President Donald Trump’s second term “may have killed” the movement behind the Green New Deal, with data obtained by Axios revealing a dramatic drop-off in the number of times congressional Democrats mentioned the project.
“Democrats aren’t explicitly disavowing the Green New Deal, but they’ve abruptly stopped talking about it as they scramble to find new ways to talk about climate change,” co-authors Alex Thompson and Ben Geman wrote in a Friday article explaining how Democrats “retreated” on the issue.
An Axios chart created using data collected by Quorum shows that Democrat members of Congress said “Green New Deal” just six times on social media and on the floor over the past three months — the fewest mentions since Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) launched a resolution to create a Green New Deal in 2018.
Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) have not reintroduced their Green New Deal resolution after first doing so in April 2023 of the last Congress, Axios noted.
The article argued, “President Trump’s first term provoked the movement for a Green New Deal. His second term may have killed it.”
In the same three-month period, Republicans mentioned “Green New Deal” on 337 occasions as they continued to discredit the climate activist project as a counterintuitive job-killer.
Josh Freed, head of the Climate and Energy Program at the Third Way think tank, told Axios: “The groups wouldn’t or couldn’t sell the [Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)], and promised they’d deliver young voters on climate. They didn’t deliver on selling the IRA, and Democrats did worse with young voters. A lot of elected officials’ faith and trust in that apparatus has been shaken.”
Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.
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