TO: Interested Parties
FR: Pete Maysmith, SVP Campaigns, LCV Victory Fund
RE: How Harris helps Climate and How Climate Helps Harris

Over the last three election cycles, candidates who have taken ambitious stances on climate action and put those plans in economic terms have won up and down the ballot. Since 2018, LCV Victory Fund’s experience has been that in close elections, voters who care about climate and building a clean energy economy can be the difference-maker. There is every reason to believe that will be the case again in 2024 – which is now the hottest year in history.

Kamala Harris’s record of building the clean energy boom that is already creating jobs and lowering costs, her understanding of the connection between public health and the environment, through action like replacing lead pipes and clean school buses, and her successful prosecution of oil companies as Attorney General are popular, mainstream positions. We have already started to talk to voters about how they contrast with Trump’s extreme MAGA agenda as laid out in Project 2025 and are eager to launch additional programs in the run up to November 5th.

Recent Elections:

• In 2022, Election Eve and Election Day polling of voters conducted by Hart Research showed that voters agreed more with “Democrats who supported strong action by the government to address and combat climate change than with Republicans who opposed such action” by 58% to 42%. By an even bigger margin (68%-32%), voters supported the climate and clean energy actions taken by the Biden-Harris administration and Congress this year. And Republicans’ lackluster response to high gas prices also fell flat, with voters favoring the Democrats’ efforts to crack down on price gouging and profiteering by Big Oil more than Republicans outdated calls for more drilling and pipelines by 57%-43%. AP Votecast exit polling found that climate change ranked only below inflation and abortion (and only one point lower than abortion) on “most important issue facing the country.” 
• 2023: Last year, we saw this same trend play out in the purple state of Virginia. As CBS put it, “Republicans campaigned on issues including lowering taxes, supporting parental involvement in schools, rolling back Democrat-sponsored clean energy mandates and improving public safety.” Sound familiar? Governor Youngkin raised unprecedented amounts of money and set the goal of a trifecta in state government to enact his anti-climate agenda. Then the results came in. Youngkin’s agenda was soundly rejected, pro-climate Virginia Democrats protected the Democratic-controlled state Senate and won control of the House of Delegates. 
• 2024: LCV Victory Fund invested in the special election to replace disgraced Member of Congress George Santos where Tom Suozzi won decisively. Our three takeaways from our extensive door knocking effort earlier this year were that 1. Ground game matters. 2. Voters are thinking about environmental issues as kitchen table issues. 3. Suozzi’s message of  taking on polluters in his very first ad, and connecting climate action, including voting for Inflation Reduction Act, to resources and infrastructure that directly benefit the district was a potent attack against Republicans who opposed such legislation.

Outlook for November

Based on their Project 2025 playbook and Trump’s increasingly unhinged ramblings about wind, sharks, and eagles, not to mention his $1 billion fealty pledge to Big Oil, we can expect Trump and Republicans to attempt to paint Harris’s positions as “too liberal.” The truth is, Harris’s record before being VP, and as part of the Biden-Harris administration clearly has been focused on extremely popular climate principles that are deeply mainstream, like holding polluters like Big Oil accountable and building a clean energy economy that works for everyone, helping to lower costs, create jobs and revitalize communities. 

Based on our experience since 2018, this is a story we couldn’t be happier to tell door-to-door, on the air, and online. 

• Support for policies like the Inflation Reduction Act, on which Harris cast the tie-breaking vote continues to be strong, and only becomes stronger the more people hear about it. 
• Voters consistently say they favor candidates who support action on climate. 
• Voters are increasingly concerned about the harm caused by Trump’s environmental policies, both when they hear about his record of rolling back environmental protections and letting polluters off the hook, and when they hear about the extreme agenda in Project 2025 to eliminate the National Weather Service, gut the EPA, and use government to serve the benefits of Trump and polluters over people. 
• Voters are also concerned about the threat to democracy and our democratic institutions posed by Trump’s continued election denials and anti-democratic policies. 

Again, LCV Victory Fund’s winning strategy is to focus on where voters who care about our issues can be the difference in a close race. 

Earlier this year LCV Victory Fund and affiliate entities announced our largest-ever investment in the election. Our priorities include winning the White House, defending the pro-climate majority in the Senate, taking back the House away from Big Oil’s MAGA allies and continuing to make climate progress in the states.  While including LCV Victory Fund’s traditional electoral work of paid media and large field programs, this year’s strategy also encompasses an expanded field program to include House races, first piloted in the successful NY-03 special election in February; relational organizing programs to activate more peer-to-peer communications about voting, innovative paid digital ad and content creator programs, and more partnerships with other organizations.

The largest-ever investment includes LCV Victory Fund’s independent expenditures in the Presidential and Congressional elections, support for state affiliates’ work in state and local elections, money raised and contributed directly to candidates at all levels through the GiveGreen program (a partnership with NRDC Action Votes), and other programs. For the last several cycles LCV Victory Fund and its affiliated entities have been one of the biggest players supporting pro-climate, pro-democracy candidates in the country–up and down the ballot. The $120 million investment is the largest the family of organizations has made, with recent election cycle investments landing at $100 million in the 2022 midterms and $115 million in 2020 elections.

With the margins expected to be extremely close in battleground states, LCV Victory Fund, along with state affiliates and partners, already announced its first $14.5 million investment in field programs in early July and has already started knocking on doors. This first wave allowed us to set up critical infrastructure in key areas, including: Arizona (Presidential, Senate, House), North Carolina (Presidential, Gubernatorial), Montana (Senate), and Ohio (Senate, House). As we move towards the fall, we are gearing up to launch large-scale canvasses in many more key states focused on the Presidential, Senate and House races. To maximize the impact of our canvass, we will also layer in additional tactics to our canvass universe during the GOTV period to increase their likelihood of turning out, including social pressure mail, digital ads, and texting. In addition to canvassing, LCV Victory Fund is running a paid relational organizing program in Presidential battlegrounds. The relational program will be geared towards recruiting younger voters under 35, a demographic that performed extremely well in our 2023 pilot program. In total, we are aiming to spend $31 million on our ground game and are planning to knock on over 3 million doors this cycle, having critical persuasion and turnout conversations with voters.

Our priority Senate races were already in a strong position, in part because these are incumbents (or sitting House members) who have supported strong climate policy in economic terms, and can make the case for how their work in Congress is already creating jobs, lowering costs and building healthier communities. We have begun running ads in Arizona in support of Ruben Gallego, including talking about his record on clean energy. In Montana where protecting public lands is a top issue, our state affiliate has already aired two ads focused on Tim Sheehy’s concerning position on public lands issues.

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Paid for by LCV Victory Fund, www.lcvvictoryfund.org, and not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.