Affordability and Climate Action Don’t Have to be Opposites
Centrist pollsters keep treating climate like a siloed issue. Voters know better.
By Rithika Ramamurthy and Vaibhav Vijay
Third Way’s recent polling on energy and climate arrives with a familiar centrist conclusion: Americans want “affordable, all-of-the-above energy—not the Green New Deal or Trump’s coal plants.” This framing positions climate advocates and fossil fuel maximalists as two extremes, with sensible voters somewhere in the middle asking for a little bit of everything.
This is wrong. The polling data may be real, but the questions misunderstand what voters are experiencing and what they want done about it.
The Framing Is the Problem
Third Way’s headline finding is that only 2% of respondents listed “addressing climate change” as a top priority for elected officials. From this, they conclude that environmental benefits “simply aren’t a priority for most Americans.”
This tells us very little. When you ask voters to rank abstract issue categories against each other, “climate change” will always lose to “the economy” or “cost of living.” But those latter categories include the material impacts of climate change. Rising utility bills driven by extreme weather and an aging electrical grid? That’s “cost of living.” Home insurance premiums spiking because of wildfire and flood risk? That’s “the economy.”
The real question is whether voters support policies that address the climate crisis while delivering material benefits. The evidence on that is overwhelming.
What Voters Actually Want
Data for Progress polling consistently shows that when you ask about specific policies rather than abstract categories, support is broad and bipartisan:
74% of voters support requiring oil and gas companies to pay a share of climate costs, including 61% of Republicans.
61% of adults support increased federal spending on affordable housing, with even stronger support among those experiencing housing precarity.
77% of voters support climate superfund legislation that makes polluters pay for damages.
When asked who is responsible for rising electricity bills, only 5% of voters blame wind and solar. The top answer? Utility companies increasing their profits, at 38%.
Third Way’s own data shows that voters see solar as the most affordable energy source. Yet somehow, their conclusion is that clean energy advocates are “losing the messaging war.”
How do they get there? By treating “climate change” as an abstract category that voters must rank against “the economy,” then concluding that low rankings mean environmental concerns don’t matter. But their own numbers show voters already understand that clean energy is cheap energy. The problem is not that voters reject climate policy. The problem is that Third Way keeps asking questions designed to separate climate from economics, when voters have already connected them.
The Elections Proved It
If Third Way’s analysis were correct, the 2025 elections should have been a rebuke of candidates who centered climate in their platforms. Instead, we saw sweeping victories for Democrats who embedded decarbonization into an affordability agenda.
In New York City, Zohran Mamdani won the mayor’s race with the biggest margin since the 1960s. His platform centered fast and free buses, upgraded schools, and tenant protections. These policies advance decarbonization while directly improving people’s lives. As our colleague Batul Hassan noted, Mamdani offers a way “to tie the climate action that we need to kitchen table concerns.”
In New Jersey, Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill pledged to freeze electricity rates and challenge utility monopolies. In Virginia, Abigail Spanberger won on a platform that included making data center operators pay for grid upgrades rather than passing those costs to residents. In Georgia, two climate-focused Public Service Commissioners won with over 60% of the vote after campaigning on lowering utility bills, increasing clean energy, and enforcing accountability on Georgia Power.
These candidates did not run away from climate. They translated it into the affordability language that voters are desperate to hear. And they won.
Make the System Visible
Third Way’s polling reveals something important, even if they miss the lesson: voters don’t connect clean energy to lower costs because no one is making that connection for them. Their data shows that just 6% of respondents had heard that clean energy could bring down electricity costs, compared to 11% who’d heard about the supposed high cost of clean energy.
This is not evidence that climate messaging doesn’t work; it’s evidence that the opposition’s narrative is dominating. The fossil fuel industry and its allies have spent decades and billions of dollars convincing Americans that the energy system works fine and that any change will raise their bills. Third Way is itself participating in this project by portraying increasing natural gas consumption as both inevitable and desirable. That narrative is false, but it’s everywhere.
The answer is not to abandon climate for a mushy “all-of-the-above” posture; it’s to name the actual forces driving costs up. Utility monopolies that prioritize shareholder returns over ratepayer welfare. Fossil fuel price volatility that exposes the grid to spikes. Aging infrastructure increasingly battered by extreme weather.
New research from Climate and Community Institute and Public Grids shows that the electricity affordability crisis is enabled by utilities’ ratemaking policies and private utilities’ interest in maximizing profits, often at the expense of ratepayers. Voters already suspect this. The job of climate advocates is to confirm that suspicion and offer an alternative.
Affordability Without Climate Is a Fool’s Errand
Third Way wants Democrats to “double down on economic benefits” and avoid leading with environmental messaging. But you cannot solve the affordability crisis without addressing its climate dimensions.
Climate disasters now cost 3% of GDP annually. Utility bills are spiking from extreme weather and growing energy demand. Insurance premiums have increased over 75% in five years, with climate disasters as a core driver. Pretending these pressures are separate from “kitchen table” concerns doesn’t make them disappear, it just cedes the terrain to those who want to do nothing.
The candidates who won in 2025 understood this. They did not choose between affordability and climate. They recognized that tackling affordability requires confronting the systems that make life expensive and precarious: extractive utilities, fossil fuel dependence, speculative housing markets. Moving forward, those in power will need to build the infrastructure that will keep those costs down in the long run: publicly owned electrical grids, green social housing, federal offshore wind authorities, public transit, and more.
Third Way is asking voters whether they prefer the Green New Deal or Trump’s coal plants. Voters are asking why their bills keep going up and who’s going to do something about it.
The people who answer that question and offer a better option are the ones who win.
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