Black voters climate change concerns are being weighed against the pressure of rising household costs, according to new polling and interviews that highlight how affordability shapes views on environmental policy.
For Elijah Lee, protecting the environment starts close to home. Raised in a predominantly Black, low-income neighborhood in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, he attended school beside a paper mill that fouled the air. After moving to Virginia as a teenager, he now worries that the economic promises tied to the state’s fast-growing data center industry will bypass people like him. At 18, he is preparing to vote in his first midterm and counts climate policy among his top concerns, though he understands why many struggling families place it behind immediate expenses. “It’s hard to care about the quality of your air or your food when you can’t even afford the food in the first place,” he said.
New polling indicates that tension is widespread. While Black voters often rank climate below other priorities, many still want leaders to address it. Interviews with voters and advocates suggest the issue is less about awareness and more about whether people see environmental policy delivering lower bills, cleaner water, and protection from corporate pollution. Some question whether climate positions should even drive their votes if they cannot trust that promises will be kept. “We understand that the future requires environmental protections,” Lee said. “But we also understand that it is not being prioritized today.”
Climate politics at the kitchen table
A survey by HIT Strategies for the Climate Equity Action Fund and the League of Conservation Voters, conducted September 24 to October 10, sampled 2,000 Black and Latino registered voters in key 2024 swing states. Seven in 10 respondents in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania said they were likely to vote in the November midterms. Only 9 percent of Black registered voters placed climate change among their top three voting issues, compared with 74 percent who selected the cost of living. Yet strong majorities still want action: 89 percent said candidates should prioritize lowering energy costs, 86 percent cited reducing air and water pollution, and 82 percent wanted candidates to prioritize addressing climate change.
Erica Tebbs, a senior analyst at HIT Strategies, said the challenge is not convincing Black voters that environmental threats are real. “The proof that is needed is that their concerns will be addressed and responded to by elected officials and that a vote will result in a real impact in their community,” she said. She added that the term “climate change” can feel abstract, while questions about electric bills, safe drinking water, and extreme weather are immediate and personal.
Bill Hairston, national field director for the League of Conservation Voters, said data center development has become a focal point in conversations about energy and environmental policy. Residents are increasingly asking what the facilities will mean for utility bills, air quality, and housing costs. He grew up in Charleston, West Virginia, where coal trucks rumbled past his grandparents’ home in a poor, Black neighborhood and soot yellowed the grass. As communities debate data centers, he wants voters to connect industry expansion with health, affordability, and government oversight, and to consider who benefits from those decisions.
Who pays for the data center boom?
The poll found deep concern among Black voters about data centers’ impact on electricity costs and skepticism that policy protections will actually shield households. Respondents were told Congress was considering requiring data center companies to pay for the electricity they use rather than shifting costs to consumers. Even with that described, 52 percent of Black voters still expected data centers to raise electricity costs for everyday Americans. “They don’t necessarily trust that this type of policy will really protect the public from taking on these costs,” Tebbs said.
Andrea Cristina Mercado, who leads the Climate Equity Action Fund, said the results reflect how Black communities are confronting policy failures on climate and the environment. Lee, who now lives in what has been called the nation’s data center capital, questions tax breaks for developers and jobs projections used to sell projects, worrying that communities will bear the costs without promised benefits. “To pass these things off as mass sources of employment is just not true,” he said. For Mercado, climate policy must also address affordability and economic realities, which she said are fueling an “organic movement against data centers.”
Shared concerns across party lines
Concern about climate change among Black voters stretched across party identification more than it did among Latino voters in the survey. Among Black Republicans, 79 percent said candidates should prioritize addressing climate change, compared with 59 percent of Latino Republicans. Hairston attributed that to Black voters’ lived experience with pollution and climate-related impacts like flooding, which he sees as an opening to organize around protections that transcend party labels. The challenge for advocates is convincing people that action can deliver results.
Nearly half of respondents said powerful interests and wealthy corporations would always block meaningful efforts to reduce climate harm, and that it is already too late to lessen the damage. Even so, 45 percent of Black voters said collective action through voting, petitions, and boycotts could hold government and corporations accountable and reduce harmful effects.
Tebbs said doubts about political power are especially strong among younger voters. Still, Lee, a first-year college student, sees signs of change. He pointed to high school students in Spartanburg, South Carolina, organizing against a proposed data center as an example of young people demanding a voice in decisions shaping their future. He urged older voters not to assume a generation raised with technology will embrace every project built to support it. “We know that this is the future that we’re inheriting,” he said. “I’m being driven by deep concerns, but also by a deep hope that we can turn this around.”
Black voters climate change
For Hawaiʻi readers, the conversations in this survey echo local concerns about who benefits from major energy and technology projects and who pays through higher utility bills or added health risks. As mainland data center growth accelerates and Hawaiʻi confronts high energy costs and climate threats, the through line remains the same: voters want climate action that also delivers affordability, cleaner air and water, and real accountability.
Those worries mirror broader questions about how governments protect residents from extreme heat, pollution, and infrastructure decisions, themes also explored in reporting on how Europe’s hottest summer drove deaths in major cities. For communities in Hawaiʻi and beyond, the debate is not whether the climate is changing, but whether policy responses will share the benefits and burdens fairly.
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