Concern about climate change has surged to record levels over the past year. Yet anti-science operatives funded by the fossil-fuel industry still relentlessly spread misinformation; the recent video “Why Climate Change Is Fake News” has drawn 10 million views on Facebook. And as his administration systematically rolls back environmental regulations, Trump seems to like stoking distrust of the scientific establishment. It is no surprise, then, that political affiliation continues to shape belief: 86 percent of Democrats believe the climate is changing, compared with 52 percent of Republicans, according to a University of Chicago/AP poll released last week.

Read: They’re here to fix climate change! They’re college Republicans.

What’s happening to water around the nation, however, permits no alternative claims: the piles of stinking algae and rotting fish heaped up on both coasts of Florida last year. The hundreds of thousands of gallons of raw sewage and hog waste that swirled in the North Carolina floodwaters after Hurricane Florence. The chalky walls—now too large to be called bathtub rings—exposed as Arizona’s Lake Mead drops to record-low levels.

Like DeSantis, Arizona’s Republican Governor Doug Ducey focused on water in his first major address of the new year—without using the words climate change. During his reelection campaign, water was “one of the issues I was asked about most by real people,” he said. Noting that Arizona faces a January 31 deadline to figure out how to reallocate its dwindling portion of the Colorado River, Ducey urged the legislature to see beyond politics and partisanship to “do the things that matter and secure Arizona’s future.”

“At the top of that list,” he said, is “securing our water future.”

It was the same in Idaho, where newly elected Republican Governor Brad Little devoted part of his State of the State speech to “Idaho’s lifeblood”—water—spotlighting the once arcane issue of Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer replenishment.

These red-state GOP governors are not taking aim at greenhouse-gas emissions like their blue-state Republican counterparts Governors Larry Hogan of Maryland, Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, and Phil Scott of Vermont. Still, environmentalists should not dismiss their momentum on water. In several states won by Trump, water, literally a chemical bond, is also proving a bond that brings disparate people, groups, and political parties together around shared concerns for the Everglades, the Great Lakes, the Colorado River, and other liquid life systems. “We have this phenomenon where one of the ways to work on climate change without triggering the cultural wars is to work on water,” says John Fleck, the director of the University of New Mexico Water Resources Program, who researches the Colorado River and solutions to water scarcity.