One might think that President Obama’s relatively enlightened policies regarding climate change compared to those of the Republicans would benefit him in this year’s election, especially in light of the current drought.
But one might be wrong about that, as THIS GUY explains:
No discussion of climate policy—yet the drought may not be entirely irrelevant for the upcoming presidential election. Several years ago, Christopher Achen and I examined the impact of droughts and floods in presidential elections throughout the 20th century. We found a surprisingly strong and clear tendency for voters to punish the president’s party when their states were too wet or too dry. In the 2000 election (the most recent in our data), we estimated that Al Gore got about 2.8 million fewer votes than he would have under ideal climatic conditions.
