Did Westerners Vote With Climate Change in Mind?

Polls say the vast majority of Westerners care about the region’s environment and climate change, but candidates who advocate for climate action lost some key races in the 2020 election. | *Jerry and Pat Donaho*

When President-elect Joe Biden is inaugurated in January, climate change will be among his administration’s priorities. The climate plan Biden and his running mate, California Senator Kamala Harris, released during the campaign would zero out emissions by 2050 and invest billions in clean-energy research. Thirty percent of our open spaces and waters would be protected, while cities would see more public transit, electric vehicles, and efficient buildings. And much of this activity would take place in low-income communities that are heavy on pollution and low on good jobs.

“It’s thrilling. Joe Biden is the candidate with the most ambitious climate plan in history,” said Tiernan Sittenfeld, senior vice president of government affairs for the League of Conservation Voters. “Having run and won on climate, we can’t wait for [Biden and Harris] to govern on climate.”

Conservation and the environment are critical issues for Western voters. According to the latest poll from Colorado College’s State of the Rockies Project, a candidate’s environmental positions are important to 80 percent of voters in the eight Rocky Mountain states, and 60 percent are in favor of action to slow or mitigate the effects of climate change. With Biden winning all but five Western states, it would seem voters, indeed, opted for environmental action in 2020. But a closer look at some key races in the region show that our relationship with the environment grows complicated when it’s time to fill out a ballot.

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Heading into election day, Montana’s Steve Bullock represented one of the Democratic party’s best hopes for retaking control of the Senate. Bullock is a popular two-term governor with strong credentials when it comes to protecting public lands and water. Bullock has long been an advocate for the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a chronically underfunded pot of money used for public land projects. He expanded the scope of Habitat Montana, which utilizes hunting and fishing license revenue to buy conservation easements, and initiated the state’s first climate solutions assessment. In one of his final acts as governor, Bullock led a lawsuit to oust William Perry Pendley, who opposes the very notion of federal land ownership, from his position as head of the Bureau of Land Management.

There was reason to believe all this would help Bullock in his Senate campaign. Montana is the only state with the right to “a clean and healthful environment” enshrined in its constitution, and that ethos remains prominent in the state’s culture. According to the State of the Rockies Project’s poll, a whopping 84 percent of Montana voters say that clean water, clean air, wildlife, and other environmental issues factor into their votes.

Bullock, though, lost to incumbent Senator Steve Daines by 10 percentage points. With control of the Senate now hinging on two runoff elections in Georgia, Daines’s victory could scuttle Biden’s biggest climate ambitions. The president-elect’s action plan would cost $2 trillion, a sum Republicans in the Senate are unlikely to support.

This isn’t to say that Montana voters explicitly decided against measures to help the environment — rather, it could be they feel Biden-esque climate action isn’t the right course of action. Daines, as Montana Public Radio’s Shared State podcast noted, has said more logging in fuel-loaded forests is needed to reduce the risks of catastrophic wildfire in the West. “Either we’re gonna manage our forests,” Daines said in 2017, “or our forests are gonna manage us.” To that end, Daines co-sponsored, with California Senator Diane Feinstein, legislation that would speed permitting for logging projects in some fire-prone areas.

That messaging resonates in a state where many residents hope to rekindle a once-robust forest products industry. In addition, Daines played a prominent role in passing the Great American Outdoors Act, one of the most significant pieces of conservation legislation in recent years. The act guarantees full funding for the LWCF, and will funnel $9.5 billion toward public land maintenance projects.

But some see Daines’s recent public lands action as election-year posturing. Daines was no champion of the LWCF before 2020, and President Donald Trump and the Senate took the Great American Outdoors Act seriously only when it became clear Daines and another vulnerable Republican, Colorado’s Cory Gardner, needed a boost in their tight races.

“I would say that we saw some greenwashing from the incumbent senator, and Montana’s a fairly Republican state,” Sittenfeld said. “[Daines] recognized that being pro-conservation is good politics and good policy.”

