Tagged In: Climate Change, climate polling, Get Out the Vote, house bill 6, renewable energy, suburban voters
Spencer Dirrig, Political Director, November 3, 2022
Climate change is an existential crisis that is already impacting Ohio families. However, decreasing carbon emissions and acting on the climate crisis aren’t just good for our environment—they are highly persuasive for Ohio’s most sought-after voting block: suburban voters. The Ohio Environmental Council (OEC) worked alongside partners to poll, research, and study the impact that climate change messaging has on suburban voters across Ohio.
Our findings are clear: suburban Ohioans want to support candidates with bold plans to invest in renewable energy and combat the climate crisis. As candidates make their closing pitches in tight contests across the state, climate must be a top priority.
In August, on behalf of OEC, EMC Research conducted a poll of 600 likely November 2022 voters in Suburban areas of Ohio. Suburban voters were identified using defined Metro counties and subtracting from those counties any voters living within the boundaries of Census-Defined Places with populations above 50,000. Interviews were conducted via live telephone interviews, email, and text-to-web methodologies from August 3-8, 2022. The survey has a margin of error of +4.0 percentage points at the overall level.
Suburban voters who would be more likely to vote for a candidate supporting renewable energy include:
Examples of highly-effective proposals for suburban voters include:
On behalf of the Ohio Environmental Council, Innovation Ohio (IO) conducted research into how to effectively message to voters about renewable energy investments in order to promote support for pro-renewable energy policies and candidates. IO conducted an Audience Understanding Survey and real-time message test using the GrowProgress platform, which recruits participants via a number of platform partners to take surveys online. Participants are Ohio adults and samples are weighted by age, gender, race, education, and party to resemble the electorate. For the Audience Understanding Survey, 597 Ohioans were surveyed from September 23-27, 2022. The goal of this survey was to understand which demographic groups respond most strongly to a variety of messages around climate change and renewable energy.
As candidates enter the final days of the 2022 campaign, speaking directly about bringing renewable energy jobs to Ohio and combating the climate crisis will be an effective strategy to persuade key suburban voters to support their campaigns.
For the full memo with results from EMC Research, please visit this link.
For the full memo with results from Innovation Ohio, please visit this link.
Questions? Contact Political Director Spencer Dirrig at SDirrig@TheOEC.org.