In this episode, I talk with Caroline Spears of Climate Cabinet about the results of the state and local climate races her organization tracked in 2024. We discuss the importance of these often-overlooked state and local races for climate progress, the challenges of the current political information environment, and Climate Cabinet's strategy for building power at the state level through 2030 and beyond.
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David Roberts
Greetings, everyone. This is Volts for November 27, 2024, "Checking in on local and state climate races," I'm your host, David Roberts. Back in May, I had Caroline Spears of Climate Cabinet on the pod to discuss her group's moneyball approach to local and state races with climate implications. Climate Cabinet was tracking and supporting candidates in over 100 elections across the country.
Last week, at a Canary Media-sponsored event in Berkeley, I had a chance to check in with Spears about how things went — how all those local and state races turned out. As it happens, the news isn't all bad.
A lot bad! But not all bad. Spears and I discussed a few state-level bright spots and shared a bit of gallows humor. I hope you will find it somewhat cathartic.
By the way, I just want to say: I got to meet and chat with lots of Volts listeners at the Berkeley event and so many people said so many nice things. It was good for my heart, which very much needed it. Not for the first time, I feel overwhelmed with gratitude (and no small amount of befuddlement) that I'm in a place where my work reaches people, means something to them, and makes some small change in the world. I never forget that it is a privilege.
Caroline Spears
Hey, y'all.
David Roberts
We heard her describing someone who couldn't help but be optimistic. Both of us looked at each other, it's like, "That's not... that's not supposed to be me, is it?" We can help it. I don't know if you guys heard, but there was an election last week and we are here to discuss the results.
Caroline Spears
The bar is still open, if folks are...
David Roberts
Yeah, can you please tip your bartender? Yeah. So, the federal level was not great, not optimal, not maybe what we would have hoped. But of course, the whole thesis of Climate Cabinet is that these subnational races matter and shape policy for the future and shape our future leaders, shape the future bench, etc. So, we're here to talk about those races, not about a pedophile being put in charge of law enforcement or a Russian spy being put in charge of intelligence or a Fox News host being put in charge of the Department of Defense.
So, let's... I'm sorry, it's on my mind. So, Caroline, let's talk about — I was going to say the good news. Let's talk about where there are glimmers of sunshine at the local level. So, you guys had this — you might want to explain sort of to everybody, kind of — you have this set of races you're watching and fighting for, and you have, I think, certain projections and expectations beforehand. And so, I would like to start with just sort of like a big picture of the races you're tracking: How close was the outcome to what you projected and expected?
And then, you know, from there, let's talk about some of the wins.
Caroline Spears
Really excited to do that. All right. There was an election last Tuesday and many of you followed the federal results. At Climate Cabinet, we are Moneyball for climate politics. So we did not do any federal races because our job is low cost, high impact. That's the space that we have in the ecosystem. And every year we go into the year and it's a portfolio approach. So on Tuesday, we had 172 climate champions up for election. And those were — yeah, so many — fantastic, running in tough races across the country that have really high climate impact for every single race.
David Roberts
You select by climate impact, right? Like, that's sort of your criteria for choosing races where someone can not just where it's winnable, but where someone can make a big difference.
Caroline Spears
Exactly. So, that would be the difference between doing like, you know, you could invest in someone running for the New Hampshire State Legislature. But there are 400 people in the New Hampshire State Legislature, which is like, I'm sorry, if y'all are from New Hampshire, that's too many. It's just too many people.
David Roberts
That's like the population of New Hampshire.
Caroline Spears
Yeah, it's like every fifth person gets to be in the state legislature. What are we doing here? It's wild. And New Hampshire again has something close to 1% of the emissions of Texas. So, the climate impact isn't fabulous. You take something like Pennsylvania, which, if Pennsylvania were its own country, it would be the 40th largest emitter in the world. Much more impactful. So, we look at the difference between those and that's really what guides our investment thesis every year. It's like, I love all of our candidates every year because we're never, like, we don't support anyone you see on CNN.
Like, you're never going to turn on CNN and be like, "Wow, that person who's running for Pennsylvania House District 142." That's the stuff that gets us really excited. So, we had 172 candidates up on Tuesday. Every year, it's this portfolio approach. Right. You go for a 50% win rate every single year. On last Tuesday, we won 52% of our races. We did pretty well. Yeah. Which is fantastic. We defended seats. We flipped seats. And like this last week has been strange because emotionally —
David Roberts
Oh, has it?
Caroline Spears
it's been a roller coaster. But professionally, we elected a lot of great people to office who are great on climate, and I'm really excited about what they'll do next year.
David Roberts
So, let's talk about a couple of those examples. There's North Carolina. It's odd to talk about happy North Carolina results, but tell us what happened there.
Caroline Spears
I am happy about North Carolina. We elected Josh Stein to the governor's race. Yeah. Really exciting. You know, a couple of years ago, I'd have been like, "Of course he would have won. Look at the person he was running against, Mark Robinson." I don't know if y'all were tracking that race. Is it appropriate to say Mark Robinson...? We're at this point in politics where I'm like, "Is this a family-friendly audience? Can I say what Mark Robinson did?"
David Roberts
Hard to even describe him in a way that's family-friendly.
