The midterms show that Latinos could be a powerhouse force on climate

As the dust settles after the midterm elections, one thing is glaringly obvious: Latinos are furious with Trump. The New York Times estimates that Democrats won 69% of the Hispanic vote – a 29-point shift from 2024. That’s likely in response to the ICE raids that have deported and even killed loved ones and the rising costs of everyday living. But many Latinos also live in areas disproportionately affected by climate impacts like extreme heat and flooding – places known as frontline communities. For insight on the midterms, Yale Climate Connections sat down with Jennifer Carman, director of survey strategy at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and lead author of a recent peer-reviewed study of climate attitudes in frontline communities. (YPCCC is the publisher of Yale Climate Connections.) This interview has been edited and condensed. Yale Climate Connections: How are you feeling about what we just witnessed? Jennifer Carman: A lot of the places in America that have the frontline communities are also the most worried about climate change: Latinos and people in the Southwest and people in border areas. When you dig more deeply into those communities, you find that they experience a lot of swings in how they vote. I consider them to be a group that’s very electorally up for grabs. But what we’re seeing is just how incredibly powerful and effective they can be as a voting bloc. We saw that in 2024 as well because they experienced some of the largest swings toward Trump in 2024, and that was the big story then. What we see this year is that they’ve really snapped back. And in some places, especially if you look at the Texas border counties, some of those swings toward Democrats are even larger than the swings that happened in 2024. My warning to the Democrats is that they shouldn’t consider this to be a permanent realignment, either. I think that depending on what Democrats do with the power that they have, that will be what makes or breaks whether they continue to have support from Latinos in the border areas in the next election cycle. YCC: What do we know about what Latinos think about climate change? Carman: Latinos care about climate change more than other racial and ethnic groups in the United States. They are also affected by climate change in unique ways. Latino communities face a lot of climate impacts based on where they live; many Latinos work outdoors and work in hotter parts of the country. That’s why so many of our frontline communities are disproportionately Latino. The important thing to keep in mind from my perspective is engaging frontline communities and engaging Latino communities, not just this election cycle but every election cycle. But I think that this cycle is a proof of concept that if this engagement happens, it is possible to win and to win in surprisingly large numbers – to swing even in states that Democrats didn’t think that they could win. YCC: Do communicators of climate change need to do more to highlight that intersection between these topics and climate change? Carman: I think that we need to have more conversations about climate change as a really practical issue, as something that affects people in their lives and affects the kinds of issues that we are already talking about: the fact that people are experiencing more harm from heat and higher bills. We know that if you’re experiencing higher temperatures, you have to run the air conditioner more often, and that’s expensive, or if you don’t have air conditioning, then you suffer. There are parts of the country that get extremely hot where people cannot afford air conditioning or cannot afford to run air conditioning. YCC: Or don’t have the right to install one if they’re renting. Carman: Yeah, exactly. There are studies that have found that apartments [without air conditioning] can get to be more than 100 degrees in the summer, and that has economic effects and health effects. A lot of these cost-of-living problems are exacerbated by climate change. When it comes to talking about climate change, it is really important to talk about it not just as this sort of broad, esoteric issue that affects us all, but also as something that affects us personally. It also affects us all individually. For example, in my office today, it is 80 degrees in November. There can be an aspect of talking about climate change that can be really intimidating. I think that’s part of why there’s this climate hushing that happens. It sounds so big, and you don’t want to have a conversation about giant systems and ocean currents and all of these various interconnected things. Climate change does have those effects, but it also has very personal and direct effects. And there are things that people can do about that. For example, voting. Putting a name to what people are experiencing is really powerful. It’s getting hotter, and the fact that it’s getting so much hotter is dangerous. And the fact that there’s more flooding, that we’re getting these freak rainstorms in the Southwest and in Florida and wildfires in Hawaii and heat waves in Alaska – it’s really important to put a name to that, and we have a name for that. That name is climate change. YCC: Where does climate hushing come from? Carman: I think it comes from a bunch of things. One of them is which voices get amplified. The Dismissive [about climate change] demographic is about 11% [of the U.S. public] and Alarmed are about 25% of the population. So there are two and a half times as many Alarmed as there are Dismissive, but it always surprises people when you tell them that because the Dismissives are so loud and so highly platformed. There are whole news channels that primarily use the time and platform that they have for amplifying the voices of the Dismissive, like our president. Read: Global warming’s six Americas When those are the voices you hear, that’s what you think everybody thinks. It can also be intimidating to push back against. Politicians have a lot more permission to talk about climate change than they think. Going into this next Congress, what I’m really hoping will happen is that members of Congress will be able to see that. A lot of policies to reduce the impacts of climate change and to protect people from climate impacts are really popular. Ninety-two percent of registered voters support protecting workers from dangerous levels of heat, and it’s one of those policies that feels like a no-brainer. And yet Florida and Texas have banned heat protection laws. Frontline communities are really central to coalition-building because they play an important role in not just connecting climate but all of these other issues. All these affordability things – frontline communities have been experiencing this for decades. YCC: And Latinos are the demographic with the highest belief in their ability to collectively effect change at a government level. Carman: I think that it’s important to recognize that frontline communities are not helpless. Because of the historical neglect, people have had to take a lot on themselves, but the potential for political action is really high. There’s a lot that they’re already doing to protect themselves. There’s a lot of capacity-building and community power in frontline communities, and I think people within those communities know it. They can serve as powerful examples and powerful leadership and potential for political power. I think that is important for the climate movement and for politicians in general to keep in mind, especially as the new Congress goes forward. Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.