But will a wet, hot, climate change-driven summer be enough to tilt the election in someone’s favor?
We know that climate-related issues can swing elections — clean air and water, cheap energy, and creating new high-paying jobs all poll exceptionally well. Voter interest tends to drop off, however, when these things are framed as climate issues. And on the darker flip side, the realities of living in a hotter world, including “unchecked migration, economic stagnation, and the loss of homeland,” are “precisely the kind of developments that have historically fomented authoritarian sentiments,” Justin Worland argued in Time earlier this year. Donald Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly proved eager to go toe-to-toe with President Joe Biden on things like clean energy, electric vehicles, and climate science.
But how much extreme weather events themselves could swing the November election is far less clear. Research suggests that even living through a traumatic event like a wildfire or hurricane isn’t necessarily enough to convert you into a climate voter. “Experience matters, but I don’t know that it matters in the way that people wishcast it to,” Matto Mildenberger, a political scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara who has studied the relationship between proximity to wildfires and pro-environmental voting, told me.
As Mildenberger explained, “In order to experience a wildfire or a heat wave or a flood and have that galvanize you into wanting to see more ambitious climate action, you’d have to experience and understand yourself as a victim of climate change.” For decades, fossil fuel interests have worked to undermine the scientific narrative and cast doubt on the links between extreme weather and climate, which is why even Republicans who experience disasters firsthand still “fall back onto stories about how there have always been wildfires, there have always been droughts.”
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In other words, this is not a chicken-or-egg enigma. How voters already think about climate change is what shapes their ensuing narratives about disasters. Peter Howe, a professor of geography at Utah State University who studies public perceptions of climate change, conducted a survey of research on behavioral outcomes in relation to extreme weather that reinforced this idea. He found that “extreme weather may reinforce opinions among people who are already worried about climate change, yet be misattributed or misperceived by those who are unconcerned.”
There is evidence that linking climate change with extreme weather could actually backfireat the ballot box for green-minded candidates. A 2022 study led by Rebecca Perlman, a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, found that Republicans who saw references to climate change after a wildfire became less likely to support an energy tax that would “protect against future wildfires and other natural disasters.” Concerningly, this pattern even showed up (albeit with “weaker and generally nonsignificant effects”) among Democrats and Independents, leading Perlman and her coauthor to suggest that “on the margin, attributing weather-related natural disasters to climate change may be a losing political proposition with voters.”
Perlman confirmed that she would be “surprised” if extreme summer weather had “much impact on voting at the national level” when I reached her via email. But that “doesn’t mean it will be precisely zero,” she went on.
Mildenberger made a similar point. Though a hurricane or a wildfire is unlikely to peel Republican voters away from Trump (and might even push some deeper into his arms), if you take a more regional lens, then you could “easily expect extreme weather events to reshape how people are prioritizing their vote, or their likelihood of volunteering, or how they’re talking to their friends and family about the current administration.”
But while hurricanes, droughts, wildfires, and heat waves can confirm Democratic priors and motivate liberals who wouldn’t otherwise have voted, Matthew Burgess, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, warned me against lumping all conservatives together as uniformly undisturbed. “Even deep red parts of Colorado get worried about drought and water scarcity,” he pointed out.
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Burgess’ research has found that Independents and liberal-to-moderate Republicans worry about climate change only slightly less than moderate-to-conservative liberals do; it’s conservative Republicans who are set far apart from the rest of the electorate, sometimes skewing results. In other words, while many studies look at extreme weather events and climate change attribution and frame the results as Republicans versus Democrats, the actual split in how voters interpret extreme weather events might be better framed as between the mostconservative Republicans and everyone else.
The bigger question, in Burgess’s mind, is whether extreme weather could ever rival issues like crime or inflation, which generally affect a greater portion of the electorate, for a place in voters’ hearts. “If you had a really big natural disaster that directly affects a broad swath of people, and whose link to climate change is really clear — that would be the type of thing I would expect to have an effect” on voters, Burgess said.
