Democrats have spent years betting that hot summers would scare voters into supporting their climate agenda.
That bet is not paying off the way they planned.
And CNN’s own data analyst just dropped numbers that have to sting inside the network’s green-energy cheerleading operation.
The Polling That CNN Probably Wished Stayed Buried
Harry Enten, CNN’s resident numbers guy, went on air recently and walked through data showing that American voters are growing less worried about climate change, not more, even as temperatures climb and the Left insists the planet is on borrowed time.
Enten put it plainly: “They don’t care.”
That’s a rough sentence to broadcast on a network that has treated climate alarmism as settled gospel for the better part of a decade.
The polling Enten cited showed a measurable drop in the share of Americans who rank climate change as a top priority. And the trend line isn’t moving in the direction climate activists need it to move heading into future election cycles.
This is the part the mainstream press rarely wants to dwell on. Record heat gets wall-to-wall coverage. Dramatic predictions about coastal flooding and crop failure get sympathetic segments. But when the actual polling comes back showing voters have tuned out the panic, that data tends to get buried or explained away as ignorance.
Enten didn’t bury it. He said it out loud on CNN.
Why the Climate Messaging Machine Keeps Stalling
The Left’s theory of the case has always been that visible weather events would convert skeptics. A bad hurricane season, a stretch of triple-digit days, a wildfire that burns long enough to dominate the news cycle — the assumption was that eventually, voters would connect the dots and demand the kind of sweeping government intervention Democrats have been pushing for years.
But voters are not connecting those dots the way climate activists expected.
Part of that is credibility. Catastrophic predictions that don’t materialize on schedule have a way of wearing out their welcome. When the same voices that promised coastal cities underwater by a certain year are still making the same predictions a decade later, ordinary people start doing the math.
And part of it is priorities. Voters who are watching grocery bills climb, gas prices fluctuate, and their household budgets get squeezed are not sitting around ranking climate policy above economic survival. That’s not ignorance. That’s rational thinking from people who live in the real world rather than in think tanks funded by green energy interests.
Bernie Sanders’ Green New Deal and its various rebranded successors promised to reshape the entire American economy through regulation, cut American’s ability to eat beef, mandate Bidenmobiles that most working families can’t afford, and kneecap domestic oil and gas production in the name of emissions targets that China and India have zero intention of matching. Voters looked at that package and passed.
Democrats keep running the same play and keep getting surprised when it doesn’t work.
What Enten’s Numbers Actually Tell the Democrat Party
There’s a certain irony in CNN hosting this conversation. The network has given enormous airtime to climate activists, dire model projections, and politicians promising to spend trillions of taxpayer dollars on green energy rewiring. And now their own data analyst is on camera explaining that the audience for all of that messaging is shrinking.
Enten’s segment is worth taking seriously precisely because it came from inside the building.
The Democrat Party faces a genuine strategic problem here. Their donor class, their activist base, and most of their media allies are fully committed to climate as a centerpiece issue. Pulling back on that messaging would cause a revolt on the Left. But pushing it harder into a headwind of declining public concern is a losing electoral strategy.
They’re stuck.
And the voters doing the unsticking are not the caricature of flat-earth science deniers the Left likes to invoke whenever polling goes sideways. They’re people who looked at what Democrat climate policy actually costs — higher energy bills, restricted drilling, mandated vehicle purchases, regulatory burdens on small businesses — and decided the tradeoff wasn’t worth it.
Restricting American oil and gas production doesn’t lower global temperatures. It raises costs for American families while handing leverage to foreign competitors who face no such restrictions. Voters in the middle of the country have figured this out even if the people producing CNN’s climate segments haven’t.
Enten deserves some credit for reading the numbers honestly instead of spinning them into a story about voter education deficits. The data is the data. Voters are less concerned about climate change than Democrat strategists need them to be, and a scorching summer didn’t change that.
But don’t expect the broader media apparatus to take the same lesson. The climate industrial complex has too much invested in the panic to walk away from it over something as inconvenient as public opinion moving in the wrong direction.
The real tell will come in how Democrats campaign heading forward. If they keep leading with climate mandates and green energy spending packages, they’re telling voters that the activist base matters more than the electorate. If they quietly shelve the issue and pivot to something else, they’re admitting what Enten’s numbers already showed.
Either way, the polling is out there now. CNN put it on the air themselves.
Source: Mediaite, “They Don’t Care: CNN Data Guru on Voters’ Shifting Attitudes on Climate Change Despite Scorching Hot Summer”
