The US Climate Politics Almanac launched with the premise that “all politics is climate politics.” After the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 underscored how our “climate and economic crises are converging,” Donald Trump has led an ever-more extreme GOP to exploit our overlapping crises to tell fantastic stories. Republicans today emphasize a nationalistic tethering of the economy to fossil fuels, and frame the world in terms of lifeboat ethics, the white-supremacist economist Garrett Hardin’s inhuman response to global ecological crisis.

In this deeply anti-social narrative, wealthy nations must secure limited resources for themselves at the expense of poorer nations and communities; minority communities as the major drivers of societal ills; and it is not possible (or worthwhile) to solve our problems through coordinated and collective action. In 2024, Republicans spent millions attacking marginalized communities and painting a grim picture of American life that “accurately channeled the darkness that so many working class Americans of all races feel.” 

Around the world, our warmer, polluted climate has enabled the rise of right wing authoritarianism. Voters may not realize it, but the climate crisis is driving much of what they are responding to. The issues that shaped the election—including the fossil-fueled war in Ukraine, inflationary pressures from increased food, fuel, home and insurance prices, and the Southeast’s devastating hurricanes—trace their origins to climate change. Voters’ pessimism about their economic futures is surely reinforced by the continued uptick in billion-dollar climate disasters, which are placing huge fiscal pressures on federal and state governments. 

As Trump, Musk, Ramaswamy, and other oligarchs attempt to dismantle major elements of U.S. climate policy in the years ahead, Hill Heat will continue to report from Washington on the extent and nature of their attacks.

But Hill Heat is also dedicated to reporting on where climate progress is still being advanced. For the next four years, that will mostly be at the state and local level. During Joe Biden’s term in office, we saw state governments take action to supercharge Inflation Reduction Act investments, and begin taking matters into their own hands to circumvent a dysfunctional federal disaster relief process.

Much more so than the last time Trump took power, state governments are poised to be vehicles for climate and democratic resilience. In January 2025, there will be 23 Democratic state governors, compared to just 16 in January 2017. There will be 15 Democratic state government trifectas in January 2025, compared to only 6 in January 2017. In January 2025, Democrats will control majorities in 40 state legislative chambers, compared with 32 in January 2017. 

State and local elections are also natural places to repair electoral infrastructure and begin the hard work of revitalizing the Democratic Party from its current, “hollow” state. There is hardly a consensus across the left about what happened to land our democracy and climate in such dire peril. But there is fairly broad agreement that the Democratic Party must commit to more year-round, member-based organization building, which has turned two Midwestern state party chairs into the frontrunners for DNC chair.

Accordingly, the U.S. Climate Politics Almanac will be continuing our series of states profiles, which began with an in-depth look at Virginia during the 2021 statewide elections there. Four years later, we’ll kick off 2025 with a new preview of Virginia’s statewide elections.

Virginia Governor

In 2021, Glenn Youngkin rode a wave of pandemic grievances to win election as Virginia’s governor. Youngkin—a private equity financier of dirty energy—has worked to undermine his predecessor’s Virginia Clean Energy Economy Act, withdraw from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, and offered Big Tech millions in incentives for a data-center construction free-for-all which is driving an “immense increase in energy needs” in Virginia. “Power demand in Virginia is growing at higher levels than any time since World War II,” said a spokesperson for Dominion Energy.

“We can’t build enough wind. We can’t build enough solar, in order to power the Virginia of the future. We need all of the above,” Youngkin has said. Youngkin’s energy policy has promoted a “moonshot” bid to build small modular nuclear reactors, and he signed a law allowing the notorious investor-owned utility Dominion to send the bill to Virginia ratepayers. Meanwhile, Youngkin has vetoed a green bank bill, and circumvented the legislature to install a coal lobbyist as a senior adviser and end Virginia’s participation in the Clean Cars program. A court decision recently blocked him from defying the legislature by pulling out of the RGGI.

Youngkin is termed out, and both parties appear to have cleared their fields for a general election campaign between former Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger and Republican lieutenant governor Winsome Sears. Sears is very right wing, and is especially strident in her opposition to gun safety and abortion rights. She would likely continue Youngkin’s policies, with possibly more extreme rhetoric.

Spanberger is a former CIA officer who caucused with the Blue Dogs in the House, where she built a legislative record of modest, bipartisan achievements. Her peak moment of national attention occurred shortly after the 2020 election, when she blamed congressional progressives’ supposed embrace of lefty slogans for costing Democrats seats in Congress. With a 95% lifetime score from LCV, climate and environmental issues typically haven’t been where she’s tried to distance herself from the left. Instead, she seems to reserve her most right-leaning votes for symbolic gestures to show she is “tough on crime.”

If Virginia’s pattern of rejecting the party in the White House during their off-year gubernatorial elections continues, Spanberger will be the favorite.

Attorney General