Here’s the Climate Message That Can Help Democrats Win Big in 2026

As we head into 2026, it seems almost certain that the midterm elections will be decided by one issue: the cost of living. Voters are angry about rising prices, and in every major election over the past year—from Donald Trump’s besting of Kamala Harris, to Zohran Mamdani’s win against Andrew Cuomo, to Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill’s gubernatorial victories—they’ve rewarded the candidates who seemed most willing to tackle the issue.

Corporate-funded centrist advocacy groups have tried to use this dynamic to argue that Democrats should abandon climate action. But last month, Data for Progress and Fossil Free Media published polling that demonstrated the foolishness of this advice: Climate change is a key driver of the affordability crisis, and while neither Republicans nor Democrats currently have a significant trust advantage on “the cost of living,” Democrats do have a major advantage on “climate change” (D+14). So if they can explain how their climate policies can make life more affordable, Democrats can leverage their advantage on climate to win voters’ trust on the most important political topic of 2026. The memo offered an example of what a winning electoral message on energy costs might look like: “We’ll take on rising electricity bills by building the cheapest power and stopping utility price-gouging, all while making polluters, not families, pay their fair share.”

But beyond energy costs, surging home insurance rates are also making life less affordable for working families. Pledging to address this crisis is another way that Democrats can demonstrate to voters that they are willing to challenge the profiteers making life more expensive, while addressing the impacts and causes of climate change.

For decades, health insurance has been a prime example of rising costs in this country. Democrats have regularly put these costs at the center of their messaging, focusing most recently on expiring Obamacare subsidies. But in recent years, due in large part to the skyrocketing rate and scope of climate-related extreme weather disasters, home insurance has become an increasingly salient pocketbook concern, as millions of Americans have seen their rates soar, their coverage shrink, or their communities labeled “uninsurable.”

Nationally, home insurance rates have risen by 58 percent since 2018. In many regions the increases are far higher, and it’s not just coastal states that are suffering. For example, the average cost for home insurance in Nebraska this year is $6,400, a massive burden that’s been driven in large part by the increased destructiveness of hail storms, which are getting worse due to climate change. As one insurance agent in Omaha put it, “It’s just becoming unaffordable in our state, is the new reality.” Renters are affected, too—rising insurance rates for rental properties mean that many renter households may see their already-high rents continue to grow, while the supply of subsidized-affordable and rent-stabilized housing dwindles.

For many Americans, getting any insurance at all is becoming impossible. Since 2021, at least 36 property insurers in 11 states have canceled more than 1.4 million policies, and many insurers are abandoning parts of the country completely—all while continuing to rake in obscene profits. For example, Progressive reported $8.5 billion in profits in 2024, the same year the company canceled 115,000 policies in Florida and stopped writing new policies in Texas; Allstate raised rates by 34 percent in California last year, while reporting $4.7 billion in profits and awarding its CEO $26.7 million total compensation.

And at the same time that rates are rising and coverage is shrinking, millions of Americans’ property values are falling. According to research published last month, houses in areas that are particularly exposed to hurricanes and wildfires have sold for an average of $43,900 less than they otherwise would have because of climate-induced shocks in the home insurance market. For most Americans, the home is the biggest investment they will ever have—a significant decline in its value can be financially devastating.

Homeowners in Washington state recently filed a class-action lawsuit against major oil and gas companies for these losses. The underlying logic is simple: Climate change is the root cause of all of these harms, all these costs, all this chaos. And the oil and gas companies responsible for this climate change knew exactly what they were doing. As one internal report from Shell predicted way back in 1989, the unabated burning of fossil fuels would cause “more violent weather—more storms, more droughts, more deluges.” Yet, at the same time that these companies were redesigning their own infrastructure to prepare for the climate changes they knew were coming, they were executing a vast conspiracy to, as one fossil fuel industry strategy document put it, “reposition global warming as theory (not fact)” in order to fraudulently turn the public against climate action. Big Oil corporations—and the big insurance companies that financed and underwrote them, even as their internal analyses made clear the connection between fossil fuels, extreme weather, and major property damage—knowingly stole our opportunity to address climate change on a timeline that would have averted the insurance crises so many American homeowners are currently facing. They should help pay for the solutions.

What are those solutions? First, policymakers need to prevent the insurance industry from continuing to underwrite the climate crisis while profiting from its consequences. In other words, Democrats should be fighting for a home insurance system that prioritizes household security over corporate profits. The clearest way to achieve this is through comprehensive public disaster insurance that fairly spreads the risk of disasters—essentially a single-payer system for disaster insurance that could be available to every homeowner, renter, and mobile home dweller. And the best way to fund that is by taxing the polluters that created this crisis and the private insurers that have exacerbated it. The policy could also be funded from the coffers of the financial interests that have the most to gain from how public disaster insurance could stabilize the real estate market. (Mortgage lenders, for example, need insurable properties to lend against.)

Politically, this green economic populist agenda could be expressed much like the message above for energy costs: “Democrats will take on rising home insurance costs by building public insurance options that are affordable for households and make our homes safer, paid for by the corporate polluters and profiteers that created this mess in the first place.” As with the energy example, this climate message offers a great contrast to Trump and Republicans: According to a recent report, Trump’s tariffs are projected to increase home insurance costs 38 percent faster this year; Republicans have sharply cut disaster relief that provides critical funding to help families who’ve been hit by extreme weather; and Trump has raked in millions of dollars in campaign and inaugural committee donations from the insurance industry as it raises rates and cancels coverage.

In recent weeks, corporate-backed centrists have continued to advocate for Democrats to give up on climate. This remains bad advice. Climate change is contributing to the affordability crisis and increasing the burden of property insurance for millions of Americans. Addressing this head-on, including by campaigning for insurance programs that benefit the public rather than CEOs, is another clear way for Democrats to leverage the major trust advantage they enjoy on climate towards one of the key issues—housing costs—that will decide next year’s elections. They’d be fools not to take the layup.