Caroline Spears
But I'm not taking anything for granted. It is really exciting that Josh Stein won that governor's race. The important thing we had to do is not just have him win that race, we need to give him a veto pen that works. Because what happened under Cooper is that we had a Democratic governor and we had this GOP supermajority that was crazy on climate and would override his veto. So they passed this bill to strip energy efficiency and building codes that would have made houses like EV ready and solar ready, and they overrode his veto on that. So it's really important that we break that supermajority and give incoming Governor Josh Stein a working veto pen.
And we did that. We broke the supermajority. So, it's so exciting on climate.
David Roberts
By how many, what's our margin there?
Caroline Spears
We have a one-seat margin. Woo. Really exciting. But some of those candidates, I mean, we had a candidate flip an R+4 district. Like some of these candidates ran uphill races. Yeah. And she did it after Hurricane Helene. So this is Lindsey Prather running on the western side of the state. Hurricane Helene hit. We saw that there was polling that showed an increased interest in climate after a giant hurricane devastated western North Carolina. Again, we are taking nothing for granted this year. Polling showed that voters cared about that and Lindsay actually saw that on the doors. So they completely changed their campaign.
They went from kind of a standard campaign to, "Hey, here's how we can help rebuild." And they talked about climate, they talked about clean energy, and they won again. She flipped an R+4 district through a fabulous strategy. So, I'm really excited about that.
David Roberts
All right, and what about the future of North Carolina? Do you mean, is like having a veto over the crazy legislature the best we can hope for in North Carolina?
Caroline Spears
So, there's a short-term win and there's a longer-term win in North Carolina. The short-term win in North Carolina is that we have a working veto pen. The long term is that we have a path towards changing power in North Carolina. Right now, it's a very gerrymandered state. So, we're not only thinking about our 2024 races right now. 2030 is the big year when the state — whoever controls state legislatures in all of these states will actually redraw their own district boundaries and the district boundaries for Congress. So, I think about every win that we had this year, and I am thinking about the wins that we'll get in the 2025 legislative cycle.
We've just brought on a fabulous senior policy director to kind of run a multi-state lobbying operation to get clean energy progress at the states, which we'll need. I knew we'd need it, but now we need it more than ever after last Tuesday. So, we're really thinking about 2024, but also how are we notching wins every single year to make — and we have a map redrawing year, basically 2030. How we do in state legislative races in 2030 will determine our climate progress through 2040. We can't have another 2010-2020 year, which was like a lost decade on climate.
And that's our opportunity window.
David Roberts
People might remember 2010 when the Tea Party ran roughshod over Congress and then was responsible for gerrymandering and screwed Democrats for a decade with that. So, it would not be good if that happened again. Several states had ballot initiatives about gerrymandering, you know, with saying, like, "Let's do a nonpartisan, you know, sort of like objective panel put in charge of redistricting rather than, rather than Congress," and all three of those lost. Was one of those in North Carolina or am I...?
Caroline Spears
There was one in Ohio.
David Roberts
That's a heartbreaker.
Caroline Spears
I know.
David Roberts
Why? Why? Why Ohio?
Caroline Spears
Are you asking for there to be, like, a logical reason about how people vote every year? Because I don't know if I can give that to you.
David Roberts
This is what I can't do, and that's why I'm tortured. All right?
Caroline Spears
But this is why — can I just do a pivot into the information ecosystem? This is why having a good information ecosystem — shout out to Canary Media — is important. Yeah, but seriously, because, so I spent all of last month in Pennsylvania knocking on doors. And this happens to me every time I knock doors, which is we focus so much on first mile media, which is what the candidate says. And we're very obsessed, like, "Oh, they kind of said the wrong thing in this particular interview, w hat this means for the results of the campaign." And we don't think as much about last mile media, which is what voters hear, what they process, and what they say back to you.
Every single time I knock doors, what voters tell me that candidates are about is wildly different from what the candidates are saying themselves. And so, fixing that last mile media is, I think, our job and our goal for the next couple years.
David Roberts
You're trying to trigger me. I'm not going to let us get onto that, or I'll never shut up.
Caroline Spears
What was the tweet that made you most angry today? We can really go down in this direction.
David Roberts
I know. I will just say that so many of the postmortems are, "Democrats did this and the voters reacted this way. Why would they react this way to this?" And I keep saying, like, in between this and them is a big information ecosystem that is absolutely polluting everything. So, they just don't know. They literally don't know what they're doing. And if you eliminate that from your analysis, you're going to be like, "Well, I guess they hate it when we create a great economy and we're not going to do that again." All right, anyway, let's talk about Wisconsin.
Wisconsin is, I guess, what passes for a bright spot.
Caroline Spears
Hey, it's an actual bright spot.
David Roberts
An actual bright spot.
Caroline Spears
I stand on that. There is a bright spot in Wisconsin last Tuesday. That's absolutely true.
David Roberts
I mean, hopefully, Ben Wikler is going to be the next DNC chair. So, tell us what happened in Wisconsin. Similar to the North Carolina results in some way.
Caroline Spears
Yeah. Also broke the supermajority in Wisconsin. It's also very exciting. We did that because we got new maps. So Ben Wikler and the Wisconsin Dems ran a like 10-year strategy which was like: First, you gotta get the governorship, then you have to flip multiple state supreme court seats and then you can file a lawsuit that will make it to the state supreme court that will redraw the maps and that are basically fair now. And they're basically fair maps that they don't really prioritize one party or the other. And then we have a shot. And they executed every single piece of it.
David Roberts
They actually did it.
