Elections Aren’t All That Matter (What I Learned As A Climate Organizer)
In 2019, as my first full-time job out of college, I was an organizer for a climate campaign. With a presidential election on the horizon, my task was to inspire members of two major environmental groups to call, write to, and show up to events with their representatives in Congress and politely ask them to support clean energy legislation.
There was one piece of (good faith) pushback about our work I got more often from potential volunteers than any other:
“None of this matters unless we win the election.”
In my piece last week, I anticipated readers could have that same pushback when I promoted policies that have no chance of becoming law right now, such as Medicare for All and Universal Basic Income. Using climate legislation as a recent example, today I will more fully address why winning elections isn’t enough to make meaningful change.
THE TIMELINE
Over the past fifteen years, the environmental movement has had quite a journey to get federal climate legislation passed. Let’s go through how they handled different political conditions.
MISSED OPPORTUNITIES UNDER OBAMA
Despite the 2008 election cycle bringing one of the biggest “blue waves” in American history, environmental groups were not able to capitalize on their chance to pass climate legislation. When a Democrat-controlled House narrowly passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act (also known as the Waxman-Markey), the bill failed to gain traction in the Senate. The Obama administration focused on the Affordable Care Act and negotiations went nowhere. The bill was eventually declared dead in 2010.
While major environmental groups such as the Sierra Club, League of Conservation Voters, the NRDC, and the EDF fought for this bill, they relied on private lobbying only. There were no major marches or demonstrations in support of the Waxman-Markey nor were there serious efforts to generate calls to representatives on Capitol Hill. It became clear that without grassroots support, climate change wouldn’t be addressed no matter how many Democrats were elected.
HOW THEY KEPT FIGHTING
As a result, both moderate and progressive environmentalists shifted their focus to other means of fighting climate change. Environmental justice groups (including indigenous groups) railed against individual oil and gas projects such as the Keystone XL pipeline. Demonstrations like the People’s Climate March drew crowds exceeding 400,000 people. Obama finally took some action on climate change using his executive powers, such as the Clean Power Plan and negotiating the Paris Climate Agreement.
After Trump’s election in 2016, environmentalists knew that Obama-era progress would be reversed. Sure enough, Trump immediately pulled out of the Paris Agreement, reversed the Clean Power Plan, and took over 74 other actions to weaken environmental protections. No matter what happened in the next election, they knew our climate wouldn’t be protected without grassroots action.
In 2017, the Sunrise Movement began organizing young people and demanding that Democrats support a Green New Deal through conventional grassroots tactics (like phone banks and petitions) and civil disobedience (like protests and sit-ins on Capitol Hill.) As right-wing politics became more popular globally, activists from other countries like Greta Thunberg began staging demonstrations, leading to a series of youth climate strikes that became the largest protest movement in world history.
More moderate groups stayed active too. The Sierra Club began organizing congressional district by congressional district. In 2019, two groups (EDF Action and the NRDC Action Fund) hired a campaign consulting firm to organize their established members in seven swing congressional districts. That firm hired four organizers to run the “Green Team” project — for six months, I was one of them.
HOW THEY TOOK ADVANTAGE OF ANOTHER CHANCE UNDER BIDEN
When potential volunteers on my environmental campaign told me that my work didn’t matter without a Democrat in the White House, I understood what they meant. After all, the main policy I was being asked to push at the time (which was called the 100% Clean Economy Act) would indeed have had zero chance of becoming law if Donald Trump had been re-elected as President the following year.
Luckily, the opportunity to pass climate legislation did come, and the environmental movement was ready for it this time. When political shenanigans from fossil fuel shill Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) threatened to derail their work, 650 environmental groups signed on to a letter demanding Congressional Democrats reject his “Dirty Deal” and flooded Congress with thousands of calls.
In August 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) became law, investing over $350 billion towards fighting climate change and directing regulators to reduce American carbon emissions by 40% by 2030. While the IRA has problems (including selling off some public land for oil drilling) and doesn’t quite do what climate science demands, it is the federal government’s biggest-ever investment in addressing climate change.
SO WHAT?
Without organizers like me and volunteers like the ones I worked with, Democrats could (and probably would) have ignored climate change again. Without everyday people pushing them, Democrats would have just thrown up their hands and moved on when Manchin tried to kill their bill. Hell, this landmark climate bill wasn’t even named as a climate bill — instead, it was named for its focus on inflation, an issue that (unfortunately) is in the news much more often.
I’ll guess that many of you reading this are fed up with choosing between options that you don’t like every election. It doesn’t have to be this way, though. Political parties and their positions on issues move quite a bit over time based on what they can get away with. What’s unthinkable one decade can be common sense the next.
In the modern day, we see activists from both the left and right get wins they spent decades fighting for. While marriage equality had almost no support before the mid-90s, it gained support almost every year from then on, regardless of whether a Democrat or Republican was in office. When the Supreme Court made marriage equality law nationwide, the cause had broken the 60% mark in opinion polling for the first time that same year.
On the other side of things, while it took fifty years of organizing on their end, anti-abortion activists have finally achieved their (terrifying) goals. Since the Dobbs decision overruling Roe vs. Wade, fourteen states have banned abortion outright while an additional eleven have policies hostile to abortion access. All of that has happened even while a Democrat sits in the white house.
What options you (as a voter) can choose from when you vote depends, sure, on work that’s being done by elites in backrooms, but also on work that’s done by grassroots organizing from causes of all political ideologies. There are no prerequisites to getting involved in this process other than caring about something. Without you, more opportunities to make change will be missed, no matter who wins the next election.
In my next piece, we’ll talk about the last decade and how each party has moved (or declined to move) our national politics in the direction they say they want America to move. Politics get very dark sometimes, and next week’s piece (I’m sorry to say) is not going to be an exception to that. We need to understand, though, that breakthroughs are possible and within our grasp, as long as we build enough political will.
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