Nope, Billionaire Tom Steyer Is Not a Bellwether of Climate Politics
What should we make of billionaire Tom Steyer’s reinvention as a populist candidate for governor of California, four years after garnering just 0.72% of the popular vote in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, despite obscene spending from his personal fortune? Is this proof that he is difficult to discourage? (In that race, he lost nearly $24 million in South Carolina alone.) Is this proof that billionaires can do a lot of things we can’t? Or is this proof that talking about climate change is a loser’s business and that Democrats should give up on it?
Politico seems to think it’s the third: Steyer running a populist gubernatorial campaign means voters don’t care about global warming.
“The billionaire environmental activist who built his political profile on climate change—and who wrote in his book last year that ‘climate is what matters most right now, and nothing else comes close’—didn’t mention the issue once in the launch video for his campaign for California governor,” journalist Noah Baustin recently wrote. “It wasn’t an oversight.” Instead, “it reflects a political reality facing Democrats heading into the midterm elections, where former climate evangelists are facing an electorate more concerned about the rising cost of electricity bills and home insurance than about global warming.”
It’s hard to know how to parse a sentence like this. The “increasing cost of electricity and home insurance bills” is undoubtedly a climate issue. Renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuels, and homeowners insurance is surging because increasingly frequent and increasingly severe weather events – driven by climate change – make insuring large swaths of the country expensive, if not impossible. So the fact that voters struggle to pay for utilities and insurance doesn’t prove they don’t care about climate change. Instead, it proves that climate change is a table issue and that politicians are, unfortunately, failing to embrace the blatantly populist message that accompanies robust climate policy. This is a problem with the Democratic message, not a problem with climate as a topic.
The article continues: “Climate concerns have declined in the state over time. In 2018, when Governor Gavin Newsom was running for office, a poll found that 57 percent of likely California voters considered climate change a very serious threat to the economy and quality of life for the state’s future. Today, that figure is 50 percent.”
This may seem convincing to you. But in fact, this is a very selective reading of the PPIC survey data linked above. What the poll actually found was that the share of Californians calling climate change a “very serious” threat peaked at 57% in 2019, declined slightly in subsequent years, then dropped precipitously by 11 points between July 2022 and July 2023, before rising similarly from July 2024 to July 2025.
Why did it fall so quickly from 2022 to 2023? Sure, maybe people stopped caring about climate change. Or maybe instead, the month after the 2022 election, Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, the most significant climate policy in U.S. history, and people stopped being so worried. Why then did concern increase rapidly between July 2024 and July 2025? Well, between those two dates, Trump won the presidential election and set about, with congressional Republicans, dismantling anything that even remotely resembled climate policy. The Inflation Reduction Act collapsed.
I’m not saying this is the only way to read this data. But consider this: The percentage of respondents saying they are somewhat or very concerned about members of their household being affected by natural disasters has actually increased over the same period. The percentage saying air pollution poses “a more serious health threat in low-income areas” nearby increased. Those who say floods, heatwaves and wildfires should be considered “a good deal” when construction of new affordable housing increased by 12 percentage points between 2024 and 2025, and those “very concerned” about rising insurance costs “due to climate risks” increased by 14 percentage points.
This is not the portrait of an electorate that does not care about climate change. It’s a portrait of an electorate that might actually be very willing to hear a politician convincingly embrace climate populism — championing affordability and better material conditions for workers, in part by protecting them from predatory industries that are causing a cost-of-living crisis while poisoning people.
This is part of a larger problem. Currently, centrist Democratic establishments are strongly insisting that the party abandon climate issues in order to win elections. The evidence on this is mixed at best. As TNR’s Liza Featherstone recently pointed out, Democrats’ blowout victories last month showed that candidates merging climate policy with a message about energy affordability have been very successful. Aaron Regunberg explained further why talking about climate change is a smart strategy: “Right now,” he wrote, “neither party has a significant confidence advantage on ‘electric utility bills’ (D+1) or ‘cost of living’ (R+1). But Democrats have major confidence advantages on ‘climate change’ (D+14) and ‘renewable energy development.’ (D+6) By explaining how their climate and clean energy agenda can address these issues, Democrats can leverage their climate advantage to win voters’ trust on what will likely be the most important issues in 2026 and 2028.”
One of the problems with climate change in political discourse is that some people’s understanding of environmental policy begins and ends with the Spotted Owl forestry battles of the 1990s. This is the kind of attitude that leads to the assumption that affordability policy and climate policy are not only distinct but actually opposed. But this is totally disconnected from current reality.
Maybe Tom Steyer isn’t the guy to illustrate this! But his political fortunes, regardless, don’t say much about climate messaging in general.
Statistic of the week
3 times more infant deaths
A new study finds that babies of mothers “whose drinking water wells were downstream of PFAS releases” died at a rate almost three times higher during their first year of life than babies of mothers who did not live downstream of PFAS contamination. Read The Washington PostThe study report here.
What I read
More than 200 environmental groups call for halt to new U.S. data centers
An open letter calls on Congress to suspend all approvals of new data centers until regulations catch up, due to issues such as voracious data center energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions and water consumption. From The Guardianthe report of:
The move comes amid a growing revolt against attempts by companies such as Meta, Google and Open AI to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in new data centers, primarily to meet the enormous computing demands of AI. At least 16 data center projects, worth a total of $64 billion, have been blocked or delayed due to local opposition to rising electricity costs. Facilities’ need for huge quantities of water to cool equipment has also proven controversial, particularly in drier areas where supplies are scarce.
These seemingly parochial concerns have now mushroomed into a powerful political force, helping propel Democrats to a string of recent electoral successes in gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey, as well as a stunning victory in a special Public Service Commission poll in Georgia, with candidates campaigning on lowering the cost of electric bills and limiting data centers.
Read Oliver Milman’s full report at The Guardian.
This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter written by associate editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Register here.