Caroline Spears
So, watch this space in 2026, we made some great gains. And basically, once you get incumbency in one of these seats, it becomes so much easier to re-win election. So, this is an uphill climb this year in the Wisconsin state legislature. But in 2026, 2028, our job just got a whole lot easier. And what's literally on the table, we have 100% clean energy on the table. We have clean cars on the table in Wisconsin, if we can flip just a few seats.
David Roberts
What are the margins in the House and Senate there? They're both Republicans still, right?
Caroline Spears
They're both Republicans still. But basically, the maps are drawn favorably. And in a year where Trump isn't at the top of the ticket, people feel much more confident and — just to like, I know it doesn't feel, listen, I know it doesn't feel exciting to be like, "We have new maps in Wisconsin," but Wisconsin has more emissions than the entire state of Norway by like 2x. So these are, I think these states are important on an international scale and the things we do at these states matter. And there's some folks here who I used to work with at Cypress Creek.
And one of the best things I talk about is when we were at Cypress, we built over 60 projects in the state of Massachusetts and none in the state of Arizona. That's all state policy. So these states really matter for our ability to get things done. And it doesn't emotionally, like, this is one of those weird weeks where I don't emotionally, I'm like, not super happy about last Tuesday's results, but intellectually I'm like, "Well, we can still get some stuff done. That's great." And it is great, actually. And we'll just let that sink in and keep working at this level.
David Roberts
Yeah, the only other happy spot was New Mexico. Tell us. Yes, tell us about New Mexico.
Caroline Spears
New Mexico, Dem trifecta. But this is a great case. Sometimes when you talk, "Oh, Republicans, Democrats, Republicans, Democrats." A classic case of "this stuff can be very nonpartisan" because in New Mexico we had Democrats who were voting against things like a community solar bill, which is like, come on, like community solar bill, there should be a non-starter. We've gotten that through bipartisan majorities before. I mean, you can't get it through a Dem trifecta, what's going on? So it's just clear that there's a lot of partisanship baked into how people view climate. But it's not always partisanship.
In New Mexico, we got involved in the primaries earlier this year. We had nine seats. We had an open seat, four defense, and four offense where we had, again, folks voting against really obvious climate stuff. And we knocked all four anti-climate people out of office earlier this year in New Mexico. Yeah, it was awesome. Yeah. Expanded climate window of opportunity in the New Mexico state legislature. We have a lobbyist there. We're ready to go.
David Roberts
So, you anticipate good things coming out of New Mexico in this coming —
Caroline Spears
I anticipate it with work, with lobbying, you gotta show up in the Capitol and you have to say, "This is what I want you to pass, this is how to get it done." But we are in a much stronger position than we were six months ago.
David Roberts
Okay, well, that concludes our good news for the event. Let's talk about some bad news. In the bad news column, which I would say I sort of expected, were pretty bad results in these PUC elections. So, some states, I think like five, have elected public utility commissions, the regulatory body that oversees the state's power utilities.
Caroline Spears
Obviously, something we should totally elect and that the voters —
David Roberts
Something that voters are so educated on.
Caroline Spears
I feel that way when I'm looking through the ballot measures. I'm like, "Do you need this? Should I be voting on this?"
David Roberts
America has too many elected positions. That's a real problem. But in Arizona and Montana, bizarrely, they're elected. And so, Montana had, I think, a 5-0 anti-climate PUC and now still does.
Caroline Spears
Yep. No change.
David Roberts
Yes, and Arizona had a 4 to 1 anti-climate majority and now has a 5-0 climate majority. So basically, no climate champions won in those races. Is that just because, I mean, are those all just drafting on bigger votes? Like, is anyone, is any voter voting for a particular PUC commissioner, or is this just like reflects partisanship?
Caroline Spears
So, in Montana, a state that Trump won by, I think, we're at 15 or 20 points. When it's that level of margin, it's partisanship. Arizona, where the margins are a lot closer, is a place where we can make a lot of changes. So, the way I would think about — there's two things to think about for the Arizona Corporation Commission. The first is that running a statewide race in Arizona during a presidential and Senate year is expensive, and we have to put the money in like "this is worth it." And it is worth it.
David Roberts
Oh, you mean just like trying to get your ads out in the midst of all the other ads?
Caroline Spears
Yeah, these are expensive races and we need to be spending like they are. And we underspent by about 66% this year. Yeah. Our budget should have been 3x what it was. And we all , this was a known known going in. And it's just a flag for us going forward. What we also need to do is be running people for these races that have held elected office before. And so there's a recruitment piece to that too that we can solve next time.
David Roberts
Who underspent? You mean Climate Cabinet underspent on it?
Caroline Spears
The whole field.
David Roberts
The whole field.
Caroline Spears
We tried raising for it. It was really hard. Yeah, we have the budget in mind. But you can go to people and say, "Hey, this is how much it's going to cost." And they either say yes or they say no.
David Roberts
I know. And trying to convince people that PUCs are important is wonky. Yeah. Hopefully, if you are Volts listeners, which you should be, you will know that there's an organization now called Power Alliance that's out there very much trying to sort of... Thank you. Trying to — I mean, I don't know why I'm saying thank you. It's not my organization, but I'm a big fan — a big proponent that's trying to sort of raise the profile of PUCs, generally trying to draw attention to the races where there are elected PUCs, trying to get people with money to pay attention to those things.
