Politicians Can Win Elections with Climate Lessons from experience

Introduction The stories that follow were shared with CCL on the November 2013 International Call by Eric Sapp, who has spent most of his career working at the intersection of faith and politics. A recording of the call, in its entirety, is available on our website. These stories focus on how Democrats have won elections by reaching out to Evangelical Christians, a Republican-leaning constituency, and the faith based community at large. The lesson is clear: Democrats who stand up for the climate can win Evangelicals to their camp, and Republicans who stand up for the climate can keep them in their camp. There is substantial upside at no electoral cost. Everyone, therefore, should be advocating for strong action on moral grounds to fix the climate.

About Eric Sapp: Eric Sapp, a native of Durham, NC, was Senior Partner at Common Good Strategies (CGS) prior to co-founding Eleison Group. CGS received significant national attention following the ’06 election cycle for its groundbreaking faith outreach and messaging work for the DSCC, Senators Casey and Brown, Governors Strickland, Granholm, and Sebelius, Rep. Shuler, and the , Kansas, and Oregon State Democratic Parties. CGS clients significantly out-performed Democrats nationally (normally by double-digits) with Protestants, Evangelicals, Catholics, and weekly churchgoers. Dr. John Green, Sr. Fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, said about CGS’s work that “if Democrats learn a lesson from ’06 and are able to duplicate these efforts more widely…we could potentially see historic shifts in voting blocks that would dramatically change the relationship between faith and politics in this country.” Eric has been a regular speaker on faith and politics on television and radio shows, most often providing a Democratic perspective on conservative programs. Eric’s background also includes stints with Representative David Price (D-NC), where he handled faith and politics, budget, tax, and homeland security issues. Before that, he worked for Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. He has his masters of divinity and public policy from Duke University, and now lives in Northern Virginia with his high school sweetheart and his son Beckett.

*The following transcript has been modified slightly. It was modified to make it more readable without changing the meaning.

ERIC SAPP BACKGROUND: I am a Christian, an Evangelical Christian. I got into the work that I have been doing because I was worried about what I saw happening to the Christian witnesses. It became entirely lined up with the ideology of a single party. Our work and my entrance into climate, after the 2004 elections, after we did basically all of the democratic faith outreach work in that following cycle, ‘05 and ’06; What we found was that climate was our best way into all these churches that Democrats had honestly never spoken to previously. We had no relationships with Evangelical Christians. As everybody knows the “god gap year” in 2004, the best indication that someone was going to vote for Bush, was not that they were Republican but was that they went to church on a regular basis. That’s what got Democrats' attention, but this happened because Democrats had not been talking to them. We were trying to build relationships in ‘06, and very quickly realized there was a point that we could connect on with climate, what became “creation care”, environmental stewardship. Connecting there opened doors, started to build relationships. As officials and national leaders started to talk about climate they changed some of the voting dynamics, because the voters who were told that the only issues that mattered were abortion and gay marriage were now being told by their leaders, top leaders in the Catholic Church, National Association of the Evangelical, major pastors, Rick Warren, even Pat Robertson saying that climate change is a vital issue that Christians needed to care about. That had opened the door for a broader discussion. Now, why does this matter? Some of the stats, the reason that this community is important to this debate and how they can be helpful in all that we’re trying to do for climate is: Just about 30 percent of voters are Evangelical Christians. A quarter identifies as Catholic, another 18 will self identify as mainstream Protestant. All of those people, as well as all people are more than their faith, but their faith oftentimes heavily influences how they view themselves and how they view the world. Being able to connect with them through that faith is vitally important. We have just completed some polling on how to engage faith folks. It has highlighted two very important points. Where a lot of us start is that the science is so overwhelming—and it’s like 98-99 percent of scientists agree. We know the science is clear on climate change and that is where a lot of us want to start. What we found at the

polling, that was so interesting, was that the top two arguments for the whole population, for people who are not religious and for religious people are all the same top two arguments. The science argument… the kind of 99 percent of science, and then the second argument being that we have a moral obligation to tackle climate change for other people. What was interesting about the call was that for non-religious people, the science argument was the most important. For religious people, that moral frame was most important, but for religious people the science argument was the second most important argument, and it worked when the entrée was the moral frame. So when you started in the faith community saying science, science, science and that’s it, you would not move people as far, but if you started with the moral argument, you met them where they were. The science argument worked very well and worked much more strongly, and when you combine those two arguments, those are arguments that persuade over 90 percent of Americans. Having done a lot of polling on a lot of different issues and our pollster too when he said this, “we never see numbers like that, where you only have two messages that are so simple and clear that have such a wide impact.” And so this is the opportunity and what is so exciting about where we are. Now, I will caveat, they work with all people, that doesn’t mean that saying those two things, everyone is going to say “ok, I’m a climate voter only and that’s all I care about,” but we will be able to bring them along on climate and these are people again, as Mark said in the beginning, who matter politically. A lot of the faith community, these will be swing voters, these are voters who can get in Republican circles in places where often we cannot and so that is the opportunity we have in engaging these communities and so I’m going to tell some stories now, just kind of explain it since I have had that highlight that and hopefully we will help you all kind of see more clearly opportunities on your own communities.

