Democratic Primary Voters Recognize The Importance Of Dealing With The Climate Crisis-- But Can They Drag Risk Adverse Politicians Along With Them?

H. Res. 109 is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal Resolution. On February 7th, she formally introduced it, along with 67 co-sponsors, not just progressive stalwarts like Ro Khanna (D-CA), Barbara Lee (D-CA), Jerry Nadler (D-NY), Ted Lieu (D-CA), Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), but also more conservative members who were eager to be seen as original cosponsors, like Adam Schiff (New Dem-CA), Eliot Engel (New Dem-NY), Gerry Connolly (New Dem-VA), Mike Thompson (Blue Dog-CA), Seth Moulton (New Dem-MA), Sean Patrick Maloney (New Dem-NY). By the end of February, 22 more members had signed on as co-sponsors. Things came to a grinding halt after that. A couple of guys went for it in March and one conservative Democrat, Pete Aguilar (New Dem-CA), in April. Pelosi-- burning up with jealousy for AOC to the point of dementia-- and her team, had managed to tamp down enthusiasm for the single most important bill introduced into Congress in our lifetimes. She made it clear she didn't want any more co-sponsors for the Green New Deal.

Suddenly, seemingly out of the blue, on May 1, another cosponsor signed on. Of all people it was cloddy conservative and Pelosi butt-boy Ben Ray Luján, the last person anyone would have imagined signing on. What the hell? Actually, this is easy to explain-- as I showed 2 days later. The central committee of the New Mexico Democratic Party had passed-- unanimously passed-- a strong resolution supporting H. Res. 109 and pointedly sent into the offices of the 3 New Mexico congressmembers, Deb Haaland, an original co-sponsor and the two conservative opponents, Xochitl Torres Small, a wretched and pointless Blue Dog who will never back anything progressive, and Luján. Torres Small ignored it and went about her Republican-lite business. Luján was worried about something else-- a popular Secretary of State, Maggie Toulouse Oliver, with whom he is locked in a primary battle for the open New Mexico Senate seat. Oliver is not just supporting the Green New Deal, she's actively campaigning on it.



Luján isn't known for his brainpower but even he can see which way the wind is blowing when it's hitting him right in the face. He went whining to Pelosi and said he had to sign on and she gave him leave to do so.

And, the importance of solving the climate crisis isn't unique to New Mexico. A newly released Monmouth poll of Iowa Democratic voters, shows that when asked what the top issues were for the 2020 election, #1 was healthcare, #2 was Climate and #3 was the environment-- followed by immigration education, jobs, beating Trump, civil rights, taxes, Social Security, personal integrity and national security.

Yesterday, writing for NBC News, Alex Seitz-Wald reported that the climate crisis is now a top issue for Democratic primary voters. "That's a big shift," he wrote, "from the last presidential election in 2016, when climate change did not get a single question during the debates between Hillary Clinton and President Donald Trump, and just 15 percent of Democratic primary voters named it as their top priority."

Natural disasters and the Trump administration's refusal to combat climate change have added political urgency to the issue among Democrats. As has the more confrontational tactics of grassroots groups like the Sunrise Movement and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY), who joined a climate sit-in in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office during one of her first days on Capitol Hill.

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who has based his entire presidential campaign around making climate a top issue in 2020, told NBC News on Tuesday that he sees a political "magic moment," where heightened fear about the climate has met new technologies that offer hope to solve it.

"What used to an intellectual abstraction is now a visceral life event for people in real time," Inslee said before signing a new clean energy bill. "It's not about their grandchildren, it's about them-- standing knee-deep in water or watching their house burn down."

Parts of Iowa, which holds the first-in-the-nation presidential primary caucuses early next year, are still underwater from catastrophic floods, while California, which will play a newly important role in the presidential primary, just had its deadliest and most destructive wildfire season of all time.

With that backdrop, groups like LCV want presidential candidates to go farther than they have in the past, when climate change was often seen merely as one of many boxes to check.

They were heartened, for instance, that former Rep. Beto O’Rourke chose to make a $5 trillion climate plan his first major policy rollout, while many candidates are amping up their rhetoric to show they take the issue seriously. Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) said on MSNBC on Tuesday that climate change "represents an existential threat to who we are as a species."

"Ambition, prioritization and bold plans that match the scale of the crisis are essential, as is the recognition that this is something that they have to get to work on on day one of their presidency," said Pete Maysmith, LCV’s Senior Vice President for Campaigns.

Wanna-be presidential nomination contenders jockeying for the conservative, establishment lane have been unfriendly towards the Green New Deal. Probably the most rot-gut conservative of the lot, John Delaney, is actively campaigning against it. The conservative Coloradans, Bennet and Frackenlooper, are opponents. Beto put out a half-assed position paper claiming to support action on Climate that earned him a rebuke from the Sunrise Movement. By the end of the week, it's likely that Status Quo Joe will ask one of his advisors what it is that the kinds on the :"new left" are all yelling about.

Eva Putzova is the progressive Democrat running for Congress in Arizona's sprawling, ecologically diverse first district. "When I talk to anybody under the age of 50," she told us, "climate change is hands down the number one issue for them. And more and more people recognize that it intersects other policy areas, including healthcare, immigration, and foreign affairs. What is transformative about the AOC’s proposal is that for the first time we are talking about retooling our economy through investments into the communities that have been left behind and ignored by the political elites. In my district, the Navajo Generating Station-- a coal-fired power plant is closing and a few hundred people will be without jobs. The upcoming closure of the plant has been known for more than a decade, yet our representatives have done nothing. The Green New Deal would provide the kind of climate investments that address the economic needs of the people living on the Navajo Nation. Inaction is costly and Arizonans are at the forefront of climate change, intensely experiencing its effects."