Even the weather is now political

2023-01-12T16:22:50.783Z

To open the new year, CBS News conducted a poll with YouGov evaluating how Americans feel about a range of issues, largely centered on politics. Buried deep in that poll, though, is a remarkable demonstration of partisanship in a place you might not expect to find it: the weather.

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We are used to seeing broad partisan divides on heavily political issues, of course. Such divides appear in the CBS-YouGov poll as you would expect. Democrats, for example, are broadly positive about President Biden’s job performance. Republicans are broadly negative.

We’re also used to seeing this partisanship trickle out into less inherently political issues. The CBS-YouGov poll, for example, found that two-thirds of Democrats think the economy is getting better or, at least, not getting worse. This is to some extent a proxy for that Biden approval number, of course: If you assume that the president is largely responsible for how the economy is faring, you may be more inclined to view the economy as improving if your party controls the White House. And, the inverse: Republicans overwhelmingly say the economy is getting worse.

But notice the second question above. This isn’t really a measure of how things are going generally; instead, the pollsters asked people to compare their own situations relative to last year. Here, too, we see a wide partisan divide. Democrats say that their own situations are holding steady while Republicans say theirs are getting worse.

This isn’t impossible, of course. There could be actual differences that are manifesting here as a partisan split. But there are lots of other measures in which we see partisanship affecting how people view the economy. The University of Michigan’s consumer confidence index, for example, quite famously shows that partisan perceptions of the economy are linked to the occupant of the White House.

I have another favorite example, though. In early 2018, after the Republican majority in Congress passed a sweeping tax-cut bill, Fox News asked Americans if they had seen any benefit from the legislation. Democrats and independents said they hadn’t. Republicans said they had.

Unsurprisingly, the CBS-YouGov poll found that Democrats are more optimistic about the economy than Republicans, in keeping with the pattern above.

But the pollsters asked the same question about an even more nebulous concept: climate and extreme weather. Here, Republicans were more optimistic, by a 10-point margin, while Democrats were more pessimistic by 12.

You know what’s happening here, of course. The question is a proxy for views of climate change. And polling, as from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, has shown not only that there’s a wide gap between the most fervent partisans on questions of climate change but that the gap has been growing — largely because liberal Democrats are more likely to embrace positions that treat climate change as a serious, addressable problem.

Notice the second graph there: Democrats are also more likely to think that global warming is affecting the United States. This, again, isn’t surprising: If you think that climate change is a real threat and if you heed observations about what its predicted effects are, you’re more likely to think that those effects have already arrived.

And so we get to the particularly fascinating bit of the CBS-YouGov poll (as spotted first by CNN’s Ariel Edwards-Levy): Democrats are more likely to say they’ve seen extreme weather in their area than are Republicans.

The gaps here are wide. Democrats are 20 points more likely to say they have seen some; Republicans 26 points more likely to say they haven’t.

Again, there could be nonpolitical reasons for this. Democrats may be more likely to live in California or other places where severe weather has been worse. But given examples like the tax-cuts one from 2018 this, too, is probably a reflection of how partisans have been primed to observe the world around them. Or, at least, how they’ve been primed to answer questions about what they’ve observed.

One last salient point from the CBS-YouGov poll: Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to say that addressing climate change should be a priority for Congress.

Not surprising, given everything above. But a nonetheless useful reinforcement of the idea here: Weather itself is now political.