Environmental groups boasted ahead of Tuesday’s elections of the $85 million they were spending and talked boldly of how they would become a potent political force.
On Wednesday, they were licking their wounds.
“Let’s be clear — we lost some champions last night,” League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski said at a Washington media conference.
The League of Conservation Voters was the second-biggest environmental spender behind NextGen Climate Action, the Super PAC founded by billionaire ex-hedge fund manager Tom Steyer. Other groups, such as the Environmental Defense Action Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund and the Sierra Club also contributed.
None saw a great return on their investments.
“We lost far too many races yesterday,” Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said. “There’s no way, and there’s no desire on any of our parts, to spin this, to try to throw some sunshine into a story that has some pretty disturbing elements.”
Of the Senate candidates NextGen — which wasn’t represented at the Wednesday news conference — backed with its $65 million, only Democrats Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Rep. Gary Peters of Michigan won their races. Democratic Gov.-elect Tom Wolf in Pennsylvania was the only of three gubernatorial candidates NextGen supported who won, beating his unpopular incumbent Republican opponent.
The groups avoided a question about whether their money could have been better spent by, say, funneling it toward more politically connecting outfits such as the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee or Senate Majority PAC, the Super PAC linked to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.
Instead, they said they simply need to raise more money.
“It was too low. It’s really expensive to play effectively in politics,” said Elizabeth Thompson, president of the Environmental Defense Action Fund.
Peters and Shaheen, the two winners of the bunch, attracted the least amount of spending from NextGen out of the four Senate contests in which it played. The group spent more than $7 million in the Colorado competition to boost Democratic Sen. Mark Udall, who fell to GOP Rep. Cory Gardner. The group also dropped more than $5 million into Iowa to prop up Democratic Rep. Bruce Braley, who lost to Republican opponent Joni Ernst.
NextGen spent the most — more than $9 million — trying to unseat Republican Florida Gov. Rick Scott, but he withstood a challenge from former Gov. Charlie Crist, who ran as a Democrat after serving as a Republican.
The League of Conservation Voters backed all the same Senate candidates as NextGen, but suffered other losses too. Sen. Mark Begich, D-Alaska, who the group endorsed, fell to his challenger, Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Sullivan. Sen. Kay Hagan, D-N.C., lost to Thom Tillis, the state’s Republican House speaker. It snagged some victories in less contested races with Democrats senators such as Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Jeff Merkley of Oregon retaining their seats.
Industry groups saw the results as a rejection of environmental policies that they say constrain economic growth and raise electricity costs.
“The environmental movement’s war chest might have reached historic proportions this election, but it went up in smoke last night as voter after voter rejected their misguided platform,” said Laura Sheehan, a spokeswoman with coal and electric utility industry group American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity.
Climate change continues to rank low on a list of voters’ priorities and, in many races, environmental groups messaged on other topics meant to drive more Left-leaning and potentially environmentally minded people to the polls. But for those who did show up, the partisan divide was jarring — exit polls by Edison Research found 84 percent of Republicans didn’t think climate change was a “serious problem,” while 70 percent of Democrats did.
But environmental groups contended their issues resonate with voters, so long as politicians can point out how climate change affects people in their backyards.
They said Peters succeeded on that front. The Michigan Democrat pitched his environmental platform on preserving the Great Lakes and on removing a pile of Koch Industries-owned petroleum coke — a byproduct from refining oil sands — adjacent to the Detroit River.
The groups were confident that, despite the lack of success at the ballot box, their dollars were helping shift the conversation on climate change. They noted that the issue surfaced in virtually every Senate race, just two years after it failed to even register in three presidential debates in 2012.
Heather Taylor-Miesle, who runs the NRDC Action Fund, said that Republicans’ shift to saying, “I’m not a scientist” — a talking point several GOP candidates espoused on the campaign trail — rather than outright denial of whether human activity affects climate change hints at a recalculation within conservative political circles.
“Republicans are also seeing these numbers, and that their polling is telling them exactly what our polling is telling us — voters want action, they want action now,” she said. “Denial is no longer an option.”
