Interviews across this crucial swing state offer lessons for Democrats hoping to flip the House.
An estimated thousand rally and march for climate change in Philadelphia on September 20, 2019, as tens of thousands across the nation and millions globally participate in the Climate Strike.(Bastiaan Slabbers / NurPhoto via Getty Images)
“Are you part of the 89 percent?”
A team of Covering Climate Now reporters traveled through eastern Pennsylvania last week asking people that question, exploring what residents of that quintessential battleground state think about climate change and the fast-approaching midterm elections. Pennsylvanians had just endured a brutal heat wave that scientists said would have been “virtually impossible” absent global warming. Temperatures in Philadelphia hit 103º Fahrenheit, leading authorities to cancel the Fourth of July parade.
Pennsylvania is central to Democrats’ hopes of winning the US House of Representatives in November and putting a brake on Donald Trump’s one-party rule. Four of the 35 seats Democratic strategists have identified as opportunities to flip from red to blue are in Pennsylvania. Trump won the state by a narrow marginin 2024—a mere 120,000 votes out of 7 million cast—and his underwater approval ratings today figure to bolster Democrats’ chances.
Our 89 percent question referred to the 80 to 89 percent supermajority of people around the world who want their governments to “do more” about climate change. That’s according to Gallup’s annual global mega-poll, as analyzed by scholars in the eminent scientific journal Nature Climate Change. Separate studies by Oxford University, the European Commission, and others found similar levels of support. Crucially, the studies also found that the supermajorities in most countries do not realize they are a supermajority; instead, they think they are a minority.
Shedding further light on Pennsylvanians’ views, the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication recently released survey data measuring Americans’ views about global warming and what they think governments and corporations should do about it. The data covers the entire United States but is also broken down by state, county, and congressional district. For example, 63 percent of all Americans are “somewhat worried” or “very worried” about global warming, whereas the number in Pennsylvania is 61 percent and in neighboring New Jersey it is 71 percent.
Our interviews with a diverse collection of Pennsylvanians broadly confirmed these scholarly findings, though with important caveats. For example, Joe, a retired schoolteacher in Philadelphia, estimated that only “15 to 20 percent” of people want stronger climate action. (For electoral privacy reasons, this article will not use the last names of interviewees.) “Maybe we’re not doing a good enough job of communicating the dangers for people’s kids and grandkids,” he added.
To be clear, the size of the climate supermajority varies by country. In the United States, the percentage is lower, at 74 percent. No surprise, really, considering that the United States is the world’s oldest petro-state and currently its largest producer of oil and gas. (Fun fact: The world’s first oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859.)
But 74 percent still amounts to three in every four Americans who want stronger government climate action. In Pennsylvania, 59 percent say that the US economy should transition to 100 percent clean energy by 2050, and 53 percent say that “a candidate’s views on global warming are important to my vote.” If a meaningful fraction of these people vote accordingly in November, the climate majority could have a decisive effect on the results.
“Absolutely, I am,” said Emily, a 30-ish office worker in Allentown, when asked if she was part of the 89 percent. Climate change is one of her priority issues, she added, and “absolutely I will be voting in November.” Of Mexican heritage, Emily said some of her family members are not authorized to vote. “If you have the ability to vote, definitely vote,” she urged. “If not for yourself, at least vote for those who can’t.”
Camille, an African American single mother in Allentown, said she wants the government to do more about climate change, partly because of her children, ages 10 and 12. Underscoring the importance of affordability, she added, “But I want the government to do more about a lot of things, especially the cost of living. People are struggling, and in a country as rich as this, people should not be struggling.”
Along with Scranton, Allentown is one of two sizable cities in Pennsylvania’s Eighth Congressional District, one of the four seats Democrats aim to flip in November. Located 63 miles north of Philadelphia, Allentown is currently represented by Republican Rob Bresnahan, who ousted an incumbent Democrat in 2024 by an even slimmer margin than Trump’s.