Admittedly, it’s scary to imagine what exactly that event might be. A massive wildfire season with smoke that blankets the entire country or breaks out in a place we don’t expect? Hurricanes that pummel both the East Coast and the West Coast? So much flooding that whirlpools appear in the streets of American cities? Or something we haven’t already experienced and maybe haven’t even anticipated?
If there were ever a summer to find out, it’d be this one. It’s another “hottest year ever” on Planet Earth, and even if Americans don’t ultimately vote like it, that truth will remain.
A person holds a giant penny at a mock funeral for the coin, which was discontinued in 2025, in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson
What good is a penny at this point? Penny candy is a thing of the past, and a modern-day penny-pincher wouldn’t get very far if this were their get-rich strategy.
(This newsletter, though, costs you less than a penny. Chip in if you can.)
U.S. mints no longer make pennies, a decision that saves taxpayers an estimated $56 million annually. When the U.S. Treasury Department announced the country would stop minting them, it marked the end of an era — sorta.
Though those pesky copper-colored coins remain in circulation, some businesses, both in Vermont and nationwide, have begun experiencing penny shortages.
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Enter H.837. The bill outlines a plan that could allow retailers to phase out the penny by rounding up or down cash transactions to the nearest nickel.
Other states, including Arizona and Indiana, have passed rounding legislation, and a handful of others are considering it. As written, Vermont’s bill wouldn’t require rounding, a similar approach favored in other jurisdictions.
Some Vermont businesses have already adopted rounding. But lobbyists for Vermont businesses say some of their members fear the practice — without explicit state blessing — could open a business up to a lawsuit over alleged unfair and deceptive practices.
Worried or not, rounding will likely become more necessary as pennies get harder to find, Maggie Lenz, a lobbyist for the Vermont Retail and Grocers Association, told the House Commerce and Economic Development Committee Tuesday. She encouraged the state to create a rounding framework, but discouraged lawmakers from making such a program mandatory.
Rep. Tony Micklus, R-Milton, agreed that rounding should be optional, but said the state should mandate a specific rounding framework for the businesses that choose to round.
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H.837’s approach, which would round down totals ending in 1,2,6 and 7 cents, and round up totals ending in 3, 4, 8 and 9 cents, would seem to be the fairest to consumers and businesses, those who testified agreed.
But the change is likely not net neutral. Zachary Tomanelli, a consumer protection advocate for the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, cited a Federal Reserve study that indicated rounding could cost consumers $6 million annually nationwide. That’s because businesses price goods in ways that tend to lead to rounding up.
He called the cost modest and said he generally supported the bill.
Despite H.837 not making it past the crossover deadlines, there’s still hope that pennies might make it into Vermont’s currency cemetery. Rep. Michael Marcotte, R-Coventry, the commerce committee’s chair, said his committee could stick the rounding legislation in the Senate’s economic development bill.
That said, you might not want to ditch your pennies quite yet.
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In the know
Here are some numbers for you: Between 2012 and 2022, Vermont’s primary care workforce declined by 13%. In that same time period, the specialist workforce grew by 23%. That’s according to testimony Jessa Barnard, with the Vermont Medical Society, gave to lawmakers in the House Health Care Committee Tuesday. She said the numbers are reflective of a trend in medicine nationwide, attributed to the fact that primary care docs often make less but pay the same high cost for medical school as their peers in more specialized roles.
In Vermont, Barnard said that this widening gap is leading to a particularly acute shortage. According to a report her organization put out in 2022, the state needs 115 primary care providers to meet the national benchmark for our population size. That figure includes OBGYNs, pediatricians and family medicine docs. By 2030, as our state’s population grows even older, the Vermont Medical Society expects the state to need 370 more primary care physicians to meet the national benchmark.