So, hopefully, that will get easier.
Caroline Spears
And that's a big problem in these PUC elections. We basically see from 2 to 6% down ballot drop off, where people are voting for the top of the ticket. They're voting sometimes for their congress member. They're just leaving this whole section of the ballot blank because everybody is like, "What is the Arizona Corporation Commission?" It doesn't, the title doesn't say what it actually does. Like everything about it. And so you actually have really bad down ballot drop off in the bluest cities in Arizona. It's 2%. In kind of the suburbs, it's 6% down ballot drop off in the cities.
So, that's what I'm saying. In Arizona, there's a clear path forward. We have to treat these races like they matter. And the other reason these races are so expensive, in addition to having to get your name ID up, is that it's very competitive. Can you imagine trying to find an ad vendor in 2024 if you're a political campaign? I mean, it's wild. We have to be funding these races early. We have to give them the money they need. And the other piece of this is, it's like, well, who's funding the opposition? The fun thing about these public service commissions is they regulate utilities.
Utilities can go to all of their customers, collect rates from them every month, and then use those rates to fund the elections for the public service commissioners that will give them the best deal. It's wild.
David Roberts
Yeah. Guess who is paying attention to PUC races?
Caroline Spears
And so, there's actually state legislation that Climate Cabinet's looking at introducing, running, and building votes for over the next couple of years that says you can't use utility rates for political contributions.
David Roberts
Has passed in a couple of states.
Caroline Spears
Has passed in a few states.
David Roberts
Yeah, two or three states have passed that. And that's one of the things that, somewhat surprisingly to me, like the pod I did on that with Dave Pomerantz about those laws, was bizarrely popular. I think that does actually resonate with the public a little bit. Like, why wouldn't it? They're taking your rate money to lobby against your interests. It's pretty outrageous. Insurance is an interesting topic these days, particularly interesting in a couple of key states like North Carolina, where all of a sudden whether your home is safe looks a lot different now than it did a couple of years ago.
So, you might think it would be good to elect an insurance commissioner who was aware of the problem, but that didn't happen. What happened there?
Caroline Spears
Thanks for that lead-in. Okay. And the thing I'll say about all of these, we talk about these offices like they're set in stone. We talk about the insurance commissioner like they are the only one who can regulate insurance or public service. They're the only one. But what we see in all of these races and when it comes to the governor, the executive agencies, the state legislatures, the cities, the counties, is there's actually a constant power grab going on between all of those levels of government. It's not a layer cake, it's a marble cake. And it's a marble cake with intention.
Like when Dallas tried to move to electric leaf blowers, the Texas state legislature was like, "No, no, no." And they tried to pass a bill — it was called the Death Star Bill. You can look it up. Very dramatic.
David Roberts
They called it the Death Star Bill?
Caroline Spears
I think it got named that by the press to strip away cities' ability to do things on a lot of issues, but also on climate. And so, there's this constant power struggle. So, we will see a lot of insurance legislation come up at the state legislatures in North Carolina, because while we're electing obscure regulators for the electricity grid, why not also elect obscure regulators to do insurance? There's a lot of states that elect their insurance commissioner as well. North Carolina is one of them. We supported Natasha Marcus who's running and unfortunately, you know, we won the governor's seat there.
We won the Attorney General, we won a bunch of state statewide, and she lost the Insurance Commission race to a guy who doesn't believe in climate change, who will be setting the insurance rates for North Carolina.
David Roberts
I don't know why I'm laughing. Well, enough about that. What about Michigan? Michigan seems particularly sad to me since we had a majority there and they were quite good on — they got a one-seat majority and instantly passed a 100% clean energy bill. That's gone now. Tell us how you think about Michigan. Not just what happened, but like going forward.
Caroline Spears
So, we still have 100% clean in Michigan, still there, still on the books. It's not going away because we still have it. The Senate wasn't up this year, which helped us. Nice. And we have the governor as well. We lost the House.
David Roberts
By one seat... two?
Caroline Spears
A handful of seats gone in the House. There's a hundred seats though. So, we'll come back in 2026, y'all. Midterms tend to be — like historically have been bad years for the incumbent president's party. And I don't know, maybe this new round of cabinet picks by Trump will engender the love and appreciation of the American people. But I think in 2026 we might have a good, a good map for us at this point.
David Roberts
The people have been waiting for Tulsi Gabbard.
Caroline Spears
They have been waiting for Vivek Ramaswamy. Yes, specifically.
David Roberts
But Grand Rapids.
Caroline Spears
Yeah, we have a good story in Grand Rapids. We elected climate champion David LaGrand to Grand Rapids. Like, we elect people who are important in their own right. That's very important to us. They have to be pushing for — he wants to make Grand Rapids a 100% clean electricity city, for example. That's really exciting to us. But also, some of these candidates, David LaGrand's campaign knocked on 65,000 doors in the state of Michigan in battleground counties. That ends up running up the margins for Slotkin, who won that race in the Senate. The Michigan 3rd District and other competitive districts ran up the numbers there.
Really impressive story, and I'm excited for Grand Rapids to keep pushing forward on 100% clean.
David Roberts
Let's talk about Pennsylvania. So, everybody, Pennsylvania, sort of funny... like the entire country, the entire world was focused on Pennsylvania.
Caroline Spears
Yes.
