The Climate Candidate

Politico:

"No one has ever won a major statewide race, let alone a presidential nomination, with a single-issue, climate-focused candidacy. But Jay Inslee is about to try.

The Washington state governor launched a White House bid Friday that stands to have a significant effect on the electoral politics surrounding climate change.

For years, despite scientists’ warnings of the calamitous consequences of a warming world, climate change was relegated to a backwater in America’s political campaigns. Presidential candidates rarely mentioned the issue in debates or put money behind it in campaign ads. Even politicians supportive of policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions largely skirted the issue, convinced it resonated less with voters than health care, education or other concerns.

But while Inslee barely registers in presidential polls, the issue that the Washington governor is attempting to corner is showing new signs of traction with likely primary voters. The subtle shift — expressed in public opinion polls and in renewed focus on climate change in the Democratic-controlled House — is providing Inslee a small opening. And it is forcing other, higher-profile Democratic presidential contenders to address climate change more explicitly than in any previous presidential campaign."

Gov. Jay Inslee announcing his candiacy for the Democratic
Presidential nomination on Friday

“It’s a very different environment now than we’ve seen in well over a decade,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. For liberal Democrats, he said, climate change “is a top-tier issue, and that is the base of the Democratic Party.”

This article also reveals that former California governor Jerry Brown intends to speak out on climate change as an issue in an effort to get Democratic candidates to make it a priority:

"Will the presidential candidates just concentrate on other stuff?” he asked. “Trump and race and gender and single-payer and inequality — those are all issues that are worthy of discussing. But climate change is going to make all of them worse. So, I will do what I can to get it on the agenda. It kind of boggles my mind that it’s getting the rather minimal treatment that it’s getting."

Amen to that.