BOB CASEY VS. , 2005: We worked with Bob Casey in '06 in a Senate run against Rick Santorum. In that race again we recognized very early on that we cannot beat Santorum without dealing with the faith issue, and if Santorum carried the same faith numbers he had in his first election we didn’t stand a chance, so we ran a very concerted, significant state outreach program, again-- climate being one of the biggest issues. We got the National Association of Evangelicals to come on board and agreed to host an event on climate, at Messiah College, which is the big evangelical flagship school in central Pennsylvania. We invited both candidates to come and Messiah hosted. The students were there, they had faculty

on the panel; Santorum refused to come. Casey shows up, and again, put yourself in 2005, what has just happened in the election. Democrats terrified to go into anything, this is a right wing, evangelical conservative school, the new democratic candidate walks in, he walks in to a standing ovation, is able to give a speech without any opposition on the importance of being a good steward of the environment. Casey talks about how this is going be one of the key issues in his campaign. The first question from the students directed at him, “why was Rick Santorum afraid to show up here today and talk about this?”, and it just got better from there. When Casey left that meeting he said this, and he said this a number of times after elections, that that was the first time that he truly believed he was going to win and saw the path forward, and it was all because of climate, and this response that he was not expecting from a community that had generally been considered a Republican stronghold.

JENNIFER GRANHOLM VS. DEVOS: Jump over to Michigan, Governor who is running against Dick DeVos. [Granholm] held an event to give a talk at another evangelical flagship schools that was in DeVos’ home town, we actually met in the auditorium that was named after his family, he had done the stuff, and they had given all this money, so we were having an event in an auditorium named after our opponent at this school. The campaign was so worried about this that they actually did not put up a press release about the event; they were worried about what the response was going to be. Granholm again went, the main point of her talk, the main connecting place was “creation care”. She walks into a standing ovation from the entire audience, there are a bunch of religious media there and the press, and the religious media in western Michigan was overwhelmingly positive, glowing, talking about how strong the response was from the students. This happened about a week and a half before the election and Dick DeVos changed his schedule at the end of the election to come back to his home town and spend the last three days of the election not campaigning in battleground places around the state, but campaigning back in his home town because his campaign was so worried about what had happened when Granholm was able to connect on climate change.

HINDU VS. EVANGELICAL, 2006: Last example from 2006, take us over to Kansas. State Senator named Raj Goyle, this was for people who think, “Bob Casey was pro life, Granholm was pro choice, but a strong Christian, and how do I do this, maybe I’m not as Christian I don’t go to church all

the time”, Raj Goyle was a Hindu. He was running in Wichita, Kansas in a heavily white evangelical district against a white evangelical incumbent. He beat that incumbent and he wrote us afterwards, we worked with him; we worked with Sebelius, we were doing a lot of climate work, working with nuns and others in the state. He wrote to us afterwards and said the reason he won was this issue and all the outreach he did through it. He met people where they were, he reached out to the faith community…he didn’t tell them why they were wrong or tell them why they needed to believe what he believed. Instead he sought to understand why they believed what they believed, and find ways to connect, and you had a Hindu at Wichita Kansas beat an incumbent, white evangelical in 2006 on this issue. These results will carry in many places around the country in 2006 candidates with whom we worked and did the faith outreach, again with climate being the main key issue…They performed 20 points better than other Democrats with white Protestants in an election where we made big gains with Catholics, they outperformed other Democrats by 10 points with Catholics. This was a huge, huge shift that we saw, and that is kind of what got the parties' attention on all these issues and bumped up to a certain extent, climate, but also the faith outreach up and the party from 2006 to 2008. One other point that I think is really important looking at the 2006 time: This was an area and this is where I’ll go to people who in general in the faith outreach side maybe that’s where we work with candidates who aren’t strong Democrats etc. If you went around the country and worked with a bunch of candidates, the only candidates who ran ads on climate in 2006 and the only candidates who talked explicitly about poverty in 2006 were candidates involved in faith outreach and the Democratic candidates involved in faith outreach. They had the checkbox on their website, they fill out the voter things and send them back to their groups, the Democrats were good on this, but the people that ran on it, the faith part, is what did it and that’s where the coalition on faith can be so significant to us -- It creates another political lever that matters to the people we are trying to influence.