David Roberts
You know, I did a pod with a House rep there who was going through all the races in history, and it is like, on the razor's edge. Not just statewide, but almost every race. Like every single special election they've had, both houses of Congress, everything is like, exactly. I mean, very tense. Just talking to her. And so all this attention, all this money, including a big push from you guys, and to a first approximation, the result was nothing, no change. Everything in Pennsylvania remains exactly as knife-edge as it was before the election. What the hell?
I don't know what there is to say about that, but —
Caroline Spears
But like, going into Tuesday, you know, Tuesday, I think the initial narrative, because the narrative of losing the presidency to a guy with 34 felony counts is bad. But what we saw in a lot of our races is no change. Slightly better. We lost a chamber in Michigan. We're now tied in the Minnesota House instead of the majority. And Pennsylvania is one of those stories. Like, if you guys had told me the presidential result and the Senate result in Pennsylvania, you would not have also told me, "Oh, before going into the election, Dems had a 102, 101 majority in the House.
And after the election, they have a 102, 101 majority in the House." They also picked up a seat in a flip district in the Senate — Dems flipped a seat in the Senate in Pennsylvania this year. They lost a seat that should have been safe for Dems, but it is a prime pickup for the next cycle. But, yeah, no change in Pennsylvania. Wild.
David Roberts
Do you think it's just like, everybody just canceled each other out? Like, there was so much effort, it literally was like, mathematically identical and canceled itself out.
Caroline Spears
You know, this is like one of those —
David Roberts
Or does nothing matter? Which is my alternate theory.
Caroline Spears
Answering the first comment, not the second comment. The unsatisfying political answer to, like, every result from Tuesday, is that exit polls are all garbage and we all have to wait, like, five months to actually figure out what happened.
David Roberts
We don't have to wait. Nobody's waiting. But we should wait. Let's just say —
Caroline Spears
There's just a lot of takes out there. And what we're going to do is we're going to go through the voter file of the people who actually voted. There's like a whole statistically proper way to go about this, where you contact them, you figure out how they voted, you track that with their precinct results. You kind of — the math needs to math. And then you're like, "All right, this group of people voted like this, and these people shifted this way." But a lot of the takes right now are pretty unsubstantiated when it comes to, like, how groups of voters voted. What we do know at this point is that we had candidates outrun the top of the ticket.
A lot of times, I talk to folks, they're like, "Oh, well, you know, all those state legislature races are just coattails of the national, and all you have to do is fund the national." That is not true. It's never been true. In 2020, we had ticket splitting at the state legislature level in Pennsylvania by 15 points in all of the battleground counties. That's someone who literally, those counties, split their ticket by 15 points, voting for either Biden and the Republican state lawmaker or Trump and the Democratic state lawmaker. 15 points of difference. That makes majorities.
That's some of what we saw on Tuesday in Pennsylvania. And it just follows the pattern of what we've seen in Pennsylvania 2020 as well, which is, instead of coattails, it was like every candidate had to run their own race. They had to stand up on their own two feet. They had to get their name ID out in their community. Patty Kim, who won that Senate seat in Harrisburg, was a local TV anchor. You run candidates who are strong, who have great name ID, good candidate recruitment, and that's what a great campaign looks like. And that's what we saw in Pennsylvania.
So that's how we got there.
David Roberts
Well, one thing I just want to emphasize that Caroline said, just in case everybody isn't aware, I assume this is sort of like a politically aware crowd, more than most. But just like all the takes you're seeing are based on exit polls about this demographic swinging towards Trump and this demographic swinging away. They're all based on exit polls, which are notoriously wrong. So this happens every election. Like, you get a bunch of takes that harden into conventional wisdom, and then the actual data comes out, contradicts all of it, and it doesn't matter. Conventional wisdom never dies. Narratives never die in the media.
Caroline Spears
Is this upsetting to you?
David Roberts
No, I feel great about it. Yeah. So, everybody just needs to, like, suspend judgment for a little while about, you know, like, the Latino shift to Trump. People are drawing cosmic freaking conclusions from that, and we don't even know if it's real yet or how real it is or whether it's big or small. Like, we don't really know anything about that. So, it's hard. Everybody. There's such an appetite for takes right now. Like, somebody's going to satisfy the appetite, but, like, almost everything is BS at this stage. Minnesota seems a little sad to me, too.
They had a — I mean, God bless Tim Walz — like they had a razor-thin majority in 2022 and they just went for it. Absolutely went nuts. Like, passed all kinds of great stuff. Absolutely should have been a model for Democrats everywhere across the country and now can no longer do that. What happened there?
Caroline Spears
So, we still have the Senate, we still have the governor, we are tied in the House, and we have a really strong leader in the speaker of the House there. So, we're in like it's very rare for so many state-led candidates to run out of the top of the ticket. It's building off of some of the stuff that we saw in 2022. But in Minnesota, they had an experience 10 years ago where they won a trifecta. They said, "It's really important to us that we're like cautious. No one wants to... So we don't seem like we're overreaching.
They lost that trifecta the next two years. It didn't work. And so this time, they went in with a strong plan. They said, "We're going to deliver for people," and I think you're seeing a better result than the previous one. And they're in a stronger spot. All of the House all up in '26. So we'll see everyone back in 2026. Don't you love the timestamp on these? Just like it's constant. I've had Virginia candidates running in 2025 reaching out to us all year. So it's just, it's constant. But this is like the engine, this is the political engine.
