AUDIO:

"The EcoNews Report," Nov. 7, 2026.

The following is a rough machine transcript. Click the words to skip to that point in the audio.

TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, executive director of EPIC, the Environmental Protection Information Center. And joining me is EPIC's climate attorney, Matt Simmons.

Hey, Matt. Hey, Tom. And we are joined by Ryan Emenaker, professor of political science at College of the Redwoods. Welcome to the show.

All right. So we are talking midterm election results, both local and national, seeing if we can tease apart any interesting storylines that are going to be impactful for folks here locally or for the environment generally. So we are recording this on Wednesday, November 4th. So some of the information that we have might be out of date by the time you listen to this. So apologies, but this is all true at the time of recording. Maybe let's start local and then we can go national.

So a couple of things that I thought were interesting here is if we look at Prop 40, the California billionaire wealth tax, Humboldt County stands out as one of the few counties where this received majority support and one of the highest vote getting counties. So we, I think, are just behind Santa Cruz County at 54% of the vote in favor. So Ryan, what are we as a county?

Are we a progressive lion? Are we Democrats? How would you describe Humboldt County voters to someone from outside the area?

EMENAKER:

Yeah, I mean, Humboldt County has a long-standing independent streak. So we could go back into like the days of the 1800s where we had the Workingmen's Party and we've had lots of alternate parties and we had a socialist majority on the Eureka City Council in the 19-teens. So Humboldt County's kind of always had this tradition of being sort of an independent streak and so you could see Prop 40 being endorsed by Bernie Sanders and Humboldt County then supporting it in bigger numbers. And again, our numbers overall as a county don't necessarily Democrats versus Republicans. We have a strong amount of Republicans here, but I think the Republican style is a little bit different here than maybe other parts of the state, than maybe Republicans in Orange County. So I think we have this kind of a strong independent streak that's in that county.

There's points where the city of Arcata had more registered Green Party members than registered Republicans. So I think all of that kind of points to the type of place that Humboldt County and different parts of Humboldt County are. And I think that this is just another part of the story. That wouldn't have surprised me if you told me beforehand that Humboldt County is likely to be the place that supports Prop 40 more than any other county in the state.

WHEELER:

Well, so Arcata has a proud history of voting pretty far left. As you said, you know, we've elected green party candidates. We've had times where green party registrations were higher than Republicans, but the rest of Humboldt County has not always kept up with Arcata. I feel like it was only recently that we saw Eureka become solidly blue and maintain its progressive status throughout successive elections.

When I moved to Humboldt County in 2014, we had a nonpartisan city council, but we would have folks who are registered Republicans serving on the city council. Now, famously, we have a cop versus a communist in Matt's ward of Eureka where Mario Fernandez is in the lead, albeit ever so slightly, over Janelle Jackson. Yeah.

MATT SIMMONS:

Mario also describes himself as an anarchist, not a communist, Tom, just to clarify something.

WHEELER:

Okay, well, he made the joke to me that he was communist versus his cop. So I'll take Mario there. Also thinking to the Board of Supervisors elections, right?

It was only a couple election cycles ago that Steve Madrone beat Ryan Sundberg in McKinleyville. And I was worried at the last election that that was just a very tenuous hold of that seat. And it appears that McKinleyville is now solidly and thoroughly a Democratic stronghold. So Humboldt County, maybe we are becoming more thoroughly left, Democratic, progressive, however you want to say it. Okay. Also, some interesting results from Blue Lake, where we have basically a tied race. Ryan, do you understand the politics of Blue Lake much?

EMENAKER:

A little bit. I mean, I don't live in Blue Lake. I have friends who live in Blue Lake. I live near Blue Lake, so I understand little bits here and there.

WHEELER:

So we have basically a tied race between four candidates, two of which I think are viewed as aligned with the current majority on the city council, two of which are not. So Bull Lake, I think, is really struggling to figure out what kind of city it wants to be with contrasting visions of their future between the two camps. The two camps seem to be equally weighted at this point, so it will be fascinating.