HARRY REID, 2008: Two other case studies, taking it to 2008, from the advocacy side: Harry Reid running for reelection but early on we were trying to raise climate as an issue with him, trying to get him to champion it, obviously you had the bill now moving through Congress past the House going through the Senate. We had done a lot of organizing in

Nevada on faith outreach, explicitly around climate and set up a tele-town hall. We talked to Harry Reid, this took us about 6 months to get him to agree to it. Through outreach and through engaging these churches pastors we were able to setup this tele-town hall on the moral and national security implications on climate change. We had a person on the ground, and we worked with a number of climate groups in Nevada to build this up. We had 20,000 people call in to this tele-town hall with Senator Reid on the moral and national security implications on climate-- the most they had ever had on a tele-town hall before was 3,000 people. This happened the same day that kicked off her national tour out of Harry Reids hometown. They were then able to run a series of ads that Sarah Palin had a crowd of 500 we had 20,000 people call in to us. At this point I was working exclusively on the advocacy side, we weren’t doing the political work on that race, and we had been trying to get them on the climate trail, trying to get attention. It’s a classic thing: you make calls, they take a while to get back, etcetera, but for the rest of the year, if I called their political director, I’d have a call back in 5 minutes because we delivered something that they valued.

STORY 6: Last example: This segues in the end to the climate bill case study. In 2008 we were the lead consultants for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's Red to Blue Program, so we worked with all the pick-up opportunities the Democrats thought they would have in 2008. Over 40 of our candidates won in that program, many of them in very red districts, all of them doing faith outreach and all of them leading with climate because that was our connecting point to these people. Again, it brought a huge swing of Democrats into Congress. Another example at the Senate level, Senator Hagan in 2008: Obviously Hagan is North Carolina, and when she was running, the Obama campaign actually shut down all of their own faith outreach programs in North Carolina so there was nothing happening at O.F.A. on faith in North Carolina, Hagan was the only one doing it. Again, climate was the lead on everything Hagan was doing. In 2008, Obama’s big year, she outperformed Obama by 10 points with evangelical voters of all races. And then it was about 5 or 6 points of Catholic voters in the state, engaging in these issues was something that worked.

On the Climate Bill: Now I’ll explain why a lot of us look back on the climate bill and it is obviously a

sore point. It was something we thought was so close but didn’t come to fruition. When the climate bill kicked off in 2009, there were over 50 members of Congress who had been our former clients, most of them in swing districts so we knew them, were engaging them directly with them and had a very open conversation with them. As the bill moved forward, C.E.W., the coalition of climate groups began to realize that moral and national security arguments were the most resonant in this debate and especially with the members that we needed to swing, and so towards the end of the debate they actually ran almost all of their paid media through American Values Network, where we would team up pastors and generals and ads at events etc. just to create this frame, and what would happen is we would have a lot of the climate community show up. We would frame our issue in terms of our values and security and it was a way to build it. A lot of people look back and say the bill failed for lots of reasons. Having been on the inside, my very strong experience and diagnosis is what happened is that as we were watching it and counting the votes, is that we had a bunch of Democrats in the House lined up, we had a big majority to pass the bill, and 3 weeks before the vote in the House the word came down from the White House to all of our allies that “now is the time to push for Obamacare”, and there was a massive swing -- as progressives who care both about healthcare and climate – shifted their focus. The groups that were fighting us on climate didn’t care that much about healthcare, so the coal companies and others were able to keep their pressure going, lobbyists and others were flooding them while our side turned its attention to Obamacare and we lost in the last 3 weeks. I remember talking to one office where they said their call volume had been equal to letters, equal request for events, and then in the last two weeks, after that shift had happened; they went to 5 to 1 again. That was one of the offices that we lost. So all of a sudden we go from this huge momentum in the House, where we are probably going to win by 40 or more votes, and a lot of them slip away. We still pass it in the House, but we don’t pass it by the same major majority. And, instead of getting the bill done in the Senate that had already been passed in the House, had the momentum and would have addressed the biggest issue at the time of economics, it turned instead to healthcare. That was a double whammy because it killed the momentum of the climate bill going into the Senate but also, all of my former clients who were in these swing districts, who had taken hard votes for them on climate, on the president’s bill, backing the bill, knowing they can take hits, but also believe that if the bill was passed they would win in the end because they could show the outcome, show the jobs etc., so them being asked to take a controversial vote, then be left hanging because it wasn’t pushed through the Senate as

they were promised. As a result, a lot of those members, for that reason, refused to back Obamacare. This then killed that momentum, slowed it down and just jumbled everything going forward into the Senate, and so when people ask what happened, it wasn’t the merits of the bill, in my opinion having seen it on the inside, that did it, it was honestly a strategic mistake and the impact which that had on momentum going into the Senate and the chilling affect it had on House members supporting Obamacare, which then cycled back to further slowing the climate bill in the Senate. So those are my stories, that is my perspective.