And like, we just need this constant attention on all these levers of power because if we take our eye off the ball for a cycle, it's really hard to come back because of that incumbency advantage.
David Roberts
So any other local results, any other results you want to highlight or call out? Anything else?
Caroline Spears
Yeah, we have a good, we got a pro-climate majority in Lancaster County, Nebraska. It's very exciting.
David Roberts
Nebraska.
Caroline Spears
Got a county important for siting.
David Roberts
Right.
Caroline Spears
So that's good. And they control one of the largest coal power plants in the country.
David Roberts
What about looking forward? I guess it's like when most people think of that, they think of the next presidential race. But obviously, like you guys, we are on races next year and then 2026 as you say, never stops. What are the local races or state races of particular significance that you're watching for 2026 and do you already have your eyes on — how far ahead do you get? Or is it just frantically racing to keep up?
Caroline Spears
Yeah, can you filibuster for 45 seconds while I get over this?
David Roberts
Like, sure, sure. Just say the words 'information environment' again and I'll be unable to help myself. I'll just throw one factoid out there while Caroline's voice recovers, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this too. So, one of the interesting results from Tuesday was there was a shift toward Trump in every state, everywhere, among every demographic except for women over 65. Oddly, of course, this is like again, again, this is exit poll stuff. So, all of this is all sort of approximations. But I mean, the nationwide shift toward Trump was notable and I think is going to hold up.
The shift toward Trump nationwide was, like, whatever, like five points, five to seven points. And in the battleground states where Kamala campaigned, it was three to five points, basically. So, I would just ask you, like, what force applies to the entire country and every demographic? It's not some clever political strategy. It's the information environment that is the water in which we are all swimming. And another thing that was notable, a weirdly high number of voters this year voted for Trump and then just didn't fill out the rest of the ballot at all. Which explains some of the diversion of these local races from national results.
So, there's clearly something specific about Trump, not the Republican Party. Do you know what I mean? Like, not specifically about Trump. And I don't know what that alchemy is, but obviously a huge part of it is the information environment. And we all need to think about how that happened and why.
Caroline Spears
One story about that from Pennsylvania, when I was on the doors talking to, it's like you do a packet, it's 50 doors. I talked to about 10 people a packet. You do five people who were like, "Yeah, we're totally on your side and we absolutely have a plan to vote. See you." And we just kind of do finger guns at each other and walk to the next house. Then there'd be three people who were like, "Oh, yeah, there's an election. What's my polling place?" And you kind of do plan to vote, right? And then two people, every packet, who were like, "I don't know who I'm going to vote for."
And one thing about the, when I say, like, the doors are what makes me really believe that this information environment place is something we all have to focus on, is I remembered I talked to one of those folks who like, "What's an issue that's on your mind?" "It's like, I'm just worried that they're teaching all this stuff in the schools and like, my kids are going to like, be trans." And I was like —
David Roberts
Come home a different gender. You like, you turn your back and all of a sudden my boy's a girl.
Caroline Spears
It's just like this fear-based stuff. Andy Beshear has a great statement how he actually supported gay kids and still won governor of Kentucky. So that's it. That was a good point.
David Roberts
Yeah, it's worth reading that statement from Beshear. It's very striking. Very strikingly different from —
Caroline Spears
Yeah, and I talked to him about hearing aids. I was like, "Cool, well, you know, one of the reasons that I'm on the doors here is that I care a lot that hearing aids are cheaper." My grandmother needs hearing aids. She lost them mowing the lawn and she didn't buy another pair because they're $5,000. And so when Joe Biden lowered the cost of hearing aids, I texted them and I didn't tell them that it was Joe Biden because my primary goal was getting her hearing aids. And my whole family's kind of right-wing. Like, extremely right-wing.
Like a "signed photo of Rush Limbaugh in the living room" level. Yeah. Extremely fun. So, I was like, just for some crazy reason, you can go to Walmart and buy hearing aids now. They're like a couple hundred dollars. And it's exciting now because now she has hearing aids. And I talked to this guy, and he was like, "Oh, two people in my family are hard of hearing, and that's an issue that really matters to me." And I was like, "Yeah, all right, well, then do we have your vote in the election?"
David Roberts
Do I have a story for you!
Caroline Spears
Yeah, I mean, we walked through it, but it's just like, we can do real things to improve people's lives, and that's still important. It needs to be a centerpiece of our strategy, and people need to hear about it. So, how are we going to fix that piece of it? What were we going to talk about before we got here, though? We were somewhere else.
David Roberts
Well, I was going to ask you what you're focusing on for the next round. If there are particular states or races or —
Caroline Spears
So, I love the podcast you did with Leanne Krueger because she talked about this. 102, 101 majority in the Pennsylvania House — it's like a knife's edge every single time. We are building, at Climate Cabinet, a special election defense fund because the tough things about these special elections just happen super fast. You basically need pooled capital ready to just deploy every single time in the —
David Roberts
What is up with special elections? Why are there so many in Pennsylvania? What prompts them? Like, is it just when someone in the Congress or state house retires?
Caroline Spears
Retires, they get pulled in. Like Trump right now is pulling people out of Congress into whatever. And so all this stuff happens. Someone decides to run for mayor, like. We almost imperiled the Michigan House majority when two people left to go run for mayor. Crazy. And so they'll call a special. And in states, these can range from "Surprise, there's a special election that's happening in four and a half weeks," to something a bit longer. And so that's something we're doing to make sure that, you know, we talked about how the North Carolina supermajority is one seat.
