Something is missing from the Democratic Party’s 2026 message, and its absence speaks louder than any speech. Climate change, the issue party leaders once called an existential emergency, has gone quiet. Journalists even have a name for it: climate hushing.
An analysis of congressional press releases by Inside Climate News found that Democratic mentions of climate change have plummeted since 2025, while talk of energy affordability has surged. Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, once a green energy champion, now sells herself as a fighter against high utility bills, and her pivot is being called a blueprint for the party.
Behind closed doors, the shift is even starker. At a recent Senate Democratic strategy retreat, the polling presentation did not ask a single question about climate change. One attendee, Democratic Rhode Island Sen. Whitehouse, called it a massive blind spot.
Give the strategists credit. They read the same election returns everyone else did. The party’s own review of the 2024 loss reportedly found that green transition messaging frightened workers in traditional industries who feared for their jobs. Voters punished Democrats for the high cost of living, and nothing raised that cost more visibly than energy.
But notice what the party retreated toward. They did not change the subject to something safe and unrelated. They ran straight at affordability, the exact ground where their climate record is weakest. You do not flee toward your own weakness. You flee toward it only when you have no choice, because the voters are already holding their ever-increasing electric bills.
And those bills tell the story. The average American residential electricity rate has climbed about 25% in four years, from just over 15 cents per kilowatt hour in 2022 to nearly 19 cents this spring. In the last year alone, rates jumped more than 7%.
Federal forecasters expect another increase in 2026, with the sharpest pain along the East Coast, where climate mandates are most aggressive. These are not acts of nature. They are the predictable result of policies that shut down reliable power plants and force expensive, weather-dependent replacements onto the grid. Like adding an undependable car to your family’s budget. It just increases your costs if you want reliability.
The price tag reaches well beyond the monthly bill. When Congress passed the ill-named Inflation Reduction Act, budget scorekeepers pegged its energy subsidies at around 370 billion dollars over ten years. The real number keeps climbing.
The Congressional Budget Office now estimates the clean energy tax credits alone will add 825 billion dollars to the deficit, and the Cato Institute puts the full range as high as nearly 2 trillion dollars over the same window. That is a wealth transfer from ordinary ratepayers and taxpayers to well-connected developers, and it buys higher prices, not lower ones.
Here is the admission hiding inside the silence. If the green transition were actually making energy cheaper, climate and affordability would be the same message, and there would be nothing to hush. The party could brag about both in the same breath. The fact that its own strategists had to choose between them, and chose to bury climate, is a confession that the two pull in opposite directions.
Some Democrats insist this is a recast, not a retreat. They argue that cheap solar and wind are the affordability answer, and that voters can be won by promising climate policy will lower bills.
But that claim collapses on contact with its own logic. If renewables were truly the cheapest power, they would not need mandates, subsidies, and regulatory waivers to force utilities to buy them. You do not have to compel people to choose the cheaper option. The mandates exist precisely because the market, left alone, would choose otherwise.
The honest lesson is one conservatives have argued for years. Reliable, affordable energy and heavy-handed climate central planning cannot coexist. Americans want to keep the lights on and the bills low, and they have figured out which policies deliver that and which do not.
Democratic strategists have figured it out too. That is why they have stopped talking. The quiet is not a change of heart. It is a change of subject, and it amounts to an admission that the policies were too expensive and too restrictive to defend out loud. The rest of us should say plainly that we do not want less reliable and more expensive electricity.
Frank Lasee is the President of Truth in Energy and Climate.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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