In Arizona, the 2020 Latino vote was decisive.

And this November, Arizona’s Latinos may be more motivated than ever by climate and clean energy issues, a new poll by the environmental justice organization Chispa AZ suggests. More than 70% of the poll’s 520 registered voter respondents expressed concern about climate change and 60% support Arizona increasing clean energy requirements for electric utilities.

Those views could make a difference, analysts say, in a state where fewer than 11,000 votes pushed President Joe Biden across the finish line in 2020 to beat incumbent Donald Trump and become the first Democrat to win the state since 1996. Only Georgia had a narrower margin in the popular vote count in that first matchup of this year’s presumptive presidential candidates.

A report by the University of California Los Angeles’s Latino Policy and Politics Initiative determined much of that 2020 nudge of Arizona’s political lever from red to blue came from high-density Latino precincts. That demographic has only grown in the state since, and nonpartisan voter registration efforts seek to further amplify the Latino voice.

Latinos are expected to cast more than 855,000 votes in Arizona this election cycle, according to the NALEO Educational Fund, a 57% increase over 2016 numbers. With the intervening eight years also bringing dozens of broken heat records, skyrocketing heat-associated deaths, worsened drought and higher energy demands to the state — all exacerbated by the heat-trapping influence of greenhouse gases emitted primarily by burning fossil fuels — that increase comes with a shift in priorities.

More for Latino voters: Latino voter campaign ramps up in battleground Arizona and Nevada

Polling ahead of the 2022 midterms by Univision in collaboration with Arizona State University and Northern Arizona University suggested that inflation, abortion, jobs and gun safety were top issues for Latino voters in Arizona the last time they headed for national polls. A majority of those surveyed favored liberal candidates’ solutions.

Now, following Arizona’s boom in solar installation jobs and escalating impacts of climate change like heat and asthma that disproportionately affect low-income and minority communities, the Chispa AZ poll indicates Arizona’s Latino vote may align even more with what Democrats are offering.

With Latinos making up nearly a quarter of expected voters in this key battleground state, that means the selection of the next leader of the free world could hinge on policies related to Arizona’s scorched and sunny climate.

Arizona’s Latino voters show strong support for climate and clean energy

Working with Embold Research, Chispa AZ advertised its 27-question poll in April to registered voters who live in Arizona and identify as Latino via text messages and social media posts. Of the 520 people who participated, 55% identified as Democrats, 32% as Republicans and 13% as Independents. A majority were between the ages of 18 and 34. The research was funded by donations to Chispa AZ, a 501(c)(4) branch of the League of Conservation Voters, and by pro-democracy groups, said Nuvia Enriquez, the organization’s communications director.

The primary motivation for the poll, Enriquez said, was to gauge awareness within this demographic about the actions and relevance of the Arizona Corporation Commission, the state’s five elected utility regulators who vote to approve new gas or renewable energy projects, set statewide goals for energy efficiency and clean electricity generation and determine incentives like the “value of solar,” or homeowner buyback rates for rooftop solar energy.

Regulators reconsider solar incentives: Corporation Commission reopens ‘value of solar’ rate discussions despite strong opposition

Only 36% of people surveyed indicated they were familiar with the ACC. After then reading short descriptions of the entity’s recent actions, a majority opposed regulators’ 2022 decision to halt a rule that would have required Arizona utilities to generate 15% of electricity from clean sources by 2025, their 2023 addition of a monthly charge to residential rooftop solar customers and recent rate increases at the state’s largest electricity provider.

These responses align with values Arizona Latinos expressed in answer to other poll questions, including 63% who view the state’s reliance on coal and gas as a serious problem, 63% who are concerned about pollution from electricity generation and 59% who feel the state is moving too slowly toward cleaner options like wind and solar.

When asked about specific energy sources, from 84% to 67% of people surveyed indicated support for rooftop solar, solar farms, hydroelectricity and wind farms, in that order. Support for fossil fuel-based energy sources was somewhat lower, with 64% to 34% of respondents indicating support for natural gas, nuclear plants, coal and methane (which is the main ingredient of natural gas — that distinction was left unclear in poll questions).

The poll’s strongest consensus was a 93% agreement that the rising cost of electricity is a serious problem. This is despite Arizona’s lower-than-average electricity costs compared to other states, according to recent data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Enriquez said the results will be used to inform Chispa AZ’s upcoming communication efforts, which she said will “continue as long as the (Arizona Corporation Commission) is making bad decisions.”

“A key aspect of this awareness campaign is to just make sure people know who is having power over their lives,” she said.

Who will voters give power over Arizona’s power sources?

This year’s presidential race will determine who has power over future power generation between two candidates who could arguably not be further apart on climate and clean energy issues. The same divide is true farther down the ballot.

Trump has repeatedly used the phrase “drill, baby drill” to affirm support for burning more of the fossil fuels scientists (and oil companies) have long understood to be causing rising average temperatures and costly drought, crop failures and wildfires, including at the Republican National Convention earlier this week.

The former president is also under investigation by the U.S. Senate Budget and Finance committees for alleged promises to oil companies to roll back environmental regulations and climate policies to streamline drilling access in exchange for $1 billion in donations to his campaign. His previous administration weakened at least 74 environmental protections, as tabulated by the nonpartisan research organization the Brookings Institution.