— Olivia Gieger
Sen. Alison Clarkson, D-Windsor, spoke with members of the House Commerce and Economic Development Committee Tuesday afternoon about S.327, an economic development bill that supports a number of public resources for business owners across the state.
The bill has had a tough go of it so far.
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Clarkson handed out copies of what she referred to as “the actual bill,” which meant the package voted out by her own Senate Economic Development Committee before being “pretty much fully gutted” on its way through the Senate Appropriations Committee.
In a tight budget year, she said, this bill’s focus was on “supporting what works really well” for Vermont businesses. For Clarkson, that means continuing to invest in the initiatives like the Vermont Economic Growth Incentive program, a set of grants to help businesses expand in the state, which is scheduled to end in January. The Senate, she pointed out, has voted to extend the program for several years in a row, most recently through S.327.
“I am charging the House with doing the same thing,” she said.
Clarkson is also in favor of deepening the state’s relationships with outside investors by funding state delegates abroad. Vermont, she argued, should have more well-placed representation in areas like Québec — which this bill would provide for — and in the future Taiwan, which recently pledged to invest heavily in U.S. tech industries.
“We need somebody whose hand is up saying ‘yes, over here!’” Clarkson said.
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House commerce members met informally with a delegation from Taipei later Tuesday.
— Theo Wells-Spackman
On the move
The Senate advanced a bill Tuesday that would allow parents in Essex County to pay tuition to send pre-K students to New Hampshire schools.
In Vermont’s most rural county, families struggle to access pre-K programs, at least on this side of the border.
But S.214, legislation originally proposed by Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale, D-Chittenden Southeast, would allow for a handful of families near the New Hampshire border in Essex County to tuition their pre-K-aged children to New Hampshire schools, Sen. Steve Heffernan, R-Addison, said on the Senate floor.
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Kindergarten through grade 12 are already able to tuition to New Hampshire schools.
The Senate will need to vote on the bill once more before sending it to the House.
Vermont and the federal government faced off Monday over the state’s first-in-the nation law aimed at forcing polluters to pay for the effects of climate change with the Trump administration warning it would spur “the type of chaos that the Constitution is designed to prevent.”
The hearing before Judge Mary Kay Lanthier of the U.S. District Court for the District of Vermont comes as the administration has unleashed a broad assault on state-based climate efforts, including suing to invalidate the Vermont law establishing a “climate superfund” to recoup money from the oil and gas industry.
The Biden appointee did not tip her hand, pressing attorneys for the state and the federal government over whether the state is within its rights or stepping on federal authority. The administration is challenging a similar law in New York, and a ruling against Vermont would likely jeopardize that law and chill efforts in other states to adopt climate superfunds.
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Vermont argued the law — “a modest action” — was passed by state lawmakers in 2024 to help raise money to deal with climate change.
RUTLAND, Vt. (WCAX) – Attorneys defended Vermont’s landmark climate superfund law on Monday, as it faces a lawsuit filed by the Trump administration.
Vermont lawmakers passed the Climate Superfund Act in 2024 after devastating flooding in 2023 and other extreme weather events.
The law requires certain large fossil fuel companies to help cover the costs of climate-related damage linked to their emissions between 1995 and 2024.
It is being challenged by the federal government, along with the American Petroleum Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and attorneys general from 24 Republican-led states.
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They argue Vermont is overstepping and that climate policy should be handled at the federal level.
Attorneys for Vermont and environmental groups asked a federal judge in Rutland to dismiss those challenges, arguing the state has the right to hold companies accountable.
“It was an intense and technical day of legal arguments over whether the Climate Superfund Act passes muster under federal law, and whether it is appropriate under our Constitution and other doctrines, and is going to survive this series of lawsuits that have been filed against it,” said Christophe Courchesne of the Vermont Law and Graduate School.
Vermont was the first state to pass a law like this. New York followed, and more than 10 other states are considering similar measures.
This case could help decide whether those laws move forward.
