Shouldn’t Clinton be honest with coal country?

With leads in just about every poll, it might be tempting for the Democratic nominee to steer clear of talking about climate and instead ensure she wins Pennsylvania and Ohio, two important swing states.

But environmentalists and a top Democrat in Pennsylvania say she instead needs to do one of the rarest things in politics: have a legitimate policy conversation with voters who may not want to hear what she has to say.

“We need to be honest and up front,” said T.J. Rooney, former chairman of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party.

Clinton has already turned off voters in some major coal states such as West Virginia and Kentucky for saying during the primaries that her administration would put a lot of coal miners out of work. But those states were unlikely to vote for her in the general election anyway.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania and Ohio are states Clinton must win in November, and Republican nominee Donald Trump is targeting both of them as part of his Rust Belt strategy. Polls earlier this month showed him trailing Clinton by more than the margin of error in both states.

Clinton’s early advantage may lead some to speculate that she could play defense and not talk about controversial issues affecting Pennsylvania and Ohio. But Rooney said the former secretary of state should instead press the issue and tell voters exactly what she stands for.

“The vast majority of Pennsylvanians … live in the middle,” he said. “They understand we’re heading in the right direction [with environmental policies] and that our commonwealth is blessed with a natural resource.

“People understand this issue a lot deeper than at least those on the Right would otherwise believe.”

That view of energy issues among Ohioans and Pennsylvanians leads environmentalists to believe Clinton shouldn’t take her foot off the gas when talking about climate change. Many scientists blame greenhouse gases emitted from burning fossil fuels such as coal for driving manmade climate change.

Polling from November showed almost two-thirds of Ohioans were in favor of the Clean Power Plan, President Obama’s signature environmental regulation on coal power plants that was finalized in August. The same poll, done by Public Policy Polling, showed 60 percent of Ohio residents believe climate change is a serious issue.

It’s been much longer since polling has been done on those issues in Pennsylvania, but surveys show support among residents for clean energy and the power plant regulations.

Seth Stein, a spokesman for the League of Conservation Voters, said independent voters in the two states widely believe climate change is real and want their leaders to do something about it.

According to the November Public Policy Polling survey, 61 percent of independents backed the Clean Power Plan. A Gallup poll from March shows that 64 percent of independent voters nationwide are concerned about global warming and 68 percent of independents think higher temperatures are related to climate change.

When contrasted with Trump, who has repeatedly called climate change a hoax and once speculated it was a rumor created by the Chinese, Clinton’s policies will be much more popular, he said.

“When Hillary talks about climate change, she talks about believing in basic science,” Stein said in an email. “When she talks about solutions, she talks about making America a clean energy superpower by investing in renewables and job retraining for coal workers, key elements of her broader plan to combat climate change — that is the smart, thoughtful approach to policy voters want to see in their president.”

Going to places where she’s unpopular, such as West Virginia, and talking about her climate policies has been a test for Clinton already this year. She was booed and heckled by voters in the Mountain State and ended up handily losing that contest to Sen. Bernie Sanders, an even more militant environmentalist.

However, it paid off in May when she won the Kentucky primary, a coal-powered state whose Democratic voters were wooed by Clinton’s plans for revitalizing Appalachia’s post-coal economy.

Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, said that kind of policy consistency is what voters want in a president.

“It’s part of the test and part of the evaluation voters go through when they think about who they’ll stand for,” he said.

As the campaign enters its last two months, observers such as Brune say the day-to-day news cycles will shift away from the latest Trump campaign gaffes and toward the candidates’ actual policies.

When, or if, that switch happens, Rooney says he thinks it will reveal a gaping hole in Trump’s rhetoric when he speaks to Rust Belt audiences.

Trump and other Republicans who bash Obama’s environmental regulations, many of which Clinton has promised to continue, do not have a plan for fossil fuel-dependent economies such as Ohio and southwest Pennsylvania aside from trying to return them to past glories, Rooney said.

“They’ve got nothing to offer these people, and that’s a shame,” Rooney said. “Any time you take advantage of people going through a rough period, then shame on you.”

Trump’s message of bringing back the boom times will not resonate with voters in Pennsylvania’s coal country, Rooney argued.

Instead, such simplistic rhetoric ignores the reality of what’s happening, he said. While environmental regulations are taking their toll on the industry, greater factors are at play that are out of the government’s hands, such as the increasing popularity, and cheap price, of natural gas.

That gives Clinton an opening with coal country voters in Pennsylvania, Rooney said.

“It needs to be an evolutionary message. It cannot be reactionary and it cannot be a throwback to the past,” he said. “You cannot provide people with false hope. You can try, and sometimes people get away with it … but the reality is there’s no policy and nothing that the Congress of the United States can do to turn back time.”