Floods. Wildfires. Yet Few Candidates Are Running on Climate Change.

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The Cape Fear River flooded surrounding neighborhoods in North Carolina during Hurricane Florence. The environment has not been a major political issue in the 2018 midterm campaign, however.CreditCreditHilary Swift for The New York Times

By Trip Gabriel

Oct. 2, 2018

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Dan McCready is a boyish ex-Marine, a solar energy entrepreneur and a favorite candidate of national Democrats hoping to nab a Republican seat in their battle for the House.

His company, Double Time Capital, says its mission is to hasten “our country’s important transition to clean energy” because of climate change.

But as a candidate in a conservative-tilting battleground district, Mr. McCready’s environmental message is much more muted. Climate change is not directly named among 13 top issues on his website. And though his latest TV commercial features solar panels and boasts that the 35-year-old, first-time candidate helped make North Carolina a leader in solar power, the ad highlights Mr. McCready’s ability to balance a budget and meet a payroll. It does not mention “environment” or “climate change.”

In an election year that has included alarming portents of global warming — record wildfires in the West, 500-year floods in the East, a president walking away from a global climate accord — the one place that climate change rarely appears at all is in the campaigns of candidates for the House and Senate.

The vast majority of Democrats and Republicans running for federal office do not mention the threat of global warming in digital or TV ads, in their campaign literature or on social media.

Environmental activists and political scientists say it is a reflection of the issue’s perpetual low ranking among voters, even Democratic voters, and of the intense polarization along party lines that has developed around global warming, even as the science of human-caused warming has become overwhelming.

For scores of Democrats running in reddish districts and hoping to win a majority in the House, and for Democratic Senate candidates running in states President Trump won, highlighting climate change risks handing conservative voters a motivating issue to turn out against them.

Dan McCready, the Democratic nominee for North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District, which is currently represented by a Republican. He is a solar energy entrepreneur, but he isn’t running hard on environmental issues.CreditTravis Dove for The New York Times

The contradictions were highlighted in Mr. McCready’s district as Hurricane Florence tore through its eastern end in September. The storm delivered devastating floods after dumping 20 to 35 inches of rain, which scientists said were likely 50 percent heavier because of warmer ocean temperatures and more atmospheric moisture due to climate change.

Mr. McCready and his Republican opponent, Mark Harris, who rejects established climate science, each rushed to deliver food and emergency supplies to the hard-hit city of Lumberton, in one of the poorest counties in the state.

As flooding forced many from their homes, most residents pointed to more tangible culprits than the climate: the failure to dredge the Lumber River; a gap in the city’s levees.

“The climate and stuff, that’s God’s work,” said Rodney Locklear, a 62-year-old forklift driver, whose home was one of the few on Canal Street not made uninhabitable by the rising waters. “If man was in control of the climate, he’d have a grudge against someone and hell, he wouldn’t give him no sun — wouldn’t give him no rain, no wind.”

In polls of voters’ top priorities, climate change rarely garners more than 7 to 10 percent, trailing health care, jobs and immigration. For a passionate core, it resonates. But to the enduring frustration of environmental activists, that core has proved limited. Among Democrats, 45 percent said health care was the issue they most wanted the party to tackle if it regains power in Washington, according to a survey this year by Civis Analytics. Climate change was far below, at 7 percent.

“Until voters in the U.S. perceive this as a quite imminent threat, it’s liable to remain mired in the middle of all the other issues,” said Jeff Nesbit, the executive director of Climate Nexus, a group seeking new ways to communicate the threat of climate change, and the author of a recent book, “This Is the Way the World Ends.”

According to an in-house database compiled by Climate Nexus on 161 potentially competitive House races, only a small handful of candidates have released TV ads or online videos prominently featuring climate and energy issues.

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Even the Democratic megadonor Tom Steyer, who poured tens of millions of dollars since 2010 into raising awareness of climate change, has shifted focus this year. Mr. Steyer is spending over $30 million to help Democrats take back the House by focusing on voters under 35, whose failure to turn out in off-year elections was a reason Democrats suffered losses in previous midterms.

Recent ads from Mr. Steyer either don’t mention climate change at all, or include it among a smorgasbord of issues including debt-free college, racial justice and impeaching Mr. Trump. Climate “is very much an issue,” Mr. Steyer said in an interview, “but it’s not the issue.”

Acceptance of human-caused climate change, which the vast majority of scientists confirm, has grown polarized by political party in the decade since John McCain ran as the Republican presidential nominee in 2008 favoring cap-and-trade to limit carbon emissions.

There is now a 38-point gap between Democrats and Republicans who say the country should do whatever it takes to protect the environment, according to the Pew Research Center.

Mr. Trump, who has called global warming a “hoax,” is aggressively seeking to undo Obama-era policies to limit emissions from cars and power plants, and he announced plans to withdraw from the Paris climate deal.

“The places that are most competitive, most important for Democrats’ electoral fortunes, are places where talking about climate mitigation, major changes in our energy makeup — that has real economic consequences,” said Megan Mullin, a professor of environmental politics at Duke.

One way Mr. Trump has been good for the environmental movement is in driving up donations. Green interest groups are pouring money into House and Senate races, in many cases delivering attacks on Republicans that their Democratic rivals may shy from.

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Mark Harris, center, the Republican nominee in the 9th Congressional District, worked with Mr. McCready and other volunteers at a Habitat for Humanity project in Charlotte.CreditTravis Dove for The New York Times

The League of Conservation Voters is spending $60 million on races this year, twice as much as in 2014. Gene Karpinski, president of the group, said it would target up to 20 tossup House districts by seeking to motivate suburban women and independents to vote Democratic. Its ads attack Representative Mike Coffman of Colorado for voting faithfully with Mr. Trump, “the worst polluter of all,” and Representative Dana Rohrabacher of California, with video of him claiming “global warming is a fraud.”

Around the country, there are exceptions to the rule that cautious candidates downplay climate change. Sean Casten, a scientist and clean-energy businessman challenging Representative Peter Roskam, Republican of Illinois, calls out Mr. Trump in an ad for labeling climate change a hoax.

Mike Levin, an environmental lawyer running in coastal Southern California, launched his candidacy by pressing a book, “Climate Change for Beginners” on Representative Darrell Issa, a Republican, at a town hall. Mr. Issa decided to retire and Mr. Levin is in a contest with a Republican, Diane Harkey, who argues California’s aggressive pollution regulations go too far.

Mr. Levin said that climate change is no longer an abstraction in California after record droughts, year-round wildfires and extreme weather have become familiar.

In Florida, which is also seeing the quickening tempo of climate disruption, Representative Carlos Curbelo, whose district includes the Everglades and Florida Keys, is a rare Republican who makes climate an issue. He has introduced a House bill to tax carbon, anathema to his party.

“I bring up this issue even when I’m not asked about it,” said Mr. Curbelo.

Back in North Carolina, the climate denialism of some hurricane-battered residents in the Ninth District was echoed by Mr. Harris, the Republican candidate, a former Baptist minister. He credited divine intervention, not man-made climate change, with altering the storm’s impact, noting that Florence’s winds dropped to 90 miles per hour from 140 before hitting land. “I see the power of prayer and see God’s hand in that,” he said.

Mr. McCready, the Democrat, minced no words in an interview about the threat of climate change. But he said that talking about solar jobs — as he does in his TV ad and on his website — is a less divisive way to impart an environmental message.

“I found that talking about clean energy, showing folks the great jobs we can bring here with clean energy, is something that everybody can get behind,’’ he said.