other guests didn’t, one of sheer urgency.

Saad Amer: And even still, climate activists are keeping up the pressure and demanding more. And I think that we will see an incredibly ambitious climate policy from Vice President Harris as part of her campaign, and we’ll continue to see other officials pushing forward climate policy. But if we stop the pressure, they’ll stop the bills, so we have to keep it up. And I know that people get uncomfortable with this, but you know what I’m uncomfortable with? I’m uncomfortable with the wildfires and the floods and the droughts and all of the issues that… My family is from Pakistan, and just recently a third of the country was underwater. So people want to talk about how they’re feeling uncomfortable because some kids are in the street and blocking the road, what about the flood that eviscerated the village that my people are from?

So I don’t think that when we talk about the scale and proportion of the climate crisis, we are fully engaging with the reality of how it is already impacting all of these commuters, how it’s already causing billions and billions of dollars of damage and what’s only going to be causing trillions of dollars of damage as we continue down this pathway. I can understand that people are agitated by the immediate inconvenience of activism, but at the same time, what are you going to do by the massive global inconvenience of the climate crisis that you have every opportunity to address right now?

Julia Pyper: All right. That’s it for our first dispatch from the DNC. Brandon, Emily, a couple of questions for you before we wrap up. There’s been a lot of headlines about the fact that climate was not front and center at the DNC, was not a major part of Harris’s speech, or really any speech that we saw on the United Center stage. At the same time, how do you think Democrats are thinking about Saad Amer’s message of urgency? How are you squaring those two things?

Brandon Hurlbut: It’s really hard to balance. I think on the science part, the call for urgency is absolutely necessary. Every day we see in our news feeds some record temperature being broken, more evidence that this is happening faster. And I think about young kids today looking at this convention in the future and then maybe wondering how… It was all right there in front of them; how could they not be talking about this more? How could they not be doing more? You have to balance that with meeting voters with where they are today and the stakes of this election. I think the press continues to treat this election like it’s a normal election between a Republican like Mitt Romney or John McCain and a traditional Democrat, and it’s not. The threat of Trump is so significant, and what would happen if he was elected on what we’re trying to do with climate would be so consequential.

So I do understand the practicalities of being like, “We have to win. We have to win for climate. We have to win for lots of reasons, and we have to meet voters where they are today,” but everyone who’s claiming that we need more urgency on this, they’re right. The science does not care about the elections or the politics. The science is just happening regardless.

Julia Pyper: It seems, though, like climate activists have really internalized that point that you’re making, that let’s elect the person who will work on our issues with us, full stop, and save our debates within the party for another day. There was a headline in Politico that was, quote, We Don’t Want to Sabotage Her: Why Green Groups are Going Easy on Harris. I think their point is really, first goal, get her elected, second goal, ask questions, continue the dialogue from there.

Brandon Hurlbut: We’re not normally that practical and organized, so this is quite a different moment for the Democratic Party, but it’s what we should be doing.

Julia Pyper: I did think it was interesting, though, that a lot of different surrogates for Harris were talking about clean energy in the context of the economy. Several of the interviewees we spoke to had that lens. They seemed to be understanding that, look, climate change may not be the winning issue, but climate in the context of the economy is something that resonates a lot better.

So we were at the IBEW local headquarters in Chicago. It was a really fantastic event. We saw Pete Buttigieg speak there. This did call to my mind, though, just the electorate that the two parties are going after who are really blue-collar workers and middle-class workers who seem to be breaking in different ways now. So I want to get both of your sense of how things are going with that demographic, union workers… Obviously Democrats have a big union platform, but we also saw union representatives speak at the RNC. So maybe, Brandon, to you first, how do you think Democrats are doing in winning over that middle-class, blue-collar worker demographic who have been feeling a little lost, I think, politically lately?

Brandon Hurlbut: It’s such an interesting question, Julia, because I think we know coming out of this convention that I think Kamala is going to win the popular vote by maybe 10 million votes. Joe Biden won it by eight million last time. The question is whether she can win the electoral college, and that will turn on likely a few states in the industrial Midwest where that demographic that you’re talking about is overrepresented. There’s some really interesting ways that this could play out, both opportunity-wise and could be devastating.

Pennsylvania is the most important state. Let’s say we win Wisconsin and Michigan and lose Pennsylvania and win Arizona and win Nevada. We still lose. So that demographic that you’re talking about is so important. In those industrial Midwest, that non-college-educated voter, tends to be more union. And in that sense, the Democrats have a better chance. And we don’t have to win a majority of those votes. We just can’t lose like 80/20, right? So you got to find that segment, and that’s where we’re trying to meet them on the things that we’ve done to save the auto companies in the past, trying to help them in this transition to electric vehicles. It’s actually an interesting way that they view the world. Fiscally, they want government support. They don’t want anyone touching their social security, their Medicaid, Medicare. They want government juice because they think everybody else is getting it at their expense.

Emily Domenech: It sounds like you’re making Donald Trump’s argument to populist America, which is we’re going to make the government work for you, which I think is why it’s such an interesting space in this election.

Brandon Hurlbut: It was typically a Democratic thing. We used to have most of those voters, and there’s been this sort of flip where they’re in this middle, as you’re saying, Julia. So fiscally, they are in line with traditional Democratic views about the government, but culturally they’re different and the Democratic Party has moved further away. They’re more socially conservative.

Emily Domenech: Yeah, I think this is part of the magic that Donald Trump hit in 2016 where he frankly was able to reach this population that, to Brandon’s point, has really for a long time been represented by Democratic values. So I think the populist movement appeals to folks who are in this middle ground space by saying, “Hey, look, the government has worked for a lot of people and it hasn’t worked for you.” That sounds a lot like the message I hear from President Trump on the campaign trail that’s very focused on these regular small-town issues, like how much do your groceries cost? How much does your gas cost? Do you have a good job? Do you feel like the government is making it harder or easier for you to live your life the way you want to live it?

I think to Brandon’s point about the Democratic Party sort of moving to the progressive left, I actually felt like we didn’t see much of the progressive left at the DNC. I follow a lot of accounts online that talk about some of the issues that are sort of youth progressive voter issues, and those folks were frustrated by the campaign content that they saw on the DNC stage. So I think actually, to our earlier conversation, that is a conscious decision to maybe take a step back perhaps from the progressive movement because you know these voters are so critical in these states. It is part of why I’m surprised that you guys didn’t pick the popular governor of Pennsylvania to be on the ticket.

Brandon Hurlbut: We may end up regretting that someday. Who knows?

Emily Domenech: Because that is absolutely a swing state that is really full of folks who meet this demographic.

Julia Pyper: Okay, well, we’ve got to leave it there for this episode. We’ll be back next Friday, though, with the second half of our reporting from the DNC where we’ll talk about some more pressing issues that our guests highlighted, things like the permitting deal, recently put forward by senators Manchin and Barrasso, the appeal and concern over embracing nuclear energy, and challenges presented by our rising energy demand.

Political Climate is a co-production of Latitude Media and Boundary Stone Partners. Max Savage Levenson is our incredible producer. He worked so, so hard on all of these RNC/DNC episodes. Thank you, Max. Sean Marquand is our technical director. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. You can get all of our show notes and transcripts at latitudemedia.com, and if you want us to talk about a specific topic, please email us at politicalclimatepodcast@gmail.com. We see your emails coming in. Thank you for the pitches. Finally, please feel free to help spread the word about Political Climate on LinkedIn, X, and beyond. I’m Julia Pyper. See you next Friday.

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