Environmental Voting Record: Consequences on Incumbents’ Vote Share in 2020

• In Event: Advocacy, Voting, and Mobilization

Abstract

2020 elections were supposed to be a referendum on climate issues. Since Labor Day, West Coast wildfires revealed the scale and the destructive potential of the climate crisis. The Green New Deal generated enormous enthusiasm among young voters. Many companies signed on to different climate pledges. Opinion polls also suggested that a bipartisan majority of Americans support federal action on climate issues. Several Senate Republicans actively supported the 2020 Great American Outdoors Act which guaranteed funding for National Parks. Even President Trump though an Executive Action placed a moratorium on offshore drilling on the Atlantic seaboard. Given the high political salience of climate issues, did the voters reward or punish House members seeking reelection in 2020, based on their Congressional voting record in the 116th Congress (2019-20)?

Our unit of analysis the Congressional district. We exclude seats where the incumbent House member did not contest the elections. These include 43 open seats where the incumbent retired, 8 seats where the incumbent was defeated in the primaries, and 2 seats where the incumbent died (Rep. John Lewis, D-GA) or resigned to serve in the Administration (Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-TX). Thus, we study voting in 382 (435-53) Congressional districts.

Our dependent variable is the vote share of Congressional members who sought reelection in 2020. Additionally, as a robustness check, we look at the margin of victory or loss of the incumbent.

The key independent variables of focus are the House Member’s League of Conservation Voters (LCV) scores in the 116th Congress (2019-20) as well as the Lifetime score. As per the LCV website: “This Scorecard represents the consensus of experts from about 20 respected environmental and conservation organizations who selected the key votes on which members of Congress should be scored. LCV scores votes on the most important issues of the year, including energy, climate change, public health, public lands and wildlife conservation, and spending for environmental programs.”

We control for confounding variables such as Member’s vote share in the 2018 Congressional elections, whether the state held the U.S. Senate elections in 2020, whether the state held a gubernatorial election in 2020, the demographic composition of the district, unemployment level in 2019, the cumulative COVID-19 incidence in terms of infections and deaths (as on November 1, 2020), the vote share of the House member’s party’s presidential candidate, and PAC spending for the candidate and PAC spending by the key opponent.

Because climate change-induced extreme weather events could affect vote share independent of other factors, we control for the climate vulnerability of the Congressional district based on the FEMA’s recently released climate vulnerability index as well as the number of extreme weather events experienced by the Congressional District in the last 10 years. We also explore several interaction effects, such as interacting LCV scores with climate vulnerability index and interacting it with PAC money.

This paper makes several theoretical contributions to climate politics and Congressional politics literatures. While several studies explore how voters reward or punish House Members for their votes on specific issues – ranging from gun control to the 2010 Affordable Care Act -- this is among the first studies to examine voter response in the context of environmental issues.

Authors

• Meagan Carmack, University of Washington

• Aseem Prakash, University of Washington

• Nives Dolsak, University of Washington