Environmentalists Don’t Vote. This Group Wants to Change That. “The climate movement doesn’t have a persuasion problem as much as we have a turnout problem,” says Nathaniel Stinnett of the Environmental Voter Project. Elections 2024: How Much Do Voters Care About Climate? BY MARTINA IGINI GLOBAL COMMONS JAN 24TH 2024 2024 will be a pivotal year for democracy, with roughly half of the human population called to the polls. A lot is at stake, especially for the climate. In this article, Earth.Org looks at how perceptions of climate change have shifted in recent decades and how the urgency of addressing the rapidly unfolding climate crisis has fostered a new breed of environmentally conscious voters who are keenly aware that their ballot choices can shape the fate of their planet. Some 4 billion people – roughly half of the human population – are eligible to vote this year, making 2024 the biggest global election year of all time and a pivotal one for democracy. Beyond their immediate national impact, elections hold significant implications for global stability and the pursuit of sustainable development. As the world grapples with complex challenges such as climate change, social inequality, and geopolitical tensions, understanding the critical role of elections in fostering democracy and maintaining global stability becomes paramount. Stinnett worked for over a decade as a political campaign adviser in the early 2000s. He and the teams he worked with paid close attention to voter polling, and he was consistently frustrated to see that very few voters listed climate change or other environmental issues as a top priority. In 2014, after managing an unsuccessful mayoral campaign in Boston, Stinnett was taking a break from politics as he and his wife were expecting their first child. “I was just having lunch with a friend of mine who’s a pollster, and we were looking over some data together and something caught my eye,” he recalls. It was a rare poll that broke out both voters’ and nonvoters’ priorities. Stinnett saw that among the nonvoters, climate change and environmental issues seemed more likely to rank highly. “That just hit me like a ton of bricks,” he says. “Maybe the climate movement doesn’t have a persuasion problem as much as we have a turnout problem.”Stinnett founded his own nonprofit to put a laser focus on that problem. The Environmental Voter Project, or EVP, is now active in 19 states and has participated in over 100 elections just this year. “It is always election day for the Environmental Voter Project somewhere,” he says cheerily.Stinnett and his team use a combination of data science and behavioral science to identify non voting environmentalists and get them to become more consistent voters. He describes the approach as “really, really nerdy.” When he first started the nonprofit, he knew the concept was solid — but “never in my wildest dreams did I think volunteers would be excited by this,” he says. Emily Church, one of the organization’s more than 6,000 volunteers, embraces the nerdiness. She began phone banking with EVP during the 2018 midterm season.“We need to pass meaningful legislation, and we need voters who care about climate change to vote [in order] to get there,” she says. “And it turns out we know how to do that, so let’s just do that.”
“Even if the election doesn’t turn out the way that you might have wanted it to, if we get 300 people to vote for the very first time, they’re gonna show up again and again and again and start driving policymaking,” he says. “Those are wins. Those are examples of systemic change.” For example, community organizers on the ground in Georgia, largely being organized by Stacey Abrams and her organizations, registered people to vote at historic rates and also did what they could to fight voter suppression — and in that process, flipped a state that everybody said had no chance of ever flipping, which became the margin of victory for us to get something like the IRA passed.”....read on https://grist.org/looking-