Audience: Conservatives & Republicans

While partisanship remains the predominant dividing line in many views of climate and the environment, there are meaningful differences within party coalitions. Republicans and Republican leaners who describe their political views as moderate or liberal (roughly a third of all Republicans and leaners) are much more likely than conservative Republicans to see local impacts of climate change, support policies to address it and say the federal government is doing too little in areas of environmental protection. Further, younger generations and women in the GOP tend to be more critical of government action on the environment than their older and male counterparts. Republican women also are more supportive of polices aimed at reducing the impacts of climate change than GOP men.             

To engage conservatives with climate information, use credible, non-partisan sources, clear graphics, and motivate them to accurately learn. This study found conservatives were able to accurately process climate information in graph-form, and they were persuaded if a non-political context could be maintained. For liberals, presenting climate information from Obama was more persuasive than from a NASA source. Without a graph, there was no difference between these messengers for conservatives.             

For Republicans, belief in global warming per se is less of a sticking point (most think it’s happening, including 47% of conservative Republicans), whereas accepting that it’s human caused remains less common (only 30% of conservative Republicans). This report provides an analysis of public opinion data about the views of Democratic, Independent, and Republican voters registered on global warming, climate and energy policies, and personal collective action. Results show that the majority of registered voters believe that global warming is real (75%) and caused by human action (61%).

Frames that include social and economic reforms increase public support for climate change mitigation. Combining increased minimum wage, affordable housing with job guarantees are effective frames, particularly among people of color. Advocates should consider linking climate policy to social and economic reforms. Policy bundling can expand the scope of political discussion and sidestep gridlock. In a series of experiments, the authors find that compared to frames that did not include any economic policy, hypothetical proposals that included a job guarantee, the retraining of fossil fuel workers, or provide unionized clean energy jobs increases support for the bundled policy by 6-14 percentage points.  Importantly: while the increase in support was higher for Democrats, NONE of the economic frames was associated with a decrease in support among Republicans.