Despite its enormous implications, the climate crisis has so far mostly been a dormant issue in the US presidential election. Some hope the devastation wrought in quick succession by two major hurricanes will shake up the priorities of American voters before a stark choice between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump on polling day.
Last month, Hurricane Helene became one of the deadliest storms ever to hit the US, killing more than 220 people and causing billions of dollars in damage as it tore a path northwards, through the key election swing states of Georgia and North Carolina. This was followed two weeks later by Hurricane Milton, which rampaged across Florida.
Scientists have found that both storms were made stronger by the climate crisis, with record heat in the Gulf of Mexico loading the hurricanes with more powerful winds and heavier rainfall. Coming just weeks before the 5 November election, the storms may serve as an unhappy jolt to voters.
“This does tend to focus people’s minds on the impacts of climate change,” Jay Inslee, the Democratic governor of Washington and a prominent climate advocate, told the Guardian.
“Climate change has its tentacles everywhere. There’s no place to hide in the US. We’ve seen that with floods in the midwest, wildfires on the west coast, even in Asheville, North Carolina, that saw itself as a sanctuary. The increasing frequency of these disasters is increasing Americans’ desire to fight this beast.”
The most immediate electoral impact from the hurricanes may well be the struggle of people in places such as western North Carolina to get to polling stations amid ruined roads, downed power lines and a hampered postal service. The efficacy of the disaster response, which has been marked by misinformation fueled by Trump and his supporters that has even led to threats to emergency workers and meteorologists, may also help sway some voters.
Harris’s campaign has seized upon revelations that Trump withheld disaster aid as president, with a new TV ad that has aired in North Carolina and Georgia showing the infamous moment when the former president re-drew an official hurricane forecast map with a sharpie pen.
Americans at large are increasingly worried by the threat posed by the climate crisis amid a steady rise in costly disasters. Six in 10 people say that the impacts of global heating are being felt now, polling shows, with a further 16% saying they will be felt in the future. More than half of all voters, even though the issue is still politically polarized, are “alarmed” or “concerned” about climate change, separate polling has found.
Yet, the climate crisis has barely featured in Harris’s campaigning before or since the hurricanes, despite her support for major legislation signed by Joe Biden that has pushed huge volumes of money to clean energy and the stark contrast offered by Trump, who has called climate change a “giant scam”, claimed that rising seas will create more beachfront property and said that the US would “drill, baby drill” if he were to return to the White House.
“It’s frustrating that there isn’t a broader conversation about what’s happening here, how these storms are becoming more frequent and are costing people their homes, their lives, their insurance,” said Paul Bledsoe, a former climate adviser to Bill Clinton’s White House.
“The assumption in the White House back then was that when this extreme weather became evident, it would galvanize climate action. Yet that isn’t quite happening.”
This lack of campaign attention does have some logic to it – issues such as the economy, immigration and reproductive rights have dominated the election discourse, with climate near the bottom of voters’ stated priorities, polling has shown. Barely 5% of people typically list it as their top concern.
Climate could still prove to be significant, though. The Environmental Voter Project, a non-partisan group that seeks to drive turnout among people who care about the environment but who didn’t vote in the 2020 election or since then, estimates there are 230,000 such “climate voters” in Arizona and 250,000 in Pennsylvania, both crucial swing states decided by just a few thousand votes last time around.
“Climate is not a top-tier issue yet, but that doesn’t mean climate voters can’t have an impact in a really close election,” said Nathaniel Stinnett, founder of the Environmental Voter Project.
“It’s hard to tell how the hurricanes will have an effect but they have happened right in the middle of an election, during early voting, so it’s hard to divorce it from national politics. I don’t know if it will change people’s opinions, but I’m confident people who already care about climate change will be more energized about the importance of voting.”
The marginal voting difference played by the climate crisis may have even secured Biden’s victory over Trump in 2020, according to research published earlier this year that estimated rising climate concerns provided a significant 1.5% swing to the current president.
“When elections are so close, you don’t need a big effect to be meaningful,” said Matthew Burgess, an environmental researcher and co-author of the study.
“You could be an independent voter who doesn’t think climate change is the most important issue, but if someone is saying it isn’t real you might think: ‘Where are you getting your science from? Should I trust you on other things?’”
For many voters caught in the fury of Milton’s destructive path, the climate crisis has been made grimly apparent.
Juan Montenegro, a 75-year-old Chicagoan who moved with his wife, Claire, to the Florida seaside city of Sarasota in 2017, has drawn two conclusions from the aftermath of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, which ravaged the Sunshine state’s Gulf coast twice in a 14-day span. For openers, he is done with Florida.
“I have no reason to stay here at this point, so we’re getting out and going back to Chicago,” he says, adding that he might put their downtown Sarasota apartment up for sale early next year when tens of thousands of so-called snowbirds flee the upper midwest and Canada and head to Florida to savor the state’s incomparably balmy winters.
The aftermath of the twin extreme weather episodes has also reinforced Montenegro’s resolve to vote a straight Democratic party ticket this fall. “This makes it more clear that anybody who has any sense has to vote for the Democrats,” he noted. “They may not take global warming and climate change quite as seriously as they should, but they are more concerned about that than the Republicans are.”
That said, Montenegro suspects that some local businesses and residents are still not making the connection between rising sea temperatures driven by the climate crisis and the increasing frequency and ferocity of hurricanes and storm surge. “It looks like you need even more destruction for more people to realize that it’s global warming and climate change that are causing this and that these aren’t just freak storms,” he said.
The storm surge generated by Helene in the closing days of September flooded the Siesta Key townhouse belonging to Sam and Joyce Tucker. That barrier island marks the spot where Milton made landfall on the evening of Wednesday, 9 October, and the octogenarian couple had heeded orders to evacuate their barrier island two days beforehand.
The water level rose to nearly a foot in the interior of their two-bedroom bungalow, and the Tuckers will be spending the rest of the year in a nearby third-floor apartment in the Villa Hermosa condominium complex where they live.
Joyce Tucker says the devastation wrought by the hurricanes will not affect her decision making at the polls this fall. The retired financial planner was already worried about the short- and long-term effects of climate change long before a series of devastating storms buffeted the Florida Gulf coast beginning with Hurricane Ian in 2022.
But the Buffalo native is uncertain exactly when such meteorological phenomena will convince global-warming skeptics to finally accept the warnings of scientists and environmental activists around the world. “That may happen, though possibly not in my generation,” says Tucker. “But maybe among the younger generations.”
