For Elijah Lee, protecting the environment has always been about what’s happening close to home.
He grew up in a predominantly Black, low-income community in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, and went to school next to a paper mill that filled the air with pollution. He always wondered why it seemed like the only employment option for people in town.
Now, as data centers expand in Virginia, where he moved as a teenager, he fears the political promises of data center-driven economic growth won’t reach him or his generation.
At 18, Lee is preparing to vote in his first midterm election. Climate policy ranks among his top concerns. But he understands why people struggling to pay their bills might not put it first.
“It’s hard to care about the quality of your air or your food that you eat and whether or not that food is actually clean when you can’t even afford the food in the first place,” he said.
New polling suggests that tension is widespread. Black voters may not name climate change as their biggest election concern, but they still want leaders to address it.
In a seven-state survey conducted by HIT Strategies for the Climate Equity Action Fund and the League of Conservation Voters, only 9% of Black registered voters ranked climate change among their top three issues motivating them to vote, compared with 74% who selected the cost of living.
At the same time, most respondents said they wanted climate policy to be a top issue for their elected officials. Even among Black Republicans, 79% said it was important for candidates to prioritize addressing climate change.
Interviews with voters and advocates suggest the gap is not simply a messaging issue, but also about whether voters see the connection between environmental policy and their immediate needs. Increasingly, it is also a question if voters should even prioritize climate positions when voting because they cannot trust elected officials to deliver lower bills, cleaner water, and protection from corporate pollution.
“Young people today want to ensure we have a future where we can live prosperously,” Lee said. “We understand that the future requires environmental protections. But we also understand that it is not being prioritized today.”
Climate politics at the kitchen table
The survey, taken from Sept. 24 through Oct. 10 this year, included 2,000 Black and Latino registered voters in swing states in the 2024 election. Seven in 10 respondents in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania said they are likely to vote in the November midterm elections.
Across both groups, 89% said it was important for candidates to prioritize lowering energy costs, 86% said the same about reducing air and water pollution, and 82% wanted candidates to prioritize addressing climate change.
Erica Tebbs, a senior analyst at HIT Strategies, said the problem is not convincing Black voters that environmental threats exist.
“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,” Tebbs said. “That’s where the doubts lie.”
For Tebbs, those answers show why climate’s relatively low ranking on a list of election issues should not be read as indifference. When questions turn to the cost of electricity, safe drinking water, or extreme weather, the concerns become personal and immediate. By contrast, the phrase “climate change,” can feel abstract.
Bill Hairston, national field director for the League of Conservation Voters, sees a similar dynamic in conversations with residents. Data center development, he said, has become one of the issues bringing people into discussions about energy and environmental policy. Residents worry about what the facilities will mean for their bills, air pollution, and housing costs and gentrification.
“I think it’s actually just putting the two and two together,” Hairston said.
Hairston grew up in Charleston, West Virginia, where his grandparents’ home sat in a poor, Black neighborhood. Daily, coal trucks passed nearby. He remembers the grass around the house looking yellow, with soot on it.
“I never saw my grandmother’s grass green,” he said.
He didn’t fully connect those conditions to the decisions shaping his neighborhood when he was young, but he said voters should be making those connections more often.
For Hairston, conversations about data centers offer an opportunity to connect an industry’s presence with questions about health, affordability, and government oversight. Rather than treating those as separate concerns, he wants residents to consider who makes the decisions and whose interests those decisions serve.
Who pays for the data center boom?
The poll found substantial concern among Black voters about what data centers could mean for electricity costs.
Black voters also showed skepticism that policy promises actually benefit their households.
Respondents were told Congress was considering a policy requiring companies building data centers to pay for the electricity they use rather than passing costs to consumers. Even with that protection described, 52% of Black voters 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.
For Andrea Cristina Mercado, who leads Climate Equity Action Fund, the results show clearly that Black communities are confronting failed policies related to climate change and the environment.
Lee, who now lives in the data center capital of the U.S., is an example of this. He questions the tax breaks offered to data center developers and the promises of jobs used to promote the facilities. He worries that communities will be asked to accept the costs without receiving the benefits they were promised.
“I understand the importance of wanting to bring money into Virginia,” Lee said. But “to pass these things off as mass sources of employment is just not true.”
For Mercado, that is why climate policy cannot be separated from affordability and the economy.
“We actually believe that climate policy has to address the needs of working people,” she said, and that is why affordability is leading to “the emergence of a massive organic movement against data centers.”
Shared concerns across party lines
Concern about climate change among Black voters extended across party identification more than it did among Latino voters in the survey.
Among Black Republicans, 79% said it was important for candidates to prioritize addressing climate change. Among Latino Republicans, 59% said the same.
Hairston said this had to do with the lived experience of Black voters, who are subjected to more pollution and climate change-related issues like flooding.
He sees those experiences as an opening to organize around protections that reach beyond party labels. For climate advocates, the challenge is persuading people that taking action can produce results.
Nearly half of respondents said that powerful interests and wealthy corporations would always block meaningful efforts to reduce climate harm, regardless of what ordinary people did and that they believed it was already too late to reduce that harm.
But 45% of Black voters said people working together through voting, petitions, and boycotts could hold government and corporations accountable and reduce the harmful effects of climate change.
Tebbs said those doubts about political power mattered especially to younger voters.
But the possibility of change is still visible among young people, said Lee, who is a first-year college student. He pointed to a group of high school students in Spartanburg, South Carolina, organizing against a proposed data center as an example of students seeking a say in the future being built around them.
He wants older voters to listen to those concerns rather than assume a generation raised with technology will welcome every project built to support it.
“We know that this is the future that we’re inheriting, the markets that we’re inheriting, the housing that we’re inheriting, the food prices that we’re inheriting,” he said. “And so I think more than anything, I’m being driven by deep concerns, but also by a deep hope that we can turn this around.”
