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Across Philadelphia, dozens of silver haired, climate-conscious canvassers are going door to door in the last weeks before Election Day, leaving green slips of paper with guides on how to register to vote this year. 

“It’s the most consequential one that I’ve been a part of,” climate canvasser Daniel Carlson told CBS News. “I’ve been voting for four decades.”

Carlson is part of Third Act, a climate activist group for people over 60. The group is trying to mobilize voters on climate change in an election that’s been dominated by worries about the economy, immigration and abortion access.

CBS News polling has found climate change is “not a factor” for 32% of voters in the presidential race, but for millions, it’s their top issue, according to the Environmental Voter Project, another non-profit group; EVP works on identifying climate-minded voters and get them to the polls. EVP focuses on low-propensity climate voters — those who did not vote in the last presidential election and are concerned about climate change. 

Nathaniel Sinnett, executive director of the Environmental Voter Project, said, “In Pennsylvania, we’ve identified 245,000 of these voters,” Sinnett told CBS News, and he’s found equally high numbers in other key battleground states where EVP is active. In 2020, Joe Biden’s margin of victory over Donald Trump in Pennsylvania was 80,555.

EVP says it uses predictive modeling and data analytics to identify millions of climate-focused registered voters, and then it relies on voter files to target its efforts toward environmentalists who are registered to vote but who have not been voting. 

“We really like what we’re seeing in the early voting, nearly 130,000 first-time climate voters have already cast ballots in the 19 states where we work,” says Sinnett.

Read more of this story here. 

By Tracy Wholf and Seiji Yamashita