EMENAKER:

I think one of the things that's gone on with Blue Lake a little bit too is that when people got elected and they won by small margins, they also took that as, hey, we have an opportunity to do a bunch here. And I think sometimes we have to be careful. And I think that's true, not just for Blue Lake, but in Lexington in general. Sometimes when people get more votes than another, they take it as more of a mandate than perhaps the voters intended it.

And then sometimes there's backlash from that. And so I think that Blue Lake is going through what we'll see a lot of candidates go through, where perhaps a vote for that candidate was not that I agree with everything that they want to do. And then when you actually try to implement things. So the idea of campaigning versus policymaking, that you can campaign on something, but once you start trying to do it, sometimes people, voters who voted for you will tend to pull back and be less excited about it once it actually gets implemented.

WHEELER:

Well, so maybe that's a good transition to national elections and maybe a warning to a new Democratic Congress. So on Tuesday night, we saw the Democratic Party take both the House and the Senate with a very strong election night returns with surprising races in South Carolina, Mississippi, Ohio, Iowa, Kansas, a lot of states that the Democratic Party has not been terribly competitive in the last few election cycles, Democratic Senate candidates winning there. So, right, your point about the Blue Lake City Council might be one that is necessary for the Democratic Party to hear after Tuesday's election. So on Tuesday, the Democratic Party obviously made massive gains in both the House and Senate.

The Democrats will now control the legislature and there may be a feeling amongst some Democrats that they have some sort of a mandate in this election to move forward with an aggressive party platform. Do you read this Tuesday's election as voters' endorsement of the Democratic Party or was there something else happening here in this election that was a better explainer? Yeah.

EMENAKER:

I mean, I think that this election, and all midterms for the most part are a referendum on the president. So we see two years into Donald Trump's second term and he had historic low approval ratings. We see that playing out in the midterm. And again, all midterm elections, in all but three midterm elections since the Civil War, the party of the president has lost seats in Congress. Now, here we saw much larger than normal loss, but nonetheless, right, the party of the president, Republicans lost seats in the House, they lost seats in the Senate, they lost seats at the state level, they lost governorships, like they lost up and down, and lost more than even a normal midterm loss.

But all midterm elections are a referendum on the president. So most of this vote I think is best interpreted as, we're unhappy with the way things are going, we're unhappy with the current administration, and we're going to punish based on that, right? So that's what this vote's about. This is not necessarily we support this particular platform or this particular Democrat, it's kind of like we're just really unhappy with what's going on right now.

WHEELER:

So I think another key theme for this election has been affordability, right? So we have gasoline prices above $6.5 here in Humboldt County and high across the nation. We have voters feeling pinched by increased costs of virtually everything. Housing has also been a particular issue for younger voters, the affordability of housing. So what role do you think economic stress and anxiety had in this election and what would you suggest to Democrats as they move forward?

EMENAKER:

Yeah, well, in terms of the effects on the election, lots of evidence from political science over the years is that the number one driver of elections is the economy. And mostly gas prices and what are sometimes thought about as pocketbook issues. So what's the price of bread? What's the price of eggs? But for the most part, some people will model elections. They'll basically look at it and say, if this is how much inflation is and this is what the gas prices is, this is who's going to win the election. And they'll just do it based on generic candidates.

We don't have to know who the candidates actually are. Candidates are sort of seen as irrelevant in this. And polling sometimes is even taken out. And based on just what inflation rates or some other basic fundamentals like that, we can usually predict how many seats a party is going to win or lose based on that.

So that's almost always seen as a really huge determinant of how elections go. So we're seeing the highest gas prices we've ever seen. Almost all models would point to then that the party in power, this time it's Republicans, is going to be punished heavily for that. And so I think that just becomes another sort of data point in this longstanding trend for political science evidence on how elections function and how people, how voter behavior works.

WHEELER:

So candidate quality also I think is going to be important though in understanding at least a few of these races, races like South Carolina Senate, Texas Senate. We had the president actively, it seems like, thwarting his own party's interests through some of his endorsements. So President Trump, as a reminder, endorsed Ken Paxton for the Senate in Texas, endorsed Darlene Graham for the Senate in South Carolina, endorsed Watley for the Senate in North Carolina, and all three candidates significantly underperformed in those states.

