In the second Trump administration, Democrats have been backing away from climate change messaging. Joe Biden apparently got no credit for the Inflation Reduction Act, his marquee climate policy bill, and Trump has since unceremoniously disposed of it.

The Searchlight Institute, a centrist think tank, presented polling last September indicating that while most Americans think climate change is a problem, they don’t think it’s a major one. Therefore, the first step to solving climate change is “don’t say climate change.” Luckily, as Matt Huber points out at The New York Times, tremendous progress in renewable energy means one can accomplish a lot, emissions-wise, without mentioning climate change at all. The “heart of any affordability agenda—housing, energy, transportation—overlaps with the sectors we must decarbonize,” he writes. “When it comes to climate change, for now, it might be better to say nothing at all.”

When it comes to actual politicians running for office this year, perhaps that is a sensible strategy. But in terms of the rest of the broad Democratic coalition, it is not.

It’s not hard to see why climate policy polls poorly: People have been comprehensively misled about it. On one hand, climate activism emerged from the environmental movement, which tends to present measures to protect the environment as posing an inherent trade-off with jobs and growth. If we create some new national park, for instance, then that land won’t be available for aluminum smelters or data centers. (In reality, it is usually not this simple, but that’s the stereotype.)

On the other hand, and much more importantly, right-wing media—heavily funded by fossil fuel interests—has been lying about climate change for decades. They lied for years that it wasn’t happening, then they lied for years that it was “paused,” and now that the problem is undeniably happening all around us, they lie that we can’t do anything about it.