HEATED - Lefty climate groups to endorse Harris
Hi all—Emily here. Sorry for the late email; I’m on West Coast time for the next few weeks. But I do have a little scoop for you, so I hope it’s worth it—I’m sure it’ll generate a lot of thoughts. A coalition of lefty green groups that had not publicly endorsed Joe Biden for president in 2024 are planning to formally endorse Kamala Harris on Wednesday, HEATED has learned. The groups—part of the more upstart, agitator wing of the national environmental movement—include the political arms of Friends of the Earth, the Center for Biological Diversity, Food and Water Watch, and Clean Water Action. Climate Hawks Vote, a California-based PAC that aims to elect outspoken climate leaders, will also endorse the sitting vice president, marking the first presidential endorsement in the organization’s 10-year history. Harris has already received endorsements from the so-called “Big Green” groups—the political arms of the League of Conservation Voters, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, and Clean Energy for America. But those weren’t much of a surprise, as each group had already backed Biden’s re-election bid, and are traditionally loyal to Democratic Party politicians. The groups endorsing Harris on Wednesday, however, had so far held off on throwing their support behind Biden while he was running for re-election—in part because of the sitting president’s mixed record on climate policy. “It was very much a debate” on whether to endorse Biden, said one of the group’s staffers, who spoke on background because the Harris announcement is not yet public. But with Harris, the calculus has changed. “Because of her work in California and when she was a senator—a lot of us worked with her on creating the Environmental Justice for All Act—it gives us hope,” the staffer said. “She’s just a different person [than Biden], and has a stronger track record.” Harris still lacks a climate policy platformStill, it’s unclear how exactly Harris would be different from Biden when it comes to climate policy, because her campaign has not yet released an official climate policy platform. On a call with the lefty green groups last week, campaign staffers said they likely wouldn’t have time to develop and release a robust climate platform before the Democratic National Convention next month, due to the unprecedented and accelerated nature of Harris’s candidacy, according to two people with direct knowledge of the call. In lieu of that platform, climate activists are relying in part on Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign rhetoric to guide their ideas of what a Harris presidency would look like. While running for president in 2020, her platform included a $10 trillion climate plan, a carbon tax, and a pledge to ban fracking. Related: Why some activists believe Harris will be more aggressive on climate than Biden. But it may be unwise to assume that Harris supports the same policies today as she did four years ago. On Sunday, her campaign told Politico that she no longer stands behind her 2020 fracking pledge. “She would not ban fracking,” a campaign spokesperson told the outlet. Because of that switch-up—and Harris’s lack of a concrete climate platform this accelerated election cycle—some activists are concerned about how effectively they can campaign for Harris once the endorsements go out. “We can’t knock on someone’s door and say, ‘Vote for this person,’ and not be able to tell them what their climate platform is,” one environmental justice activist told me. “That’s not going to be a great interaction.” Indeed, Harris’s lack of a policy platform may be one reason why other environmental organizations are still holding off on endorsing the vice president. On Tuesday, Politico reported that several California environmental justice groups—including California Environmental Justice Alliance, Asian Pacific Environmental Network, and Communities for a Better Environment—have so far stayed quiet about Harris’s candidacy. The youth-led Sunrise Movement, which made waves for publicly withholding its endorsement of Biden this election cycle, has also not yet endorsed Harris. In fact, in a letter to the Harris campaign last week, the group explicitly called on the vice president to release a policy platform that promotes “a strong vision to make the economy work for everyday people and ensure a livable future for us all.” Further reading:
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