Republican New Jersey governor and presidential hopeful Chris Christie briefly made news last week when he said that global warming is real and that “human activity contributes to it.”

Yet as a whole, climate change has yet to emerge as a major issue in U.S. presidential elections, which is consistent with the recent history.

In 2012, neither President Obama nor Mitt Romney talked much about it on the campaign trail. Climate change also did not come up during the presidential and vice presidential debates for the first time since 1984. And according to an analysis by Media Matters, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and Fox collectively spent less than one hour talking about climate change as part of their coverage of the 2012 campaign (MSNBC spent about three hours).

Will the 2016 election be different? Will climate change emerge as an important issue for either voters or the candidates?

Of two minds

Public opinion surveys suggest that Americans are more likely to vote for a candidate who supports policy action on climate change. And recent research from the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication suggests that this is particularly true of younger voters, Latinos, African-Americans, and unmarried women—groups that comprise a growing proportion of the U.S. electorate.