My initial reaction, admittedly light on evidence, is that the numbers you present are at least partially due to selection bias. You’ve picked a set of issues, like climate change, that are not representative of the entire scope of “environmentalism.” It shouldn’t surprise anybody that “worry about global warming” is a blue issue, but the much more conservative-y “land use,” “protection of fish and wildlife” and “conservation,” issues for whatever reason are often not measured. In short, it feels a little to me that your actual argument is that liberal-coded environmental issues are partisan.
More than half of state wildlife conservation funding comes from hunting licenses and firearms taxes. I assure you, these fees mostly come from republicans in republican states. Here is some polling done in the west on environmental issues. It shouldn’t be a surprise that republican voters in Wyoming and rural Colorado care a lot about the environment, but one shouldn’t expect them to think about the issues in the same way as latte drinking knowledge workers in coastal cities.
It also might interest some to read how Nixon talked about the environment. This message to congress about founding the EPA in 1972 has some interesting passage, including the following:
PROTECTING OUR NATURAL HERITAGE
Wild places and wild things constitute a treasure to be cherished and protected for all time. The pleasure and refreshment which they give man confirm their value to society. More importantly perhaps, the wonder, beauty, and elemental force in which the least of them share suggest a higher right to exist—not granted them by man and not his to take away. In environmental policy as anywhere else we cannot deal in absolutes. Yet we can at least give considerations like these more relative weight in the seventies, and become a more civilized people in a healthier land because of it.
I’ve paid attention to politics for a long time, but I’ve never heard a democrat talk like this about the environment. Just this one paragraph contains three progressive blasphemies, nearly one per sentence:
The idea that the environment belongs in any way shape or form to a nation or a people (is our heritage)
The idea that the environment derives its value from the “pleasure and refreshment” they “give man”
The poll you linked indicates that Republicans in the Mountain West are more concerned with the environmental than Republicans in the rest of the country. There is a 27 p.p. partisan gap on the energy vs environment question (p. 17) - much less than the 55 p.p. partisan gap for the country as a whole. The partisan gap for whether “a public official’s position on conservation issues will be an important factor in determining their support” is 22 p.p. (p. 13), with clear majorities in both parties. Climate change is somewhat less of a concern than other issues, which I would guess is because it is more partisan, but not by that much (p. 21).
In the Mountain West, it looks like there is some partisanship for environmental issues, but only the amount we would expect for a generic issue in the US, or for environmentalism in another country. This is consistent with environmentalism being extremely partisan on average over the entire country. The Mountain West is less than a tenth of the country’s population and has an unusually impressive natural environment.
Environmentalism started to became partisan around 1990. Nixon & Reagan both spoke of the environment in these terms.
Actually, my read of the data is that the mountain west is not more environmentally conscious than the rest of the US.
The mountain west poll does not include national numbers, so I have no idea where your national comparisons are coming from. If I did, I’d check for same year/same question, but because I don’t know where they’re from I can’t.
The mountain west appears neither significantly more nor significantly less partisan on any of the climate change related questions than the rest of the US.
My main point, which I don’t think you’ve contradicted (even if I accept that the mountain west is unique), is that you’re making an argument about “environmentalism” partisanship by using primarily “climate change” polling data. The charts from the 2013 paper you’ve posted sort of confirm this take–climate change is obviously a uniquely partisan issue.
The intro to your sequence states the following:
The partisanship we see today is unusual, compared to other issues, other countries, or even the US in the 1980s.
Basically, I have not seen evidence that this is true for issues beyond climate change (or other countries!), and I think your sequence would benefit by explicitly comparing
the partisan split of non-climate-change environmental issues (e.g. rain forest protection) to
the partisan split of non-environmental issues (e.g. taxation)
Global warming is highly partisan, and the proposed solutions to it are extremely polarizing. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth is probably single-handedly responsible for shifting the GOP to deny it exists. The taint spread to other issues. A whiff of any environmentalism raises hackles that would not have been raised otherwise.
Environmentalists have used environmental laws that were initially bipartisan to throw wrenches into development favored by GOP.
Partisan sorting. Republicans who were concerned about the environment in 1990 are dead, changed positions, or are no longer Republicans, just like anti-abortion Democrats from 1990 are dead, changed positions, or are no longer Democrats.