Pennsylvania 102, 101. If a Pennsylvania state Senate seat opens, I'm very interested in that. We got three more seats to flip, let's go. So, that's something that we're building at Climate Cabinet. So, even in the interim of the next two years, we'll have opportunities to make plans. Then, it's building, in 2025, we are building a — I mentioned this lobby network. We got to fight back against Trump. We're doing it at the states. So, we're continuing to push climate progress at a state level. Being in the Capitol, in the building, making sure that we turn. The 80 people who did win the election on Tuesday are now climate champions.
Let's get them a plan. Let's go.
David Roberts
So, you're pushing legislation. You're lobbying for legislation now?
Caroline Spears
Yeah.
David Roberts
Is that a new thing for you?
Caroline Spears
We've been doing it for 18 months. We've kind of kept it on the — You know, everyone's been a little focused on the 2024 election, so we wanted to keep our focus. But now, with bringing Dave Weiskopf on board, who's from NextGen Climate.
David Roberts
Yeah, Dave.
Caroline Spears
Yes, we have a Dave fan in the house. He's great. He was a climate policy advisor to Tom Steyer. He's worked with state legislatures and governors across the country. So, he's going to lead this program for us. I'm really excited about it, but, yeah, making progress in the meantime. And then, yeah, our data science team's really good.
It doesn't take us that long to figure out where we should target next. So for this year, we had our targets 18 months ago. We're like, all right, now we just gotta raise the funds, deploy the funds. Let's go. Let's hit it. Our data science team basically can tell you which elections are going to be contested 18 months before the election happens. And so we're able to kind of precision target districts across the country. And we'll do that again for '26.
David Roberts
Let me ask you a somewhat charged question. You guys are very data-focused, very strategic, very surgical. What do you make of the larger Democratic Party's election apparatus? You know, everybody's a critic. Everybody's got their thing that Dems did wrong. You know, many of which are contradictory. You know, like, they can't have done both things wrong. You know, Kamala was both too centrist, clinging to Liz Cheney, and also too woke because she didn't disavow, you know, trans whatever. Like, so everybody seems to be drawing the conclusion that they were right all along about everything they had said before the election, which does not bespeak, let's say, a data-focused approach.
So what do you make of the larger Democratic Party right now?
Caroline Spears
Well, I think a lot of those takes rest on the information issue that we talked about before. It's like, "Kamala said this instead of this," or "This candidate said this instead of this." But if you go talk to voters, especially undecided voters, what they tell you they hear is so different from what the candidates are saying, both in substance and in volume. So, if Kamala spends 95 minutes talking about the economy, but you know the one clip goes viral on TikTok, that's the conversation you have at the door. You have the conversation about the one clip that went viral on TikTok and you can sit there and say that's not fair.
But "That's not fair" doesn't get you results. So, this is something that I'm thinking about a lot in bringing together folks in my network who really study the information economy. And I'm looking forward with our team to actually stress testing that. Actually being on the doors, talking to voters to say, "How much of our candidate's message is showing up on the doors?" I think it's really interesting. And then, in the vein of everybody's take about the election, was seeing the thing that I care about was the right thing all along. It is important that we take state legislatures seriously. In 2020, which is the last redistricting year, again, a year in which these state legislators get to draw their own districts, they choose their voters and then they get to redraw the districts of all the members of Congress.
Total gerrymandering. 2020 was the year to do state legislatures. And this is actually what really inspired us to start a PAC and to start working on this. The RLCC, which is a Republican arm that does state legislatures, entered the year with five times the cash on hand of the DLCC. Yep. And that was the year like 2022 was also great, important. 2018 was also important. There's only one year in which they redraw the maps and that happens every decade. So one thing I'm obsessed with right now is thinking about 2030, looking at all of our top emitting states on climate in 2030.
How do we have a pathway to 2030 and beyond? And by the way, I know we've done a lot of "Republican, Democrat, Republican, Democrat." It is just demonstrably true that Democrats are way better on our issue. If you're looking at value above replacement, if those are kind of your two options, you're picking like it's important that we actually look at someone's voting record. But that's just generally kind of a truism at the moment. But it's important that we have tools at our disposal. At Climate Cabinet, we use a lot of data science to constantly be looking for.
Are there Republicans out there who were taking tough votes who are good on our issue or again, value above replacement, like better than the alternative? And we funded those folks like that this year and we're keeping kind of — we're basically always having our sensing network out there and we always have to keep the door open for Republicans who want to be good on this issue too.
David Roberts
Would you or would you or have you officially supported state level Republican?
Caroline Spears
Yeah, this year there was an Arizona primary where we funded a Republican who was running against a woman who calls herself "Trump in heels." Yeah, that was fun.
David Roberts
What a terrible mental image.
Caroline Spears
I know. If you have a ChatGPT subscription, you can just throw that one in there, see what it gives you. Not our greatest vote on climate, like a 30% climate score, it's zero to 100. 30%. Dems are 80 and above. Republicans are usually 20 and below. So, if you're above 20 and a Republican, we're like, "Oh, what's going on with them? Do we need to talk to them?" So, when he tried to primary her this year, unsuccessful, but only unsuccessful by a few points, and that's something I want to keep looking at. And he took some tough votes.