Do you have any thoughts on the candidate strength this year? I know that some Democrats were worried about our own candidates and whether or not the Democratic Party put forward appropriate candidates in places like Michigan. Any thoughts on candidate strength this election cycle?

EMENAKER:

Yeah, I mean, again, as a scientist, I'd love to rerun the election with a different pick than Darlene Graham and a different pick than Ken Paxton and see what happens and would we end up getting a similar result, nonetheless, right? So on some level, we know that the entire electorate shifted by somewhere around 15%, some places a little bit more, some places a little bit less, but it's entirely possible that maybe, no matter who the candidates were, we would have seen a pretty similar result. I mean, obviously within some amount of limits there, right?

But it's possible that, yeah, again, we can't know for sure, but lots of evidence seems to indicate that candidates and particular campaigns seem to make less of an impact on elections than do a lot of other things, such as what's the price of gas? What's, is there a war? How's the economy doing? These types of things seem to matter more. But yeah, maybe those elections would have been slightly different. Maybe Democrats would not have picked up those seats quite as easily.

Maybe it would have been closer. But I mean, we're seeing things even where like, if you go to Mississippi or Louisiana, right? So in Mississippi, a Democratic Senate candidate is, right now a Democrat is ahead, but even if they don't end up winning, that's like, that's unheard of, right? Louisiana was pretty close.

You've got Democrats winning in Kansas and Idaho. So, and then these are places where we don't have that sort of candidate story to help explain it in the same way. So I think the bigger story has gotta be that we had this huge overall electoral shift, and maybe secondarily in some places, we had a little bit of movement based on candidates, but I'm not so sure that the candidates had nearly as much explanatory value as the environment that the election took place in.

SIMMONS:

So besides the economy, which I agree is probably the biggest issue for the most voters, what other issues do you think explain this election, non-pocketbook issues?

EMENAKER:

Yeah. So the polling that I saw, so the number one thing, again, and this is almost always true, economy, when the economy, that's almost always number one. But the second thing I saw, and this is a bit unusual, was fears about democracy, fears about authoritarianism. So that was actually, and that was, I think, about 30% of voters had said that that was one of their major concerns.

That I've never really seen before. And then after that, the next thing I saw was down somewhere around 15% or so, and that was concerns about ICE and immigration enforcement and the way that's being carried out. So those next two seem to be things that we haven't generally seen as major concerns. I can't think of many elections where there was quite as much fear that, are the polls going to happen? Is the election going to be stolen? And again, I think not unwarranted fears when we see what happened with January 6th and not that long in the past where that happened. So I think there was definitely some concerns, statements by the president himself saying that they're going to send troops in particular places, or the DOJ filing preemptive lawsuits to sort of challenge results.

So I think that that was a big concern for people's minds. So I think a lot of people went to the polls thinking like, I need to vote in order to show that I don't stand for this and that I don't like this. And then I think also the issue of immigration enforcement. Because one of the things we particularly see is the largest shift among voters seems to be among Latino voters, and they shifted about 30% from 2024.

And that seems to be largely driven by immigration concerns. And you can see the vote in Texas, for example, where Democrats picked up a governorship and a Senate seat is particularly those counties with large Latino populations, particularly border counties, where the vote shift happened the most dramatically.

WHEELER:

So on issues where the electorate is divided by political party, I wanted to point out, given that this is an environmental radio show, the issue of climate change is one where we are seeing vast polarization. Gallup released polling ahead of the election that queried voters on what issues were important to them. Only 5% of Republicans identified climate change is very important, independents at 27%, and Democrats at 52%. This is the widest gulf between Democrats and Republicans on issues.

But Democrats and Republicans were fairly tightly aligned on immigration being an important issue, and the economy as well. But climate change is now seemingly just kind of a one-party issue. Oh, I don't know how the Democrats will be able to effectively move forward on climate change, or I worry for our planet, perhaps, if climate change just becomes, or continues to stay so radically polarized. You know, I'm old enough to remember when Newt Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi were together in an advertisement in 2006 talking about the need to do something about climate change.

Times have really changed since then. You are listening to the Econews Report. And we are talking about the midterm election results and what they mean for Humboldt County and for our environment.

