This year, elections and extreme weather events have collided: In India, the spring general election was snarled by a heat wave that killed dozens of people, including poll workers. In Germany, severe flooding prompted evacuations just days before elections for the European Parliament. And in the U.S., people attending campaign rallies have fallen ill from record-breaking heat.
Political contests set the course for climate policy, as the U.S. presidential race between Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump surely will. Yet it’s unlikely that heat waves and disasters are changing the minds of enough voters who experience them to alter the results.
A growing body of research focuses on whether experiencing abnormal heat and other climate change-linked weather events shapes the way people vote, but a clear consensus hasn’t emerged. If people are in fact casting ballots based on their experiences of disasters, it appears to be a small number of them.
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