Again, it's like votes, not vibes. I don't care what someone puts on Twitter. How did you actually vote? What's your voting record? We're scoring it on our scale. One of the leverage points we really have in this next year, this is optimism, is we have governors who are proud of climate who can use the power of the budget negotiation process to get good things done on climate, which is really exciting. One of the examples of this is that in Arizona, the Republicans held the budget negotiation. They were going to refund the entire Department of Transportation.
The Republicans in the Arizona state legislature held that negotiation hostage because they were going to count greenhouse gas emissions at all. Like, they were just going to count them. And they were like, "Inconceivable. We couldn't possibly fund a Department of Transportation." This Republican crossed party lines and was like, "Yeah, you should just fund the Department of Transportation. This is ridiculous. Do the greenhouse gas accounting exercise. It's fine." So when he did a primary, we supported him. And we're always kind of looking for folks like that. But I don't want to, like, be dogmatic. We have to be based on the data and I don't —
Our goal is to solve for climate change. That's what we're doing. We're solving for climate, we're solving for the clean energy economy. And that's what we're always doing at every one of these calculations. So, I think sometimes we get a lot of questions like, "Can you support more Republicans?" And I'm like, "Yes, give me more who have demonstrably voted to solve climate change and I will be happy to support them." They're kind of few and far between, but they do exist.
David Roberts
Let me ask you, there's a sense, I feel like, among people following the national race or sort of among national Dems. They don't say this a lot in public, but there's this sense of sort of futility, like everything has become so nationalized. I mean, this gets back to the information environment that everything has become so nationalized. Everybody's sort of swimming in the same stew of stuff that may or may not even be relevant to them. You know, it used to be sort of conventional wisdom, almost dogma, that sort of like local issues trump these national issues, the people's material interests in some sense are primary. But you know, Dems, I think Biden's whole theory of the case, Dems' whole theory of the case these past four years, deliverism, as it's called, is, you know, maybe we've lost control of the information environment, but if we deliver concrete benefits to people that will cut through, that will in a sense occlude the rest of the noise.
And so, Biden sparked a manufacturing renaissance in hollowed-out parts of the country. There are factories being built all over the place, there are jobs popping up, there are whole economies and towns being revived. There's the hearing aid stuff. There's, you know, like, go down the line, there's all sorts of, like, middle and lower-level stuff that people never even took note of. But it seems like to the extent they could, Democrats delivered to the extent they had power and it did not seem to matter at all. It did not seem to like specifically unions, like he voted, you know, like went, marched on, crossed union lines, supported unions, protected their pensions, etcetera, etcetera.
And they went, they shifted toward Trump this year. So, as someone who's in local elections on the ground at states, who's playing in this field, like, is that your sense that the grain of local differences matters less and less? That in a sense, local issues matter less and less? Or do you think that's overblown?
Caroline Spears
It is true that when you have a candidate who runs a really good local campaign, they overperform, but they don't overperform the fundamentals of their district. You know, you'd want to say, "Oh, we delivered all these things in Ohio, now we're going to magically win Ohio." But we lost Ohio by like 10 points last time. You don't overperform significantly from the fundamentals of your district, but you can overperform somewhat. And we saw that with Lindsey Prather in North Carolina. We saw that with races across the country. What I will say is, "Yes, it is true that the economic gains of the Biden administration were not realized by the majority of people who showed up on Tuesday."
And there's a world in which we kind of sit in that and are like, "Wow, we did all these things and it didn't, it didn't matter." But kind of our job, like everyone here, works on climate change. Like, our job is to kind of look at what is an impossible task and be like, "Okay, this is huge. It seems enormous. It doesn't seem like I have agency, I'm going to find a pathway through." And like, that's what brings people into climate, I think. And like, that same approach is what we need to bring into politics as well.
And like, I'm not disagreeing with you that this wasn't a good election. But like, as we've talked, I'm —
David Roberts
Pretty sure I have the better of that argument.
Caroline Spears
Yeah, but like we've talked about, "Okay, if true, what do we do based on that?" And how much kind of excavation do we need to do on that "if true" statement? And then, how much do we need to build on the gaps in that statement, whether it's information, economy, or above? And like, that is literally our job is to take what seems like a really big task that involves not every single one of us in this room, but like millions of people across the country and to actually make it happen. And we have strategies for that and we have proof points of that.
And if we don't have strategies, we can do hypothesis testing and we can test the strategies over time. And like, we have to, like, there's no, like, we have to solve, we have to work on climate change, we have to make our democracy work and we will find a pathway through. And like, that's what we gotta do. That's what we're all here for. I'm not trying to be Pollyanna about it. Like, we all know, like, no one had a really fun last seven days who was like, hoping that Harris would win, but we did have real people who won on Tuesday and they show us the future.
And I don't know, none of us started in climate because we're like, "This will be easy and I'll retire and it'll be great." Yeah, we could have all worked at Snapchat with our lives, and we didn't. We're here and like, this is kind of the road we picked. And I'm happy to be here. It feels like a good thing to do with my life.
David Roberts
All right, well, we'll wrap it up there. Thanks, everyone. Thank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out, especially, to my super producer, Kyle McDonald, who makes me and my guests sound smart every week. And it is all supported entirely by listeners like you. So, if you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at volts.wtf. Or, leaving a nice review, or telling a friend about Volts. Or all three. Thanks so much, and I'll see you next time.
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