EMENAKER:

Yeah, I mean, I think you're right to point out that it's like, it has not always been like this, that climate change was not seen as such a partisan issue. That also makes me wonder if there's a possibility that it will revert back, right? That maybe we're in a particularly anomaly, that in particular, Donald Trump is the current leader of the Republican Party, which is gonna change in the next couple of years. Maybe he's already changed based on this midterm election since he's not gonna be on the ballot again. That if you have the person at the top of your party saying it's not a big issue, that if you get someone else, that that could flip around pretty quickly, perhaps.

It also wasn't that long ago that young people, regardless of party, were particularly interested in climate change, and so I think that that may actually, would be an interesting spot to look is like, what do 18 to 29-year-olds say about climate regardless of party? Young Republicans, what do they think as well? And then also, not that long ago, evangelical Christians were starting to identify the environment as one of their major issues, and evangelical Christians being largely identifying with the Republican Party. So I think there's actually some possibility that that, that I think that that may, that Gallup poll number I think is probably right, but I think that may not be that solidified, that I wouldn't be surprised in four to eight years if we see that not, again, becoming an issue that both parties are concerned about.

WHEELER:

So let's talk about money in this election. So this was the most expensive midterm election ever. Elon Musk dropped in, Matt, how much was it?

SIMMONS:

Almost half a billion dollars.

WHEELER:

$500 million into this election, largely in Texas, his new home state. I was shocked to learn that Texas was not even the most expensive Senate race in the country. Ohio beat it with just ungodly amounts of money being spent there. The Georgia Senate election was also an extremely expensive one with the Republican candidate largely self-funding a lot of the advertisements there.

SIMMONS:

i'll also just say a lot of this money was coming from industry groups trying to protect their sort of advantages under the current congress so oil data centers

WHEELER:

Markets

SIMMONS:

And so despite their extreme spending to try to protect their industries, I think in most cases these elections went the other way.

WHEELER:

Yeah, so I think that this is perhaps surprising for a lot of people who view money in politics as some sort of an existential issue. So Ryan, what does the data tell us about the role of money in politics? Is it predictive? Is it determinative? What role does it have?

EMENAKER:

Yeah, I mean, for the most part, what most evidence has stated is that money doesn't usually change people's minds. It's true that money can come from one source or is self-funding. Self-funding candidates almost always lose. On some level, in certain contexts, it can be indicative of how much support someone has, particularly when it's grassroots funded. So a bunch of donations of $5 from a bunch of people, those are probably also people that are likely to vote for them. In that example, money is indicative of just who's winning, not necessarily that the money is making them win.

In other examples, where you have someone like Elon Musk putting $500 million in, that's just one person spending. That doesn't indicate that there's big support the way that a bunch of smaller donations might. And those types of candidates don't tend to win, where they're getting it from one source or when they're doing it themselves. Those types of candidates tend to lose. So for the most part, money doesn't seem to change who wins all that much, above a certain threshold, obviously.

If a candidate can't raise any money at all, well, they're probably not going to win. But usually, money cancels each other out. And once you get past a certain point, it's just a saturation point. It doesn't make much difference. Now money is hugely important in terms of politics, not necessarily for who wins, but who has access.

So there was a good study that was done about a decade or so ago, where someone sent a fake letter to a member of Congress and said, I want to have a meeting with the Congress member. And then they sent a separate letter that was all the same, except it said, I want to have a meeting with the Congress member, and I'm one of their large donors or whatever. And they found that a much higher percentage of the emails that identified themselves as donors got a response from the congressional staffers than the other ones. So money seems to be able to buy access. It doesn't seem to determine who wins.

It also seems to determine the behavior of elected officials who are seen spending much of their time trying to cultivate donors to their elections. And so rather than working on legislation or anything else, and many of them complain about this themselves, they said, I'd rather be representing people, but instead I'm trying to raise money. So money has a really negative impact in politics, it's just not the way that most people think of it. It's usually not determining who wins, but it is affecting access and it is affecting how elected officials behave.

