Republican nominee Donald Trump is moving closer to the center on climate change in response to voters softening on the issue, billionaire climate activist Tom Steyer and other Democratic operatives suggested on Wednesday.
“I thought it was interesting that Trump felt the need to, the other day, to actually deny he was a climate denier,” said Neena Tanden, president and CEO of the progressive think tank Center for American Progress, during an event it hosted in Washington with Steyer’s group NextGen Climate.
Tanden’s group is noted for its close ties to the Obama White House and to the Clintons. Its founder, John Podesta, is Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign director.
In her remarks, Tanden was referring to Trump’s brief statements on climate change Monday night during his debate with Clinton. When jeered by Clinton over his calling climate change a “hoax” perpetrated by the Chinese, Trump said repeatedly, “I do not say that.”
“Deleting tweets is not usually the best way to do that” in distancing from a previously held position, Tanden quipped. “But it was interesting that he … didn’t want to allow that to be accepted.”
Steyer, who sat on a panel with Tanden, chalked up Trump’s defensiveness on the issue to growing support from voters on the right for cleaner energy sources and climate change.
“If you ask the easy question, if the government should accelerate the move to clean energy, Republicans would say yes in the mid-70s [percent range],” Steyer said. “If you ask a tougher question, if it asks climate change, caused by humans, government should act on it, you get well over 50 percent” of Republican voters, he said.
“So the fact is, Republican voters have really moved,” he said at the Thursday event.
A Gallup poll from March that continues to be cited going into the election shows that 31 percent of Americans think environmental issues are important. That is the lowest level of concern since Gallup started including it in surveys back in 2001.
On climate change specifically, only 10 percent of Republicans worry about it a great deal compared to 36 percent of Democrats, according to the Gallup data.
“Climate change and the quality of the environment rank near the bottom of a list of concerns for Americans, who are instead far more worried about more basic economic issues such as the economy, federal spending and the affordability of healthcare,” Gallup said in releasing the poll results in March.
Two polls issued last week by conservative groups who support clean and renewable energy jibed more with the figures Steyer is claiming, but only in part.
One of the polls issued during the Conservative Clean Energy Summit in Washington last week admitted that the findings were surprising, showing a whopping 62 percent of Republicans support taking action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that most scientists blame for raising the Earth’s temperature, resulting in global warming.
“As expected, support grows among independents (77%) and Democrats (89%),” said Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, which released the poll results. Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions and Just Win Strategies conducted the nationwide online survey among 1,061 adults from Sept. 12 to Sept. 15. The margin of error is 3.1 percent.
Another survey released at last week’s summit by the Young Conservatives for Clean Energy Reform showed that among young conservative voters only 7 percent thought climate change was a priority issue. However, it did show that 67 percent favored tax credits, or subsidies, for clean energy research and development.
The big question, Steyer said, is “at what point” do Republican voters begin to weigh climate change in their voting decisions. He said it isn’t important to prove to voters “that we’re right” on the issue. It’s more pressing to convince conservative voters that climate change is an urgent issue that requires decisive leadership to address, Steyer said.
“It’s not that you deny that you are a denier, you have to have a solution,” he added, noting that 75-80 percent of younger, millennial voters think the president should take action on climate change.
Trump has been attempting to pull in supporters of former Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Sanders leaned further to the left than Clinton on climate change and his supporters are wary of voting for her. Clinton has been struggling to keep millennial voters, who made up a large chunk of Sanders’ supporters, interested in her campaign.
Steyer said Trump’s denying being a denier, at this point in the election, “just seems so dumb. You really shouldn’t be president of the United States if you don’t believe in basic science.”
