Climate progressives won the midterms without saying ‘climate’

Detailed summary

How the ideas behind the Green New Deal got an update for the Trump era.

On October 20, the two candidates running to represent Michigan in the U.S. Senate, Abdul El-Sayed and Mike Rogers, took questions for an hour at the Detroit Economic Club. El-Sayed, the Democrat who had previously run for governor, made a name for himself years ago by connecting public health to the climate crisis. He published a fierce defense of the Green New Deal at the time, touting its economic, health, and planetary benefits. But last month at the Detroit Economic Club, El-Sayed didn’t mention the Green New Deal at all.

Instead, the only mentions of such a plan came from his opponent, who used it as an attack on El-Sayed and the Democratic party as a whole. “We need to make sure we don’t have the largest tax increase in the history of the country,” Rogers said, “which is, that’s what the other team is talking about doing.”

A vote for El-Sayed would ring in an era of “big government, government control, more rules, more regulation, another Green New Deal,” Rogers continued. It’s become a common refrain since President Donald Trump’s effort to rebrand the climate movement’s push for widescale public investment in renewable energy as a “Green New Scam.”

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Even though many of the newly elected Democrats did not talk about the Green New Deal by name, the think tank Climate and Community Institute describes El-Sayed as belonging to a new class of green economic populists who are running for public office (and winning) by connecting the need for climate action to soaring utility bills and the hoarding of wealth by a handful of individuals and companies.

El-Sayed “clearly gets it,” said Patrick Bigger, research director at Climate and Community Institute, or CCI. The senator-elect’s platform, which proposes stricter regulations on data centers and energy companies, is “really exciting,” he said.

Bigger led a recent analysis that scored candidates in…

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