Environmental Justice Communities Swing Towards Trump

In one of his early acts as president, Joe Biden directed his executive agencies to determine “how certain federal investments might be made toward a goal that 40 percent of the overall benefits flow to disadvantaged communities.” This direction led to the Justice40 Initiative and the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST), which determined which census tracts qualified for disproportionate funds based on more than thirty indicators across eight categories of burdens including energy, legacy pollution, workforce development, transportation and more. This turned out to be a significant portion of the country; as of 2023, 33% of Americans lived in an environmental justice community, according to the CEJST.

It should not be surprising, given the scope of the communities, that the goals of environmental justice as construed by the Biden administration were also broad and nebulous. Under the Biden administration, “environmental justice” came to encompass not just local environmental remediation—toxic waste, lead pipes, asbestos, and so on—but helping “communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis” with renewable energy investments and generally stimulating the economy by creating “good paying, high quality jobs” in parts of the country “too often overlooked and underserved.”

All noble goals, to be sure; but it quickly became clear that voters were more comfortable with the earlier, narrower idea of environmental justice than the broadly ambitious one espoused by the Biden administration.

A January 2023 poll by the progressive pollsters Data for Progress found that support for “ensuring the fair treatment of all people” in the creation of environmental laws was strong and cross-partisan: 77% of all voters said they supported the idea, with even 60% of self-identified Republicans saying it was “very important” or “somewhat important.” Yet responses to the Biden version of EJ as manifested in the Justice40 initiative were much less enthusiastic and much more partisan: when Justice40 was described to respondents, just 54% of voters said they supported the initiative, including only 25% of Republicans. Support among Blacks (72%) and Latinos (68%) was high, although not as high as among Democrats overall (82%).

Voters’ relative ambivalence did not stop the Biden White House in its quest to “put environmental justice at the center of what we do,” as Biden himself described it in 2022. On top of the Justice40 Initiative, his Administration established a National Climate Advisor, a White House Environmental Justice Interagency Council, and a White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council that would ensure Biden’s “whole-of-government” climate agenda was guided by the principles of environmental justice. No less a figure than Robert Bullard, the self-described “father of environmental justice,” endorsed this agenda, telling the Washington Post in 2021 that the Biden team’s new advisors, offices, and councils were “a signal being sent across the country to say that this is real at the highest level.” As the Center for American Progress described Biden’s efforts last year, “No administration in history has done more than President Joe Biden’s to ensure that all people—regardless of race, income, or ZIP code—live in healthy and safe communities.”

Environmental justice communities, however, did not return the favor.

Comprehensive precinct-level voting data are still coming out for the 2024 elections, but the evidence we do have shows that Justice40 census tracts, in every single state for which we have data, swung more decisively towards Trump than did the rest of the tracts in their respective states:

We can only speculate, of course, as to any causes of this striking trend. But it’s consistent with a couple substantive arguments we would make about Democrats’ environmental agenda and the state of the American electorate.

Our first argument is that Democrats’ strategy of climate deliverism at the very least fell short, and possibly even backfired, politically.

The gambit to shore up political support by targeting climate spending disproportionately in red states and disadvantaged communities obviously failed to swing any states to the left in 2024. Mere awareness of President Biden’s signature climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, remains politically underwater among an electorate that continues to place a low priority on climate change. And as these data suggest, the Biden-Harris environmental justice agenda was, if anything, least effective politically in the communities it was intended to support.

The material impact of environmental spending is of course a different matter than the political support for the politicians who spent it. It’s admirable to invest in remediation of polluted neighborhoods, expanded mass transit, and construction of climate-resilient infrastructure. But from an Administration that also famously failed to expediently deploy electric vehicle charging stations, high-speed broadband, and other projects under the trillions of dollars in infrastructure spending it passed, we have to wonder how much of the benefits intended under the Justice40 Initiative actually materialized in those communities, and how strong a connection residents of those communities made between local projects and national Bidenomics.

