When Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a law erasing the words “climate change” from state statutes in May 2024 – colloquially known as the “don’t say climate change” law – Democrats were outraged. Just six months later, many liberal politicians began to go quiet on the issue themselves. After Donald Trump won the 2024 election, mentions of the climate crisis started to disappear from Democrats’ rhetoric. As the 2026 midterms approach, that retreat is still shaping how some candidates talk about climate on the campaign trail.
The trend, known as “climate-hushing”, may reflect the limitations of Joe Biden’s climate policies, said Daniel Aldana Cohen, assistant sociology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies climate politics and inequality. Green jobs and housing investments fell short of the climate movement’s desires, consumer incentives disproportionately benefited wealthier households, and Democrats struggled to effectively communicate their accomplishments. The president has since rolled back many Biden-era clean energy incentives and regulations.
The climate crisis, however, is still rearing its head around the country, fueling the heatwaves, wildfires and floods plaguing communities around the US. It also lurks behind issues animating voters, from datacenter expansion to rising home insurance rates. And while some pundits have concluded from their polling and research that Americans don’t want to hear about global warming, other surveys directly contradict those findings.
“Maybe people don’t rank climate as their main or top issue … but nobody really experiences everyday life like walking around the world rank-ordering the things that they care about,” said Aldana Cohen, who is also founding co-director of the thinktank Climate and Community Institute that calls for “green economic populism”. “What’s important is to learn how to embed the climate issue organically amidst the other issues that people care most about.”
Some progressive and populist candidates in the US midterms are pushing back against climate-hushing, linking the issue to economic concerns and everyday struggles. Others aren’t speaking about it directly, but pushing for policies that could curb emissions. Such efforts could help build a mass base for climate policies, said Aldana Cohen.
“If we want to decarbonize fast enough and adapt to the impacts that are already here, we’re going to need a robust majority that backs those policies,” he said. “Elite consensus alone will not suffice … we’re going to need like large numbers of people really enthusiastic about climate policies.”
The Guardian spoke with three midterm candidates about how three issues with major environmental implications are shaping their campaigns.
Single-payer disaster insurance
Jane Kim, state director of the Working Families Party and a former San Francisco county supervisor, is running to become California’s next insurance commissioner. The little-noticed but highly influential position oversees the state’s home, auto and business insurance markets.
The frontrunner in the race, she received 27% of votes in the June primary. Among her key proposals is a single-payer system for disaster insurance, which she began developing as climate-fueled wildfires ravaged the state.
California wildfires have catalyzed homeowners’ insurance crisis. Companies have stopped writing new policies and non-renewed thousands of homeowners in high-risk areas, making coverage increasingly difficult to find. Homeowners can turn to the California Fair Plan, the insurer of last resort, but it provides limited fire coverage rather than the broader protection of a typical homeowners policy.
Kim argues that climate-fueled disasters are making catastrophic risk too large and socially consequential to leave to the private sector.
“The biggest change in the insurance industry in the past four years is the increase of climate disasters,” she said. “We used to have a billion-dollar storm every three to four months, and it seems like we now have one every three weeks, so the price of risk has truly gone up.”
The scheme would create a public, government-run insurance program to cover wildfire damage for all homes, modeled on government-backed programs in New Zealand, France and Spain. Homes would be automatically enrolled regardless of their condition, and owners would pay premiums based on property values, risk, and other factors. Some aspects of the plan would require legislative approval.
Since the nonprofit program would not have to generate shareholder profits, Kim said investment returns could build a pool of money for future claims. It could also be designed to mitigate climate risk rather than simply avoid it, she added.
“In New Zealand, they actually use a portion of premiums for fire-proofing and flood-proofing, because they guarantee home disaster insurance to everyone,” she said.
Private insurers are also major institutional investors in oil and gas, which are fueling the climate crisis, said Kim – an issue she would uplift in office, though it is outside the direct purview of the role.
Critics of the single-payer disaster scheme argue that shifting financial risk to the state could further destabilize California’s insurance market and leave taxpayers bearing a greater burden, and fear pricing risk either too high or too low could both cause major challenges.
Kim argues consumers are already paying too much for insurance. She says revenues could be raised from a variety of places, including potentially by forcing state insurers to pay an “exit fee”. She also says she does not aim to eliminate the private insurance market, but to bring in government where it falls short.
“The current insurance system is a failure,” she said. “Voters know that.”
“Insurance was invented centuries ago as a form of mutual aid,” she said, pointing to ancient Roman practices where soldiers used communal funds to cover funeral expenses. “It was always meant to be a way to distribute risk collectively, so that no one would be left out.”
Democrats may be moving away from tackling climate issues head-on, but in California, “climate is unavoidable,” Kim said.
“It’s a crisis that’s reshaping the way so many people are living,” she said. “Losing your home, your community, your neighborhood, your schools, and then not knowing if you’re going to get insured for the very thing that you paid for? That’s unconscionable.”
AI datacenters
In Michigan, William Lawrence, a progressive Democrat running for Congress, has placed his opposition to unchecked datacenter expansion at the center of his campaign. He is calling for a statewide moratorium on new datacenters and backing a federal moratorium, arguing that the facilities can strain local infrastructure and drive up energy demand.
Lawrence co-founded the youth-led environmental justice group the Sunrise Movement, which mainstreamed calls for the Green New Deal in 2018. He won his primary race earlier this year and will faceRepublican incumbent Tom Barrett in November.
