Courting the Climate Vote in Pennsylvania

Mother Jones illustration; Photos by Antonia Juhasz

Donald Trump has an enemies list. The Sierra Club has an allies list—some 259,000 Pennsylvanians who could decide the election.

They have demonstrated concern for the climate crisis, the clean energy transition, and the environment—but they are young, or newly registered, or do not regularly vote. “These voters can be critical,” says Sarah Burton, the Sierra Club’s national political director. “But they often need extra pushes to get out and actually vote.”

So the Sierra Club is enlisting a vast cadre of volunteers to turn them out. People are gathering in dining rooms across the state and in zoom calls nation-wide to write postcards and make phone calls. As of Thursday, they’d contacted about 100,000 people on the club’s list.

“The only thing that defeats Trump and MAGA Republicans is collective action, and in my mind, specifically collective action on climate. There is such a potential there. I think it’s really exciting,” Burton says.

The Sierra Club is far from alone. Across the state, I met organizers from a wide range of green groups tapping into environmental concerns to get people to the polls. In a 2023 poll by The Nature Conservancy-PA, a whopping 86 percent of Pennsylvania union households say addressing climate change is a priority. Even the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA) finds that their members are eager to hear how Harris and Walz will secure well-paid union jobs while building the green energy economy. People are hosting block parties, knocking on doors, and doing everything else they can think of to reach voters in the state.

The message can seem out of sync with the Harris-Walz campaign, which has emphasized an “all-of-the above” energy strategy and made clear its opposition to a national fracking ban—things that are largely anathema to many of these same voters. But that’s all the more reason to show up, says Maria Andrews, movement politics director with Pennsylvania Stands Up, a group working with low-income BIPOC communities across the state and mobilizing a massive get out the vote effort.

“If Trump wins, he’s made it clear he will do the bidding of fossil fuel corporations and billionaires,” Andrews says.  “If Harris wins, we can better organize for more,” she says.

In Pittsburgh, I went to a block party organized by Black Voters Matter, the ACLU, and the NAACP, part of a “Climate Revival Tour.”  The smell of barbecue filled the air and DJ QRX played dance music, as Jacquea Mae and Lauren Lynch-Novakovic sat contentedly beneath a shade canopy. They told me of dangerously polluted air in their neighborhoods, and how that intersects with the need for civil and women’s rights. Mae had already proudly cast her ballot for Harris. Lynch-Novakovic hadn’t yet—she longs for more action for peace in Gaza and the Middle East. But in the end, Lynch-Novakovic says, she’ll vote for Harris, finding the alternative just too unthinkable.

Grammy-nominated recording artist and actor Antonique Smith—she played Mimi in the original production of Rent—took the stage. “I implore you to vote on climate,” Smith says. “It’s voting for love. Because loving your neighbor as yourself [means] we don’t want pollution in our neighborhoods and we don’t want it in anyone else’s,” and it is this same fossil fuel pollution, she stresses, which is also causing the climate to change. She then sang “a love song to the earth.”

Then Reverend Lennox Yearwood, Jr., President and CEO of the Hip Hop Caucus, joined Smith, wearing a silver sequined blazer that complimented her shirt and shoes. Smith and Yearwood formed Climate Revival with the goal of mobilizing Black faith communities and getting out the environmental vote. Yearwood dismissed the promise of jobs made by the fossil fuel industry. Fracking accounts for barely 0.32 percent of jobs in Pennsylvania, and Yearwood was quick to point out how the Biden-Harris administration had made the nation’s largest-ever investments in climate action and environmental justice. “How do we fix climate change?” he asks the crowd. “It’s to vote. That’s the first solution.”

Over 300 miles away in Philadelphia, Jason Shedlock, Regional Organizer and Secretary Treasurer of Laborers’ Local 327 and president of the Maine Building Trades Council, wears a hunk of coal attached to a chain around his neck. A descendant of coal miners, his great grandfather died in a cave-in and a grandfather died from black lung. “This is really personal for me,” he says.

He’s in Philly to canvas with hundreds of other LIUNA members as part of the AFL-CIO’s get out the vote effort. The AFL-CIO is part of the Blue-Green Alliance, uniting labor and environmental groups across Pennsylvania and the nation. LIUNA supports “all of the above” energy, but its members also know better than to be left behind. As they go door-to-door talking to their own members and workers from a broader AFL-CIO labor list, they describe how Trump promised an infrastructure bill for five years, but it was Biden and Harris who made the single largest investment in infrastructure in US history and delivered on jobs. Shedlock likes to stress that Biden and Harris are closing the huge wage gap that has existed between the pay to build a pipeline and the pay to construct a wind farm. “These folks don’t need to be environmentalists,” Shedlock says. When they are offered pay that enables them to provide for their families and policy that supports their union, “they start to like wind and solar quite a bit,” he adds.

Beth Ahearn also came from Maine, where she’d been the state political director of the Maine League of Conservation Voters. As we walked through a quiet neighborhood in Downington, a borough in Chester County about 30 miles west of Philly, she knocked on doors and was greeted warmly by several residents, some with children on their hip. If they had not yet voted for Harris, Ahearn made sure they had a plan to do so.

So perhaps it is no surprise that of late, Harris has begun to insert more pro-climate messaging in her speech, recently telling voters in Pennsylvania, “I love GenZ, these young leaders, they’re clear eyed, they’ve only known the climate crisis… they’re so wonderfully impatient…They’re ready to get in there. Let’s invest in them!”