Tons of Connecticut’s young voters say climate change is a big issue. But how many of them are basing their vote on it?
WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s Jan Ellen Spiegel to discuss her article, “Is climate change a key issue for young voters? It’s complicated,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. Read Jan's article here.
WSHU: Hello, Jan. Climate change has been an issue of concern for young Americans for a while now. You recently spoke with about a dozen students at an environmental research class at Three River Community College in Norwich. You talked about voting. Were you surprised by the responses you got?
JES: I don't know that I was totally surprised by the responses. I'd certainly spent a fair amount of time rooting around to see what I could find in the realm of polling, which is a little hard to do because you don't have a ton of direct polling, you sort of have to extrapolate from what's out there. And it was pretty clear that other issues had bubbled up, and certainly from one of the organizations that have been doing this for a long time, the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, better known as CIRCLE, they've been looking at youth civic engagement for years. They're based out of Tufts.
And those guys were saying, 'Oh no, the economy is almost always number one.' What was interesting was not so much that something else might supplant climate change, but what some of those things were and what the young folks I was talking to had to say about that on some levels, some of those responses were interesting.
WSHU: Let's start with the polling. What information were you able to get out of the polling? Because I understand the Connecticut Mirror did a poll with MassINC Polling Group in September. And then there was also a Sacred Heart University poll, which was done with GreatBlue.
JES: Well, again, it's a little bit of extrapolation in that, let's take the polling that the Connecticut Mirror did. There was really just one question in there, in terms of the issues that people, broadly, not just young people, cared about. And it was really phrased, which issue mattered most? There were a number of issues. Climate was pretty far down the pretty long list, although 42% of people mentioned it, which is reasonably high, especially given the history of where environmental issues have stood in terms of interest over time, not just climate issues. Then if you broke it out by age group, what I discovered was that the 60-year-old plus group had a 46% interest in it, but the 18 to 29-yea- old group was down a little from that point at 43%. But here's the thing, it didn't specifically say, what issue are you going to be most interested in voting on? It just gaged the interest.
And that harkens back to some of the stuff that's just been around for decades. If you ask people what their interest was in environmental stuff, it was way up there, like, I'm totally interested in environmental stuff. But then if you ask what they were going to vote on environmental stuff, it traditionally just ended up rock bottom. It was always dead last. So that piece of it was not new. The Sacred Heart University Institute for Sustainability and Social Justice poll was specifically a national youth survey, and they discovered that something like three quarters of the youth they surveyed, and some of them were below voting age, 15 to 29 was their group. Again, you didn't have groups that comported with each other. Everybody was doing different age groups. Three quarters of them said they were worried about climate change. 55% of them said they were worried enough to have legitimate anxiety about it. But when you ask them, What are you going to be doing in the next six months to essentially deal with that, like voting, it just plummeted down to overall, about 36%. They broke it out by regions, the northeast region came in at around 34%.
So there's this disconnect, and that also became an interesting issue, what the reason for the disconnect is. And on some level, it's just that younger voters do not know. I mean, I hate to say this, they don't necessarily know what's going on out there. You have a great deal of ignorance about what the Biden administration, for instance, has done on the climate front. I heard over and over again, 'Well, I don't think either group has done enough.' Now, as a reporter, seeing what I term just a fire hose of policy coming out for the last four years now, that was a bit of a head scratcher for me.
WSHU: I also see that there was a little bit of a difference between an older student who had voted several times, who was 30 years old, and so this was not going to be the first time they're voting, and a younger student who was voting for the very first time. Ethan is the name of the older student, and he said he's really concerned about the government system. What exactly was he trying to say there?
JES: I think that's the issue that we've often referred to in this election, as the future of democracy and how well the government works, whether it gets anything done or doesn't get anything done. He seemed to be more tapped into that some of the younger students who were interested in climate were looking at it through a more narrow lens. One saying they weren't going to vote for any candidate who would take money from fossil fuel industries. Another said they weren't going to vote for a candidate who, you know, had supported any level of war because they felt war was often over fossil fuel interests.
WSHU: There was a student who said that they would only vote for the Green Party, right?
JES: That was that was the one who wasn't going to vote for anybody taking money from fossil fuel industries. I went around the room early on and asked folks, are you registered? I was, frankly, very surprised to see that everyone was registered. All the hands went up. If you ask the question, are you going to be voting based on climate change, sort of as a single issue, no hands went up, but then they started to explain a little bit more that it fit into a spectrum of things, which to some degree mirrors what the group I mentioned earlier, CIRCLE, has seen over time.
Economy seems to be the key issue, and that is a long standing thing. And then there's a cluster of a bunch of different things, whether it's climate or abortion or gun control, and kind of number two tends to be whatever is bubbling up at that point. So say, after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting some years back, gun control bubbled up as the key interest. So that one sort of morphs with what's ever going on. So to look at that age group where you might think that they are carrying the water on climate change, maybe not.
WSHU: Interesting. But they all seem to be interested in voting in this election.
JES: Yeah! Even the ones who didn't like either of the two major candidates, I would say, 'Well, are you going to stay home?' And they say, 'Nope, not going to stay home.' So there you go.
