ClimateVoices Featuring Nathaniel Stinnett

In this issue, I’m pleased to be talking to Nathaniel Stinnett , founder of the Environmental Voter Project , a nonpartisan nonprofit, with the mission to build environmental political power. Nathaniel has a decade of experience as a senior advisor, consultant, and trainer for political campaigns and issue-advocacy nonprofits. Since 2015, EVP has contacted 10.5 million unique environmental voters and helped convert almost 1.8 million of them into “super-voters.”

Hailed as a "visionary" by The New York Times, and dubbed "The Voting Guru" by Grist magazine, Stinnett is a frequent expert speaker on cutting-edge campaign techniques and the behavioral science behind getting people to vote. He has held a variety of senior leadership and campaign manager positions on U.S. Senate, Congressional, state, and mayoral campaigns, and he sits on the Board of Advisors for the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative . Formerly an attorney at the international law firm DLA Piper LLP, Stinnett holds a B.A. from Yale University and a J.D. from Boston College Law School.?

According to your research, 8 million environmentalists did not vote in the 2020 election and over 13 million sat out the 2022 midterm elections. How does EVP identify environmental voters?

Unfortunately, we can’t interview every, single American to find out which individuals care deeply about climate and the environment, so we take the next best approach: (1) we poll tens of thousands of registered voters, (2) we isolate the ones who tell us that “climate change” or “clean air, clean water, and the environment” is their top priority, (3) using publicly available voter file and consumer data, we then work with data scientists to learn as much as we can about these self-identified “climate-first” registered voters, (4) we start looking for patterns and correlations in the data so we can identify additional people who might prioritize climate & environment, and then finally (5) after lots of testing and refining, we build a “predictive model” where we assign a probabilistic score to every, single individual voter in a state, telling us how likely they are to list climate & the environment as their #1 priority. We’ve then repeated the process for a total of 19 states. In short, although we can’t talk to every American, we can build a highly accurate model that helps us predict which Americans have a greater than 85% likelihood of listing climate & environment as their top priority over all other issues – those are the “environmentalists” we target.

The final step is to then separate the voters from the non-voters, and we don’t need fancy data scientists for that. Who you vote for is secret, but whether you vote or not is public record, so we just cross-reference our identified environmentalists with public voter files and target the non-voting environmentalists for our voter-mobilization campaigns.

What is your theory about why that constituency of environmentalists do not vote consistently?

Well, this is a little harder to ascertain because when you ask people why they don’t vote, they often lie and tell you what they think is the most socially acceptable excuse for not voting (what pollsters refer to as “social desirability bias”). We can be sure of the following two things, though: (1) people who care deeply about climate/environment are disproportionately young and people of color, which are two groups that are always the target of voter suppression efforts (so it’s literally harder for them to vote than it is for other people), and (2) the climate movement is weirdly apolitical and that impacts our voting rates; for instance, when most people think about “addressing climate change,” they imagine changing their personal behavior (i.e., eating less meat or biking to work), whereas someone concerned about reproductive rights or mass shootings would never think that way — they understand that those issues are systemic, political problems that require systemic, political solutions — but we don’t think about the climate crisis in that way, so we’re less likely to seek political solutions. And Dear God does that need to change; the climate movement needs more political power, and we need it fast.

You’ve said the climate movement has a turnout problem and not a persuasion problem. Yet very few voters rank climate as one of their top three issues. How can those of us who already care about climate help expand the pool of environmental voters?

That’s right, very few voters list climate as their top priority, which in turn makes it easy for politicians to ignore climate change when they campaign, legislate, and govern. However, when we look at non-voters — the people who campaigns typically ignore — it turns out that millions of them do prioritize climate change. This is what I mean by the climate movement having a “turnout problem, rather than a persuasion problem.” We don’t need to convince millions of people to start caring about climate change; rather, we need to convince millions of already-persuaded, non-voting environmentalists to start voting. And, as frustrating as that sounds, it’s actually a big opportunity because it’s really hard to change people’s opinions, but it’s much easier to change their behavior and get them to start voting, largely because we can run messaging experiments and then look at public voter files to see which messages actually succeed and get people to vote.

So what can people do to get more environmentalists to vote? Well, first, you can volunteer for the Environmental Vote Project where our volunteers deliver proven turnout messaging to non-voting environmentalists every day! But you can also use your own social influence to encourage other environmentalists to vote. Behavioral science tells us that the best way to change other people’s actions is usually to leverage social norms that are important to them (i.e., taking advantage of their desire to be viewed as honest, or smart, or a good environmentalist). So whenever you’re posting on social media or talking to your peers, you should be a loud and proud environmental voter — make sure they know that being a voter is part of what defines being a good environmentalist or a good climate activist.?

In Big Tech, they call me a “shit stirrer” – and I love that nickname. What’s your moniker??

Oh, man. That’s a hard one. Someone once called me “A bomb-thrower in a Brooks Brothers blazer,” and I guess that’s kind of right. I’m preppy, and nerdy, and maybe the fiercest lefty you’ll ever meet.

Keep up with?ClimateVoices?– an online Q&A penned by leading climate thinkers and doers.?Follow ClimateVoice to stay in the loop when additional interviews are published monthly.

#climatevoices #sustainability #climateactivism #climateleadership #climatepolicy #climateaction #employeeactivism #corporateadvocacy #corporateinfluence

The opinions and views expressed in this interview are solely those of the individual(s) being interviewed. They may not reflect the views, policies, or positions of ClimateVoice, the employer(s) of the individual(s) being interviewed, nor of any other organizations with which the individual(s) being interviewed are affiliated. This interview is intended for informational purposes only and should not be interpreted as an endorsement or official statement on behalf of such employer(s) or organization(s).