How Election Week 2022 Went Down

Sixty-one percent of Americans think that Congress should do more to address climate change, according to public-opinion maps produced by the climate communication programs at George Mason University and Yale University. The programs use a combination of survey data collected in 2021 and statistical modeling based on more than a decade of similar surveys to create the maps. Support for some specific policies is even higher — like “regulate CO2 as a pollutant” (72 percent) and “fund research into renewable energy” (77 percent).

Of course, this support is not uniform from state to state — or congressional district to congressional district. All of the 45 districts where 70 percent or more of residents support Congress doing more about climate change elected Democrats to the House of Representatives in the 2020 election. (The Yale/George Mason analysis is based on districts from the 116th Congress, lines that have now changed because of the 2021 redistricting cycle.)

But the situation gets more interesting when you start looking at districts where between 50 and 70 percent of residents support congressional action. This includes several districts that elected Republicans in 2020, such as California’s 22nd District (62 percent support congressional action), New York’s 2nd District (65 percent) and New Jersey’s 2nd District (66 percent). Even both congressional districts in Idaho fell into this category, with 52 percent of the 1st District and 55 percent of the 2nd District supporting increased congressional action on climate change. Ultimately, there were only 12 districts where less than 50 percent of adults supported congressional action on climate.

That consensus around what Congress should be doing on climate change feels deeply weird (to put it mildly) given the way that environmental issues — and particularly climate change — have been politicized in this country. In a January poll, for example, Pew Research Center found that while 81 percent of liberal Democrats said that human activity contributed “a great deal” to climate change, only 11 percent of conservative Republicans said the same. And just a little more than a year ago, the environmental news website Grist reported that the gap on climate change between the left and right has been getting larger over time.

But this apparent contradiction just highlights the fact that Americans think very differently about the basic science of climate change than about the policy solutions to it. That same Pew poll found that 33 percent of conservative Republicans wanted to take steps to make America carbon neutral by 2050, which suggests that three times as many conservative Republicans want humans to combat climate change than believe humans are causing it.

When you add in the documented differences within groups of Republicans — moderate Republicans are more supportive of climate action than conservative ones, younger Republicans have much higher rates of belief than their elders in climate science and the seriousness of climate change, Republicans who have experienced extreme weather shifts believe more strongly that climate change contributed to that weather — it becomes more clear how a country with a strong partisan split around the existence of climate change could still be largely in agreement that Congress needs to do more about it.