2016 Climate debate for 2016: 'Job-killing' Democrats vs. 'backward' GOP Republicans are banking on the new EPA rules hurting hopefuls like Hillary Clinton. But Democrats are embracing them.

The long-term success of President Barack Obama’s new climate regulation probably depends on a Democrat like Hillary Clinton winning the White House — but it’s not at all clear the rule will help the party’s chances in 2016.

The tougher coal standards Obama announced Monday will force major adjustments to power companies in Michigan, Ohio and parts of Pennsylvania — the battleground states Democrats usually need to win the White House. That gives conservatives ample ammunition to insist once again that Democratic leadership will drive up energy prices and wipe out thousands of jobs, a theme that contributed to big losses for the president’s party in the last two midterm elections.


Still, Democrats insist that embracing Obama’s climate agenda is a winning message for 2016, including with key voting blocs like Hispanics, and they say it offers another opportunity to paint the GOP as anti-science and beholden to corporate polluters. Clinton did exactly that this weekend, when she praised the climate rule while vowing to defend it from “Republican doubters and defeatists.” In turn, the Republican National Committee attacked Clinton on Monday for supporting “yet another job-killing Obama policy.”

Clinton is pushing the climate argument as part of an effort to portray Republican views as backward, a storyline that also encompasses women’s health, relations with Cuba and resistance to the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage ruling, a campaign official told POLITICO. “The issue works in terms of painting out a larger narrative around the Republican Party as being out of step and out of touch,” the official said.

Clinton “will continue to invoke and defend the president’s proposal over the course of the campaign,” the official said. “We think that’s a good issue not just in the upcoming primary audience but among the general electorate.”

It’s a turnaround from the 2012 presidential campaign, when Obama rarely even mentioned climate change. Recent polling showing that voters care about the issue — paired with interest from powerful Democratic donors like green billionaire Tom Steyer — and have helped convince liberals they should embrace it.

The stakes in 2016 are especially high for the success of Obama’s power plant rule because of the way he’s carrying it out — by issuing a set of EPA regulations rather than by enacting a law like the Affordable Care Act. That strategy allowed Obama to get around certain defeat in the GOP-led Congress, but raises the risk of a possible Republican president hobbling and potentially dismantling the regulations.

Both parties quickly started seizing political turf on the issue Monday, as Republican Ohio Gov. John Kasich vowed to resist the climate rule and Sens. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) labeled Obama’s plan a threat to senior citizens and minorities.

“Our seniors will be forced to choose between medical care and meals while paying for a multibillion dollar rule that has no measurable impact on global warming,” Inhofe said in a statement, arguing that it could carry weight with retiree voters. He also contended that the costs of the climate rule “will be most harmful to low-income and minority communities.”

A day earlier, GOP presidential contender Marco Rubio had warned that Obama’s rule could raise electric bills for customers like “a single mom in Tampa.”

Obama openly scoffed at some of those claims while announcing the rule Monday. “If you care about low-income minority communities, start protecting the air they breathe and stop trying to rob them of their health care,” he said.

Clinton and her Democratic primary rivals Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders all hailed the rule and even pledged to go beyond it. “It’s a good plan, and as president, I’d defend it,” Clinton said Sunday, adding, “We can and must go further.”

Some D.C. veterans doubt that climate change will matter to vast majorities of voters, but acknowledge it could sway some crucial states. “I’m just not convinced issues like this are going to be the things that drives the 2016 election,” said Jim Manley, a former adviser to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. “It might be important in a few states — like Ohio and Pennsylvania, for instance.”

Then again, Ohio and Pennsylvania may help decide the outcome of 2016.

Each party points to polling to back its case: Democrats cite surveys showing that strong majorities of voters, especially Hispanics and even many Republicans, think the climate threat is real and favor action to address it. But GOP leaders cite polls showing climate change is a low-priority issue, especially compared with the economy.

