The Conversation Leans on Flawed Polling Study to Claim That Climate Change Influences Elections
By
Linnea Lueken
March 14, 2024
In a recent post by The Conversation, “Climate change matters to more and more people – and could be a deciding factor in the 2024 election,” one of the authors of a recent study looking at polling and Americans’ attitudes towards climate change claims that despite being low on most people’s list of concerns, it actually plays a potentially deciding role in elections. This is unsubstantiated, and not only can the results can be manipulated based on what polling you select, but the researchers appear to have -at best- some major blind spots when it comes to interpreting their data.
Matt Burgess, assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, wrote the Conversation piece, and is also one of the authors on the study being referred to. Right away, he admits that American voters’ top priorities are economics, inflation, crime, health care, education, and immigration. This is consistently shown to be true, as Climate Realism has pointed out numerous times. Not only do Americans rank other issues higher than climate change, but it is actually ranked last or tied for last for the majority of people when compared to other issues, even other environmental issues.
Still, Burgess insists that actually climate change has influenced presidential elections, writing “[d]espite this, research that I conducted with my colleages suggests that concern about climate change has had a significant effect on voters’ choices in the past two presidential elections.”
https://climaterealism.com/2024/03/the-conversation-leans-on-flawed-polling-study-to-claim-that-climate-change-influences-elections/