The Biden administration, on the other hand, has taken historic action on climate and environmental justice issues with the passage of the $369 billion Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022 which has brought more than $10 billion and 14,000 jobs to Arizona in climate and clean energy investments as of March, according to the research and advocacy organization Climate Power. While not all Arizonans support this priority in the White House, some youth groups in the state feel Biden could be doing even more to address the consequences of climate change that will impact them most.

Beyond that top race, the candidates running for the U.S. Senate seat left open by Sen. Kyrsten Synema, I-Ariz., also vastly differ on climate and energy issues.

Republican candidate Kari Lake has echoed Trump’s enthusiasm for drilling and cutting environmental safeguards while accepting large campaign donations from the oil and natural gas industries.

In contrast, her Democratic opponent, Rep. Ruben Gallego, voted for Biden’s IRA and lists the environment as a priority for his campaign, though his website does not spell out many details and his response to recent questions from The Arizona Republic about his top issues mentioned abortion and immigration but not climate or clean energy. Green party candidates Mike Norton and Eduardo Quintana were the only ones to mention climate in their responses to The Republic. Lake did not provide answers.

Both Lake and Gallego recently courted the Latino vote in Arizona with targeted campaign events, though Lake’s Latino-themed event did not appear to attract many Hispanics.

Democracy is a two-way street

With more than three months to go before election day and the Democratic presidential candidate not yet officially confirmed, a lot could still shift in what the world will see from Arizona voters, perhaps especially from the state’s Latino communities.

Stephen Nuno-Perez, a professor of politics and international affairs at Northern Arizona University who helped direct the polling with ASU and Univision ahead of the 2022 midterms, will track it closely. He plans to head into the field after the primary in late July to survey Latinos and perhaps also non-Latinos, depending on funding, about the issues most important to them.

Nuno-Perez is particularly interested in understanding how attitudes about climate change have evolved over the last two years. He told The Republic he was not surprised by the results of Chispa AZ’s poll and thinks unclean water, heat and asthma are consistent concerns for Arizona’s Latinos even if they don’t always associate them with a warming climate.

“One of the reasons we’re doing more survey work on climate change is because it’s an identifying issue for Democrats,” Nuno-Perez said. “It used to be immigration where the Democrats could say ‘Clearly we’re on your side, clearly we are different than Republicans.’ In the last four years, climate change and the environment has become one of those issues where Democrats can go to Latinos and say ‘We are the party for you.’”

Our latest energy investigation: In sunny Arizona, a relocated gas plant ignites questions over who profits and who pays

With Latinos now also broadly supporting abortion rights and working solar installation jobs, Nuno-Perez thinks this demographic could be heard in a big way in November, not because the system has done a better job of integrating and listening to them, but “more just the fact that there are more Latinos than there have been.”

“I think one of the things that makes Latinos so pivotal is that they’re an emerging group,” Nuno-Perez said. “Even though Arizona has a long relationship with Latinos in the United States and Latinos have been here before Arizona (was a state), it’s one of the groups that tends to be less engaged, largely because the system is less engaged with Latinos. Our democracy is not a one-way street.”

Joe Garcia, Chicanos Por La Causa’s director of public policy and leader of the nonpartisan organization’s “Get out the vote” campaign, aims to increase Latino engagement by going after “low propensity voters” to help get that traffic of the democratic process flowing in both directions so it can better address the needs of all Arizonans.

Speaking to The Republic from the Unidos Conference in Nevada, the other swing state where CPLC has launched a Latino voter registration campaign, Garcia said he views getting more Latinos to vote as part of Arizona’s “maturation process” toward becoming representative of its residents.

“You look at the state Legislature now, there are so many Latino-elected officials, whereas one time only a couple of decades ago, there’s just a couple,” he said.

CPLC’s nonpartisan efforts to register more Latino voters regardless of how they might vote could shake things up beyond what current polling of already-registered voters can predict. Garcia doesn’t think this would be because Latino communities diverge much culturally from white communities, but because they tend to be younger and to therefore align with the issues important to people who are not yet established and are more concerned about the future. That may be why the Latino vote, when activated, often buoys Democrats.

Read our climate series: The latest from Joan Meiners at azcentral on climate change

Like Chispa AZ, Garcia wants Arizona’s Latinos to be more informed about murkier governmental entities like the Arizona Corporation Commission, to talk about the issues and to feel less intimidated about the ballot. He acknowledged that many Latinos, and young people in general, are feeling disillusioned by the options for president, causing them to think “I’m not going to vote. I’ve seen this movie, and I don’t like either of them.”

That’s why he thinks it’s critical to raise awareness about down-ballot contests and propositions rather than focusing on individual candidates, which, as a nonpartisan organization, they avoid discussing anyway. With that approach, both parties will be forced to listen to what younger people want for their children and grandchildren, he said, which is important because issues like climate change “will be here for a long, long time.”

“The trick is not letting them become so jaded that they decide not to vote at all,” Garcia said. “That’s the danger.”

Joan Meiners is the climate news and storytelling reporter at The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. Before becoming a journalist, she completed a doctorate in ecology. Follow Joan on Twitter at @beecycles or email her at joan.meiners@arizonarepublic.com. Read more of her coverage at environment.azcentral.com.

Sign up for AZ Climate, The Republic’s weekly climate and environment newsletter.