It’s also possible that the environment wasn’t a defining issue for voters this year (most state-by-state exit polls didn’t ask about climate). The pandemic, economic turmoil, and the presence of Donald Trump on the ballot could have pushed voters in different directions, especially with the nation’s politics as polarized as they are today. Indeed, Montana Republicans largely positioned themselves as bulwarks to an incoming Democratic administration. Daines talked far less about public lands than he did about Democratic boogeymen such as Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “What I am most concerned about is the direction D.C. is headed,” Daines told Montana Free Press. “You put Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Joe Biden in charge of Washington, you’ll see a federal takeover of the health care system.”

The strategy worked. Despite Montana voters’ reputation for splitting tickets, Republicans easily won every statewide office. “Republicans had started out with the goal of nationalizing this campaign in Montana, and Democrats were trying to keep the focus on local stuff, on Montana issues,” University of Montana political science professor Robert Saldin said on Montana Public Radio. “And, at the end of the day, the Republicans appear to have been very successful in doing that.”

Other tightly contested Western races followed a similar course. In Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District, which encompasses much of the Western Slope, Lauren Boebert — a Trump Republican, pistol often at the hip, whose political career began when she confronted Beto O’Rourke about assault weapons — beat Diane Mitsch Bush, a Democrat with experience in state and county government. While Mitsch Bush made water and outdoor recreation issues central to her campaign, Boebert focused on, as The Colorado Sun reported, her opposition to “gun control, abortion, sex education, the U.S. Department of Education, vaccinations, Obamacare, masks, the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic, coronavirus restrictions, and ‘lunatic, left-wing liberals.’”

Yvette Herrell, a more traditionally conservative politician, flipped New Mexico’s 2nd Congressional District by defeating Democrat Xochitl Torres Small in a rematch of the 2018 midterm race. Torres Small emphasized the importance of public land access in her campaign. Herrell, meanwhile, followed the Montana strategy and linked Torres Small to Pelosi, who is reviled by many Republicans, and the Green New Deal, which Torres Small has said she opposes. The associations, though tenuous, were enough to topple the incumbent in a district that encompasses much of New Mexico’s oil patch.

Despite Westerners’ stated fondness for our land and water, it’s difficult to ascertain whether climate and the environment proved a decisive issue in the region’s key races. Montana, Colorado’s 3rd, and New Mexico’s 2nd all lean Republican, so Democratic wins would have shown that conservation and climate policies are gaining steam, especially in the oil and gas country of eastern New Mexico and western Colorado.

It’s worth noting that Mark Kelly won his Senate race in Arizona while pushing a climate message very similar to Biden’s, and Colorado voters didn’t bite on Gardner’s late public-lands gambit, opting instead to send Democrat and former Governor John Hickenlooper to D.C. Those Senate pickups mean that Biden’s overarching climate plan still has a lifeline depending on the Georgia outcome in January.

Regardless of how Senate control shakes out, LCV’s Sittenfeld said there’s plenty a Biden administration can do to move our economy in the climate-friendly direction scientists agree is necessary to avoid the worst effects of global warming. Soon after entering office, Biden could roll back many of Trump’s executive orders, and on the conservation front, he could reinstate Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments — all without congressional approval. And even a divided Congress might support smaller measures, such as expanding tax credits for renewable energy or capping orphaned oil wells. Biden has associated much of his climate change plan to infrastructure and job creation, two issues that typically garner Republican support.

And because climate change impacts virtually all aspects of American life, there are myriad opportunities to fold climate measures into legislation addressing other issues.

“Whether it is the coronavirus pandemic, or racial injustice, or the economic crisis, or the climate crisis, there are opportunities to address all four and move forward with a clean energy economy that is just and equitable,” Sittenfeld told me. “These crises are all interwoven and related, and the solution to one is quite helpful with solutions to all.”

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