My initial reaction, admittedly light on evidence, is that the numbers you present are at least partially due to selection bias. You’ve picked a set of issues, like climate change, that are not representative of the entire scope of “environmentalism.” It shouldn’t surprise anybody that “worry about global warming” is a blue issue, but the much more conservative-y “land use,” “protection of fish and wildlife” and “conservation,” issues for whatever reason are often not measured. In short, it feels a little to me that your actual argument is that liberal-coded environmental issues are partisan.
More than half of state wildlife conservation funding comes from hunting licenses and firearms taxes. I assure you, these fees mostly come from republicans in republican states. Here is some polling done in the west on environmental issues. It shouldn’t be a surprise that republican voters in Wyoming and rural Colorado care a lot about the environment, but one shouldn’t expect them to think about the issues in the same way as latte drinking knowledge workers in coastal cities.
It also might interest some to read how Nixon talked about the environment. This message to congress about founding the EPA in 1972 has some interesting passage, including the following:
I’ve paid attention to politics for a long time, but I’ve never heard a democrat talk like this about the environment. Just this one paragraph contains three progressive blasphemies, nearly one per sentence:
The idea that the environment belongs in any way shape or form to a nation or a people (is our heritage)
The idea that the environment derives its value from the “pleasure and refreshment” they “give man”
A higher right to exist not granted by man?????!
A lot of the emphasis is on climate change, which has become partisan than other environmental issues. But other environmental issues have become partisan as well. Here’s some data from a paper from 2013 by D.L. Guber, “A cooling climate for change? Party polarization and the politics of global warming.”
The poll you linked indicates that Republicans in the Mountain West are more concerned with the environmental than Republicans in the rest of the country. There is a 27 p.p. partisan gap on the energy vs environment question (p. 17) - much less than the 55 p.p. partisan gap for the country as a whole. The partisan gap for whether “a public official’s position on conservation issues will be an important factor in determining their support” is 22 p.p. (p. 13), with clear majorities in both parties. Climate change is somewhat less of a concern than other issues, which I would guess is because it is more partisan, but not by that much (p. 21).
In the Mountain West, it looks like there is some partisanship for environmental issues, but only the amount we would expect for a generic issue in the US, or for environmentalism in another country. This is consistent with environmentalism being extremely partisan on average over the entire country. The Mountain West is less than a tenth of the country’s population and has an unusually impressive natural environment.
Environmentalism started to became partisan around 1990. Nixon & Reagan both spoke of the environment in these terms.
Actually, my read of the data is that the mountain west is not more environmentally conscious than the rest of the US.
The mountain west poll does not include national numbers, so I have no idea where your national comparisons are coming from. If I did, I’d check for same year/same question, but because I don’t know where they’re from I can’t.
Take a look at this cool visualization of different state partisan splits from 2018: https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/partisan-maps-2018/
The mountain west appears neither significantly more nor significantly less partisan on any of the climate change related questions than the rest of the US.
My main point, which I don’t think you’ve contradicted (even if I accept that the mountain west is unique), is that you’re making an argument about “environmentalism” partisanship by using primarily “climate change” polling data. The charts from the 2013 paper you’ve posted sort of confirm this take–climate change is obviously a uniquely partisan issue.
The intro to your sequence states the following:
Basically, I have not seen evidence that this is true for issues beyond climate change (or other countries!), and I think your sequence would benefit by explicitly comparing
the partisan split of non-climate-change environmental issues (e.g. rain forest protection) to
the partisan split of non-environmental issues (e.g. taxation)
Several things are at work.
Global warming is highly partisan, and the proposed solutions to it are extremely polarizing. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth is probably single-handedly responsible for shifting the GOP to deny it exists. The taint spread to other issues. A whiff of any environmentalism raises hackles that would not have been raised otherwise.
Environmentalists have used environmental laws that were initially bipartisan to throw wrenches into development favored by GOP.
Partisan sorting. Republicans who were concerned about the environment in 1990 are dead, changed positions, or are no longer Republicans, just like anti-abortion Democrats from 1990 are dead, changed positions, or are no longer Democrats.