Climate change matters to more and more people – and could be a deciding factor in the 2024 election

Young people demonstrate ahead of a climate summit in New York in September 2023. Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images by Matt Burgess, University of Colorado Boulder If you ask American voters what their top issues are, most will point to kitchen-table issues like the economy, inflation, crime, health care or education. Fewer than 5% of respondents in 2023 and 2024 Gallup surveys said that climate change was the most important problem facing the country. Despite this, research that I conducted with my colleages suggests that concern about climate change has had a significant effect on voters’ choices in the past two presidential elections. Climate change opinions may even have had a large enough effect to change the 2020 election outcome in President Joe Biden’s favor. This was the conclusion of an analysis of polling data that we published on Jan. 17, 2024, through the University of Colorado’s Center for Social and Environmental Futures. What explains these results, and what effect might climate change have on the 2024 election? President Joe Biden speaks about his administration’s work to combat climate change on Nov. 14, 2023. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images Measuring climate change’s effect on elections We used 2016 and 2020...