In his race for the state’s hotly contested purple seventh district, Lawrence has featured the datacenter issue prominently, including in multiple television ads and speeches. At least 11 datacenters are planned throughout Michigan, and three hyperscaler-size ones are proposed in district 7 alone, with another recently struck down by Lansing’s city council.
The climate ramifications of datacenter buildout are important to the longtime climate organizer. The facilities consume enormous amounts of electricity, much of which is still generated by burning fossil fuels, and their rapid expansion is driving efforts to keep gas, oil, and even coal online, potentially locking in emissions for decades.
Recent research found AI could increase fossil fuel production enough to generate at least three times the emissions associated with today’s datacenters. But climate concerns are far from the only reason Michigan voters are worried about the buildout of the facilities, Lawrence said.
Some fear water contamination, noise pollution, higher energy bills or falling home values. Others are most concerned about the impact AI will have on the job market and society at large.
“You think you know the place you live and you can envision a future there, but then you have to imagine a behemoth datacenter that … potentially driving you and your neighbors out of town,” he said. “That is all so deeply destabilizing.”
The “most uniting frame”, he said, is a sense that AI companies have too much power to push projects through small communities.
“That all really calls our democracy into question,” he said.
Barrett does not support a national datacenter moratorium. This month he put out an ad calling for local control of datacenter development, and put forth legislation he says would stop federal agencies from overriding local land-use, zoning, siting, or permitting rules for the facilities. He had previously backed legislation which included billionsin tax breaks for AI developers, and another bill aiming to limit federal environmental reviews for datacenters and other projects, the American Prospect recently reported.
In Michigan, some unions and local officials have backed datacenter proposals that promise to bring jobs and revenue. Lawrence says he understands their concerns but fears AI will undermine employment in the longer term.
Temporary bans, he said, would allow officials to develop stringent regulations around datacenters before their rapid buildout.
A Data For Progress poll indicates that more than 40% of residents were “much more likely” to vote for a candidate who opposed the buildout of datacenters – a dynamic that helped Lawrence win 49% of the vote in Mason, site of a planned facility.
Lawrence said climate-hushing is an understandable trend.
“There are so many acute crises in our world,” he said. “It is challenging to name them all in a five-minute stump speech and weave it all together into one story.”
Still, when he talks about the climate crisis and environmental issues more broadly with voters, particularly when discussing his own background, he said many of them are receptive. They understand that “we live on a living planet and we depend on it,” he said.
Right to repair
In Nebraska, Dan Osborn, the Independent former labor leader running for Senate, has made “right to repair” a part of his platform, even featuring the issue in a video ad. The policy would make it easier for people to repair and maintain their cars, farm equipment and other products, reducing waste and extending the life of goods.
It’s a concept built on a simple idea: if you buy something, you should be able to fix it yourself or hire someone to do so. The candidate became passionate about the proposal after an experience at work.
Osborn spent two decades as a mechanic at Kellogg’s, where he helped lead a successful 77-day strike in 2021. One day on the job, he was working with a ball valve used to flavor Fruit Loops. (“All those Fruit Loops are all the same flavors, even though they’re different colors,” he said.) He asked a co-worker in the storeroom how much replacing the valve would cost, and found the answer was between $500 and $600.
Only a Teflon seal inside the valve needed replacing – a fix he said he could have made himself for about $80. But the company didn’t stock the necessary rebuild kits, meaning the entire valve would have to be thrown away and replaced.
“I said, ‘that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,’” he said. “I had no choice at that point but to throw that thing in the garbage.”
Osborn sees the same problem playing out with farm machinery, cars and other products, where manufacturers’ restrictions can leave workers and consumers waiting for authorized technicians or paying for expensive repairs they could otherwise handle themselves. Defense contractors run “the same monopoly repair scam”, Osborn says, forcing the military to pay contractors taxpayer money for repairs.
Though he frames it mainly as an economic justice issue, he also sees an environmental benefit: repair generally uses fewer resources than making and transporting replacements and keeps usable equipment out of the waste stream.
“It’s a waste for the environment,” he said. “It’s just a waste all around.”
The issue has gained prominence in recent months. In July, the manufacturing company John Deere reached a major settlement with the Federal Trade Commissionand five states, requiring the company to give farmers and independent repair shops access to diagnostic software and tools needed to fix up equipment. Federal and state lawmakers across the US have also proposed dozens of right to repair bills across the country.
Trump has also backed some right-to-repair measures, signing a June memo directing regulators to clarify what car repairs Americans can legally perform and consider easing enforcement against people who fix their own cars.
“Talking about the issue is good,” said Osborn. “But there needs to be actual laws around this, and they need to have some teeth.”
Opponents, including the Cato Institute, have argued that right-to-repair laws could expose companies’ intellectual property or that improper repairs could increase emissions.
But proponents say the proposals could massively benefit the environment. Planet-warming pollution from electronic waste rose by 53% from 2014 to 2020; green groups say right to repair could help reverse those projections.
“I usually really talk about it as a consumer protection issue … but certainly the environment plays into it for people that are concerned about that; it gets brought up,” he said.
As a candidate in an agricultural region, Osborn said many voters intrinsically understand the importance of a healthy climate and an uncontaminated landscape.
“We only get one planet, and we can’t screw it up,” he said.