WHEELER:

So back to kind of the issues that were motivating voters in this election, one of the interesting theories is that data centers had a role in this election, in particular, bipartisan opposition to the construction of data centers in a local community. So there were at least 41 ballot measures before voters in various local jurisdictions in this election that proposed to ban data centers in their communities, all but one of those passed, meaning only one jurisdiction voted to allow for data centers to be built in their communities. Data centers were seemingly important in the Texas gubernatorial race, with Greg Abbott's support of data centers in the north part of the state there being an important driver.

Also in Ohio with Amy Acton and Sherrod Brown taking their Republican opponents to task for their support of data centers. Ryan, do you think, again, that this is something that candidates looking forward to 2028 should prepare for? Are data centers going to become part of our national conversation politically in a more prominent way after this election?

EMENAKER:

Yeah, I mean, I can't think of any other issue where, one, it was on as many ballots as it was on across the country, and then, two, that had the success rate that it did. So we could look at some other types of issues that have some salience, but issue of abortion, it was on a few different ballots, but its success rate was about protecting abortion rights. It was about 50-50. In some states, they wanted to protect it. In other states, they didn't.

You could look at housing affordability. Some states, they wanted to protect it. Other states, they didn't. You could look at issues like whether we're going to require voter identification. Some states, it passed. Some states, it didn't.

The data center issue is the only thing where you can say it was almost universally people voting to restrict it. So that becomes pretty interesting that it's like, wow, that had a success rate that no other issue seemed to have on the ballot. I think it also comes back to that question a little bit about people are saying that climate change, the Republicans are like, climate change may not matter, but a lot of Republicans are very concerned about data centers. And the question becomes, well, then why? So the issue is pretty closely tied to environmental concerns. Absolutely, it has to do with farmland, too, for many Republicans.

Yes, it has to do with continued way of life. But a lot of that comes back to environmental concerns on some level. And so it seems like if we're trying to speak a common language, if Democrats are trying to say that we're worried about climate change, that maybe the way of talking about climate change is talking about a similar way of climate change has similar destructive aspects, as do data centers, and trying to note that the reason why you're concerned about data centers probably is closely aligned with why I'm concerned or this other person is concerned about climate change. But I think people are going to look at this and be like, wow, what a huge success rate.

How do we now start talking about data centers in a way that resonates with my other values? And then how do we use this? But I think this will be a huge issue in 2028.

SIMMONS:

So I'm stealing this idea from Naomi Klein, but I think something that strikes me about data centers and AI, normally with some sort of economic development versus environmental conflict, there's two sides of the coin. There's like, I want to protect the environment, but I'm also worried about the economy and jobs. With data centers and AI, it loses on both sides, right? It's bad for air quality and water and emissions and use of land, and it steals your job, right? It's the AI is going to come and take your, and so you end up losing on both sides, and then it becomes this incredibly unpopular thing. Data centers themselves weren't directly on the ballot in California, but we did have a proposition, Proposition 45, which would have sped up environmental reviews in which the opponents of it really pointed out that speeding up environmental reviews for data centers could potentially lead to more of them being built.

As of this recording, it is still too close to call, but it is trailing. It looks like it will not pass. I could be wrong by the time you hear this. What do you think concerns about sort of local environmental protection not? There was this big push in this election, right, to speed up environmental reviews and take away local folks' ability to protect their communities. Even in this wave that is not happening, what do you think about how that plays in this election?

EMENAKER:

Yeah, I mean, I think Humboldt County would be one of the defining features for Humboldt County is this concern about local control. And I think that's something that cuts across both Democrat and Republican. It's one way, at least in Humboldt County, to talk between the two parties is that this concern over we want local control and we don't want outsiders controlling how things operate. I think we saw this overall that played out this way throughout the state in terms of the way that Prop 45 is trending.

And I think it seems like pretty likely that that's the way it's going to go down even once we get the final results, which ultimately final results don't happen for 30 some days. But I think I think we can make a fairly good guess on where that's going to be a prediction based on the evidence. But yeah, I think I think Naomi Klein's framework is interesting in terms of how it loses on both the economic and the climate issue. But like it comes down to what economic you're talking about, because I think this has been true even for other types of industry that it also is going to hurt jobs, too.