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The Yale data indicates that 59 percent of the district’s residents are “worried” about global warming, the same percentage that wants the United States to transition to clean energy by 2050. And like Pennsylvania as a whole, 53 percent of eighth district residents say a candidate’s views on global warming are important to how they vote. The numbers are very similar next door in the Ninth Congressional District, even though the ninth is home to some of Pennsylvania’s fracking operations.
The eighth is a swing district partly because it has lots of voters like Bobby, a white-haired computer systems manager who saw no urgency in addressing climate change. “I think climate change is real. We can feel that the weather is hotter than it used to be,” he said. “But burning fossil fuels only has an incremental effect on it. We should be stewards of the earth and make incremental improvements, but they’ll be incremental.” Roughly one out of three people (32 percent) in the eighth district likewise believe that global warming is not much affected by human actions.
Jose, a warehouse worker in Allentown, agreed that the weather had been “very hot,” but he had never heard the terms “climate change” or “global warming.” When they were explained, he waved them away with a smile, saying, “This is in God’s hands.”
God’s will was invoked in more than a few of our interviews, a reminder of how powerful a role religion plays in public attitudes in the United States. More than one in three (37 percent) of Americans reject the science of evolution, believing instead that “God created humans in their present form in the last 10,000 years,” a 2024 Gallup poll found. “I never heard of global warming, but it don’t matter,” said Rodney, an older African American man hawking ice-cold bottles of water across from Independence Hall in Philadelphia. “It’s all up to Jesus. And you better get right with Jesus, or you’ll end up in a place a lot hotter than this.”
Although a clear majority of the people we interviewed in the purplish eighth district and in bright-blue Philadelphia said they favored stronger government climate action, there are significant caveats. Many of these individuals did not seem to hold this opinion very strongly; they had only a vague understanding of what climate change is and how it could be tackled; and they were not necessarily likely to vote in November.
Liz, a middle-aged retail clerk in Plymouth Metting, a smaller town 20 miles north of Philadelphia, said the July 4 heat wave was “terrible” and was “probably” made worse by climate change. She plans to vote in November, but she said that “most people around here don’t care about that stuff, and they don’t vote.”
James, a security guard in Plymouth Meeting, said the July 4 heat was “really bad. I heard on the news it was the hottest it had been in 100 years.” Did he think global warming was to blame? “I don’t know. They used to talk about that more, but I haven’t heard much about it lately.”
James’s comment aligns with one of the most striking findings in the Yale survey: Eighty-four percent of people in the eighth district and 82 percent in Pennsylvania as a whole said they only heard about global warming in the media once a month at most. Some major US news organizations have retreated from climate coverage recently; the TV networks ABC, CBS, and NBC reduced the airtime they devoted to climate change by 35 percent, according to the watchdog group Media Matters. This retreat, however, runs counter to what audiences say they want. A separate study released this month by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that 74 percent of Americans say “they are interested news stories about global warming.”
Kennedy, an African American educator from Tennessee who was touring Philadelphia with his wife to mark the United States’ 250th birthday, was not surprised that a sizable minority of people don’t care about climate change. “What the media says is very important,” he said. Referencing the roughly 25 percent of the country who he estimated reject climate science, he added, “People need to have an honest assessment of what’s going on with their world if they’re to have informed opinions.”
Only one person among the dozens we interviewed correctly guessed the percentage of Americans who favored stronger government climate action, and her method was grounded in a similar insight. Covering Climate Now conducted our interviews in Philadelphia alongside Susan Phillips, the veteran environment reporter for the local public radio station WHYY. Near an outdoor World Cup viewing party the city had organized, Phillips put this question to Amanda, a middle-aged white woman on a bicycle: What percentage of people do you think want their elected representatives to do more about climate change? Amanda paused and replied, “Seventy-five percent.” It was simple math, she explained. MAGA is 25 percent of the country, so “America minus MAGA is 75 percent.”
Mark HertsgaardTwitterMark Hertsgaard is the environment correspondent of The Nation and the executive director of the global media collaboration Covering Climate Now. His new book is Big Red’s Mercy: The Shooting of Deborah Cotton and A Story of Race in America.