Other Democrats, notably Representative Parag Khanna and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, have proposed a tax on energy companies’ “windfall profits.” According to Garin’s polling, the idea is popular even with Republicans, 73 percent of whom said they supported it.
Asked about the concept, a White House official was noncommittal, but said, “We’re not going to sit back on our haunches and do nothing.”
The hunt for climate voters
Environmental groups have grown increasingly sophisticated in how they engage in politics in recent years, constantly fine-tuning their strategies as they pressure Washington.
There’s the inside game at the Capitol — nudging lawmakers to act on their priorities. This is a tough one for the environmental movement. By one estimate, various groups spent more than $2 billion on lobbying over climate-related issues between 2000 and 2016, with the energy industry leading the way. Back then, “the environmental community was largely playing an inside game” but lacked political power, Podesta said.
“Without engaging more forcefully in the public debate, you get outgunned,” he said.
Then there’s the outside game — building a coalition of voters who are motivated by environmental concerns, chiefly climate. And here, green groups are no longer simply preaching to the proverbial choir. Activists say that 2019 was the first year climate showed up on surveys as a top-tier voting issue, and they expect that trend to continue.
Democrats view climate voters as an increasingly critical element of their governing coalition, but they worry about whether many of them will turn out in 2022 — especially if Biden is unable to deliver on the rest of his climate agenda. That’s the task many left-leaning groups are turning to now.
During the last election cycle, the League of Conservation Voters’ affiliated super PAC, the LCV Victory Fund, studied what it calls “environmental swing voters” in an effort to find new pools of support.
