Addendum on electoral strategy

Part of what motivated me to do the breakdown of legislators below is that I feel like there's been less strategic thinking by the environmental movement about this sort of thing than I would expect. Possibly I just haven't been exposed to it enough - I didn't come to the climate problem out of interest in environmentalism, but out of interest in international relations and negotiation, and my interest in domestic politics is a secondary effect of the fact that domestic politics constrain international negotiation - but I haven't noticed a lot of it floating around.

By contrast, the other side is certainly doing this, and at an even more fine-grained level. I'm currently reading Eric Pooley's The Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to Save the Earth. Pooley describes the strategy of the Information Council on the Environment (ICE - see what they did there?), an organization involved in the anti-climate-action movement:

The ICE's goal, according to a strategy paper written by its pollster, was to 'reposition global warming as a theory (not fact)' by targeting 'older, less-educated males' and 'younger, lower-income women' in congressional districts that get their electricity from coal.

Fundamentally, getting a favorable vote on something controversial is a question of pulling together enough votes, and you do it in the context of a terrain of interests which influence which votes are easiest and hardest to move. Outside actors trying to move votes do best, I think, if they're responsive to the terrain they're working in. But it's not my impression that the environmental movement has gamed this out very much - perhaps because they don't see this as a strategic interaction but rather as a morally driven effort to disseminate the truth. From that point of view, truth is truth whether your district produces a lot of coal or not.

There may indeed be something to be said for that attitude. But I think the environmental movement is at this point losing the information war regarding climate change, and I wonder how much of that is due to facing more strategic approaches from the other side.