Manley said he thinks Clinton has little choice but to “hug the administration’s policies as close as possible” on the climate issue. “It’s a risk that she’s going to have to take if only because it’s an issue that’s important to a big segment of the base and to many donors as well.”

But it’s not a big risk for Clinton, argued former Rep. Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat who lost his reelection bid amid 2010’s tea party wave after voting for an Obama-supported cap-and-trade climate bill.

“The table is already set on that issue in these states,” he said, adding: “In the coal-producing parts of Virginia, Democrats are losing those coal-producing counties. And it’s not going to get any worse if Democrats continue to take the positions that they’ve been taking on climate change.”

Meanwhile, conservative candidates face perils on the climate issue too, said former Rep. Bob Inglis, a Republican who now advocates for a carbon tax: They risk being seen as “Neanderthal Republicans” if they refuse to acknowledge the scientific consensus on climate change and decline to offer their own plans for addressing it.

“It’s very important for conservative candidates to be careful in their messaging here,” Inglis said. “They have to say, ‘We don’t like their solution, but here is a better solution.’”

Inglis also likes to warn fellow Republicans that the divisions among the states aren’t set in stone. For instance, he notes, traditional coal states like Ohio and Pennsylvania are moving more heavily toward natural gas, a fuel whose share of the U.S. power supply is expected to continue growing despite the carbon limits in Obama’s plan.

Some coal-state Democrats say Clinton can sell her climate message more effectively in swing, coal-producing states if she talks about technologies to make both coal and natural gas cleaner — even though many greens regard “clean coal” as an oxymoron.

“If we take that approach, that’s how we best solve the climate challenge but create harmony between the coal and climate advocates,” said Jon Wood, president of CoalBlue Project, a coalition of pro-coal Democrats. “There’s no solution here without low-carbon coal.”

When Clinton rolled out her green-power strategy last month, her campaign said she would soon release a plan to “protect the health and retirement security of coalfield workers and their families and provide economic opportunities for those that kept the lights on and factories running for more than a century.” But Wood doubted that will satisfy voters in coal country.

Clinton’s coal proposal is “not harmful, it’s not a negative,” Wood said. “But I don’t think it’s going to be very satisfactory to a lot of people in Western Pennsylvania.”

Michelle Pautz, a political science professor at the University of Dayton, said Democrats should frame the climate rule “the way Obama did: as something that’s good for the economy,” which would generate jobs in wind and solar power and make power bills cheaper. “Environmental issues don’t poll as well in Ohio,” she said.

They can also try to appeal to the state’s large Catholic population by playing up Pope Francis’ urge to make climate action a moral imperative, Pautz said.

On the GOP side, supporters of aggressive federal climate action say polls point to a disconnect between Republican voters and candidates.

On Monday, for example, a poll commissioned by the League of Conservation Voters and the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund found that a plurality of Republican primary voters in New Hampshire and South Carolina believe climate change is happening, support limits on carbon pollution and to a lesser degree favor EPA setting “strict carbon dioxide limits on existing coal-fired power plants with a goal of reducing emissions significantly by the year 2030.” The Republican firm American Viewpoint conducted the survey in July, before Monday’s White House climate rule rollout.

Some Republican advisers acknowledge privately that the GOP is vulnerable to attacks on climate science. And while more hardline GOP candidates outright deny that the planet is warming, others like Rubio and fellow Floridian Jeb Bush have taken more complicated stances. Rubio has danced around the question of whether humans are one cause of climate change, while Bush has openly acknowledged that human activities play a role.

A few Republican donors even see room for the GOP to flip the script entirely by competing in 2016 as the greener party, wielding capitalism instead of government mandates as the solution to global warming.

One of those is Jay Faison, a Republican businessman who pledges to spend at least $175 million on an effort to get the GOP to take climate change seriously. He thinks the issue will loom larger in the general election.

“I believe you will see more and more Republicans embracing clean energy solutions that minimize Washington bureaucrats and maximize results from the greatest engine of prosperity and innovation the world has ever known,” Faison said by email.