It seems that in some cases the connections made by residents of frontline communities with the Biden administration may have even been perverse. A report released by the World Resources Institute last October detailed the frustrations of many community organizations interfacing with the government and unhelpful intermediary entities. “I have found more help outside of J40 than I found within J40. It’s a bottleneck of bureaucracy,” one Detroit organizational leader is quoted as saying.

An administration that had been more effective getting money out the door to its intended beneficiaries in Justice40 communities might still have lost support in those communities compared to the 2020 electoral outcome. Voters expressed a variety of reasons to punish Biden, Harris, and the Democratic Party in 2024. But the fact that Justice40 tracts swung harder toward Trump than non-Justice40 tracts does suggest some level of failure over and above Democrats’ more general weaknesses in the past few election cycles. Specifically, it suggests that Democrats’ long-held strategy to mobilize disadvantaged communities into a meaningful bloc of “climate voters” has not only failed but backfired.

This leads us to our second argument, which is that authentic political representation cannot be conjured from on high.

Much has been made in recent years, and especially in the weeks and months after the election, of the false representation “The Groups” make of specific communities. The canonical examples are when groups like the Black Lives Matter Movement advocate defunding the police even though solid majorities of Black Americans support the opposite, or United We Dream demanding laxer federal enforcement of illegal immigration while most Latin American immigrants support stricter border control. This is what makes “viewpoint representation” so tricky. The views of activists of a particular background might actually differ substantially from the assessed views of the cultural community as a whole, but activists often use their identitarian credentials as backup for their minoritarian positions.

Now, there may be bottomless complexity in drawing boundaries around Black and Brown communities, or low-income neighborhoods, or the urban-rural divide. But few would question the actual existence of those communities, and many people would at least self-sort into them, or even strongly identify with them. By contrast, basically no one used the term “environmental justice community” until the Biden White House and the broader advocacy community spent several years inscribing criteria, based on dozens of indicators, to determine exactly what an environmental justice community is. In doing so, elected Democrats and advocates arguably ended up treating Justice40 communities as even more of a monolith than they treated African-American voters, Latin American voters, urban voters, and other demographics that shifted against them in 2024.

This does not seem to have paid off politically, for the obvious reason that responding to a community’s needs with a certain policy response only makes sense if the community understands itself in the same terms and if it recognizes the relevance of the policy response.

The diversity represented in Justice40 communities—one-third of the nation’s population—defies simple categorization, whether the category is “disadvantaged,” “environmental justice,” or otherwise. Exposure to wildfire risk is a very different condition than housing shortages, just as living in a home with lead pipes is a very different condition than facing a depressed local job market. The fact that the Biden Administration attempted to consolidate its policy responses to these myriad risks under one federal initiative does not mean that the specific citizens involved would necessarily recognize their problems as “environmental justice” problems, let alone problems that the government was meaningfully addressing. Indeed, a survey released in summer 2024 revealed that only 22% of Americans were aware of federal environmental justice efforts.

If you add it all up—the lack of awareness of Democrats’ climate and environmental justice spending, the higher priority elected Democrats placed on climate change than rank-and-file voters, and the sharper turns towards Trump among Justice40 communities—the results of Democrats’ climate deliverism look pretty disappointing. Instead of using green industrial policy to both reinvigorate American infrastructure and recruit political majorities to sustain their project, Democrats appear to have spent trillions of dollars alienating traditional blocs of political supporters.

The extant injustices, meanwhile—wildfire and flood risk, pollution, substandard housing, job shortages, and the other CEJST indicators—endure. But whatever your priors on the risk and response involved here, you’ll have to update them, because these environmental justice communities, literally, no longer exist. As of January, President Trump repealed the Justice40 Initiative. The Biden-era effort to instantiate environmental justice into federal industrial policy, for better or worse, has come to an abrupt end. How many voters actually notice this shift is an open question.