Group gets out the green vote

Nearly half a million people in Georgia consider climate change their top concern but never cast a ballot on this issue or any other, said Nathaniel Stinnett, founder of the Environmental Voter Project, which aims to rectify that situation. 

“We find environmentalists who don’t vote and we turn them into better voters,” Stinnett said.

Begun in Boston in 2015, the nonpartisan, non-profit Environmental Voting Project now operates in 19 states. Early on, Stinnett set his sights on Georgia as a state where there were “a whole bunch of non-voting environmentalists.” 

“Slowly but surely, we’ve been mobilizing voters in local, state and federal elections in Georgia since then, using every little election as an opportunity to change people’s behavior,” Stinnett said. 

One example: Savannah’s mayoral race in 2023. 

“So we identified 10,375 registered voters in Savannah who are likely to list climate as a top priority but were unlikely to vote in last fall’s mayoral election. And so we sent them digital ads, we sent them direct mail; our volunteers called them.” 

Voter records later revealed that 13.1% of those targeted non-voting environmentalists voted in that election. EVP compared that result to the voter records of another 3,006 non-voting environmentalists it had identified but not spoken to. In that group, 8.1% voted. The difference in results was statistically significant, Stinnett said. 

The group targets low propensity voters who have at least an 85% likelihood of listing climate as their top priority. Non-voters are easy to identify. While who you vote for is secret, whether you vote and in which elections is public record, available from the Georgia Secretary of State’s office. 

Finding the 4% to 9% of nonvoters who are likely to prioritize climate and the environment over all other issues is more difficult. Stinnett and his colleagues conduct polls and mine publicly available data to create profiles of likely climate voters. They may not be who you think. Demographically, they are likely to be young or old people, especially older women; Black, Native American and Asian American/Pacific Islanders; and lower income people.

It’s often people who have been most directly affected by climate change or pollution.

“I think we’re conditioned to think that climate change is kind of a luxury issue that white wealthy voters worry about, but no one else. But that’s not the case,” Stinnett said. “It’s disproportionately young people, people of color, and even lower income people who are more likely to list climate and environmental issues as a top priority. And that’s certainly the case in Georgia.”

Once it identifies these people, the EVP is laser-focused on getting them to the polls.

“We do not endorse candidates, we do not lobby for particular policies,” Stinnett said. “We don’t even –  as weird as it might sound – try to get people to care more about climate or the environment. In fact, a good way to think of us is, we’re not in the mind changing or opinion changing business at all. Instead, we are solely focused on finding people who don’t need their minds changed. We want to find the people who care so deeply about climate and the environment, it’s their number one priority, yet they aren’t voting, so that we can then make a purely behavioral intervention and turn them into better voters.”

Environmental Voter Project volunteers appeal to social norms to nudge people to the voter booth, like pointing out how many other people on their block voted in the last election.

“Peer pressure works,” Stinnett said. “It’s juvenile, but it works.”

So does appealing to people’s better angels. 

“So what do door-to-door canvassers often do? They ask people are you going to vote or not? And the interesting thing is, even if you’re an awful voter, you’ll probably say, ‘Oh, yeah, of course I’m gonna vote.’ And that’s like a trap being closed on you. Because then what we can do is right before the election, call you up and say, ‘Hey, I just want to remind you, you know, back in April, you said that you were gonna vote. Tuesday is the election. That’s your opportunity to follow through on your promise. And we know what’s important to you is to be an honest person.’ And now, yeah, it’s a little aggressive. But you know, so is the climate crisis.” 

EVP’s over 7,000 volunteers around the country canvass, call and send postcards to these voters. The staff of five also places digital ads and sends direct mail.

Dan May, a volunteer with the Environmental Voting Project has organized postcard parties in Atlanta. He read off the typical message he and other volunteers print: “You know it’s important to be a good voter. Please make sure your friends and family are good voters, too!” 

No cursive is allowed because younger voters especially can’t always read it, said May, who taught college biology in the Atlanta area for 20 years. 

The cards May wrote were sent out to potential voters in Nevada for its primary elections earlier this year.

In Georgia this year, the Environmental Voter Project This year the project has identified 491,000 Georgians who are registered to vote, have a greater than 85% likelihood of listing climate as their top priority, yet are unlikely to vote this fall. 

Stinnett pointed out that just 11,780 votes separated the winner and loser in the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. 

But he’s looking beyond Nov. 5. to a long-term goal:

“That is to dramatically increase the number of environmentalists who start showing up in every election,” he said. “Because the embarrassing truth that most of us don’t want to admit to in the climate (movement) is that we don’t have nearly enough political power. We just don’t. There are far, far too few voters who list climate as a top priority, and until we start changing that, boy, is it going to be hard to expect politicians to lead on climate.”