Human attention span is a finite resource. I’m actually pretty okay with that, since it’s not going to change. One of the things that kept coming up in the early days of the Trump administration was the conversation about “distraction.” Namely that “Trump Doing X Terrible Thing is Just a Distraction from Y Terrible Thing He is About to Do.” I think some people still do this, but it seems to have died down since, mercifully.
The reality is that the GOP being in control of literally every branch of government has raised a lot of seperate issues, and it’s no surprise that we’re having trouble getting to them all. The Climate will wait another two years, while we untangle the rest of this mess. Climate change is a big deal, but so are a lot of other things, and debates are timed. They’re also not the only form of political activity that matters.
Also this n is small, if anyone cares. The methodology focused on close races is a little weird with not a lot of data points to construct a trend or a sense of significance. We have no governor’s race or senate race this year, and our district race hasn’t seen a debate yet. This is because the candidate with an R after their name is either too chicken, or has read the polling data to mean that debate only increases the Dem’s profile. We weren’t included in this assessment and neither were a lot of other races happening around the country, and both the candidates in this race have positions on the issue, with the Republican having actually publicly met with grassroots climate-change activist groups and making some positive noises with his mouth (it’s a given that the Democrat did).
Actually if anything this is part of a slightly broader and unfortunate trend for left-leaning organizations to focus heavily on big races (fair enough) at the expense of smaller ones (this part’s the problem.)
My point with all this, is that all things considered, I’m not sure that there’s a significant conclusion to be drawn from all of this.