But it helps the economy in terms of like the stock market or there's different types or different versions of the economy, the economy right now in terms of the stock market is doing absolutely wonderfully, the economy for most people's pocketbooks not doing so wonderfully. So I think that data centers aren't that different than maybe many other industrial changes that we've had, whether that was globalization and plants moving to other countries like that was bad for jobs and bad for the environment, but good for stockholders. Perhaps I don't know that the trend is that different on this than some of the other ones, but maybe it's easier to articulate it.

WHEELER:

All right, here in California, we had Prop 50 last year, which redistricted the state in response to other redistricting efforts across the country to try to gain more of a partisan advantage here for Democrats and other places for Republicans. As a consequence of this, we have at least three incumbent Republicans in the state of California losing their congressional seats. We have Valdeo, Kiley, and, uh-oh, there was a third, though.

So we are going to have a new experiment, at least for the next couple cycles, where Congressman Huffman and Congressman McGuire, I get to say that now for the first time, will be representing a large part of California that hasn't seen a Democrat since the 1960s, places like Modoc County, deep red Republican Modoc County. Ryan, we know that Congressman Huffman has been on the show. I think that he might be a listener. If you were to try to talk to the Congressman to tell him about how to be an effective representative for this new inland district, what sort of advice would you pass along?

EMENAKER:

Well, one, I think he does a really great job. And so he probably doesn't need my advice a whole lot, but I mean, I think, and one of the reasons he does a great job is that he tends to listen to folks, right? And so you want to listen to the concerns that people have. I think he's very much concerned about how do I represent this district in the right way? What are the concerns? What do people need in this area?

A lot of the job of members of Congress is constituent service. So how do I serve my constituents? What types of things they need? And his office has always been really great constituent service in a lot of that. Again, yeah, people within your district and your constituents are not always going to agree with you on every issue, but if they trust that you are concerned about them, that you work hard and that you're doing your best and that you're going to take care of them and you're going to try to bring money home to the district, generally, they're going to be happy with the type of representation you're providing, even if you don't vote the way they want on every issue.

And again, most people have no idea how their Congress members are voting on most issues are not able to pay attention on that granular level. But I think showing you care, showing you can bring money home to the district, showing that you have those concerns at heart, that you get to all different parts of the district, which he's always done a great job of, right? So despite the fact that our district was so long that he used to represent, he's all the way down in Marin, he spent a fair bit of time coming up to Humboldt County and he had really great representatives up here. I think if he continues to do that and does that for Modoc County as well, I think he's going to be a beloved member of Congress for those folks too.

WHEELER:

All right, well, I just remembered. It was Gallagher. James Gallagher was the third Republican who has now lost his seat.

SIMMONS:

So Huffman is not only going to be representing new constituents, he's also going to be part of divided government, right, where we have a House and Senate that are led by Democrats and then Donald Trump is still president for two more years. What can past divided governments tell us about what we can sort of expect for the next two years?

EMENAKER:

Yeah, I mean, divided government always gets fewer things done than in the rarer instances when we have unified government or we have all of them together. I mean, Congressman Huffman's familiar with this. I mean, he's been in the minority a large amount of his time, right? So he first got into Congress in 2012, I think. And much of that time he spent it in the minority. So he's used to not having all three of the elected chambers on his side.

But yeah, divided government's tough. My hope is that like they can figure out how to get some stuff done, right? There's certain things that like we all want to get done regardless of what party or how that plays out. Hopefully we all want the planes to work. We want FAA to function well. We want our food to be monitored and safe.

We want, right, all of those things, like good governance should hopefully prevail and we can get some work on those types of things. And then sure, there's gonna be lots of fighting and bickering and all of that stuff going on. But let's just get the government functioning in a way that we're all happy with, that we get our weather reports, that we get all the things taken care of that matter so much to all of us on a day-to-day basis.

WHEELER:

All right, Ryan, thank you so much for joining the show. And after the next set of elections, we should have you back on to break this down too. Great, thanks Tom. All right, this has been another episode of the Eco News Report. Join us again next week on this time and channel for more environmental news from the North coast of California.