Mentions of “climate change” across North American media and research databases have fallen sharply since the 2024 election, marking the steepest post-election drop in the term’s modern history.
Usage data from the LexisNexis archive shows that references to “climate change” peaked in 2023 and remained elevated through most of 2024, before entering a sustained decline beginning in December 2024.
In calendar year 2025, there were roughly 350,000 usages of the term across English-language North American press, academic, legal, and other sources, down from around 400,000 in 2024, a decline of 50,000 mentions, or 12.5%.
This data represents both the largest absolute and percentage decline recorded in a post-presidential election year since the term entered widespread use around 2005, according to calculations based on Nexis data.
The downward trend has continued into 2026.
In the first 20 days of January, the term appeared approximately 14,000 times in the same North American English-language sources, suggesting a daily rate of about 700 mentions. If that pace holds, total usage in 2026 would land well below recent election-cycle peaks.
The data underscores how closely environmental language tracks U.S. presidential politics.
With limited exceptions, mentions of “climate change” have consistently surged in the run-up to presidential elections and receded afterward. Between January 2007 and the end of 2008, there were roughly 110,000 mentions each year; this number surged to 150,000 in the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency and then receded to pre-election levels by 2011.
A similar pattern followed the 2016 election, though that cycle was unusual: mentions rose from about 173,000 in 2016 to 188,000 in 2017, an increase of 8.67%. The mentions receded slightly before picking up again at the tail end of 2018 and continuing to increase in the 2020 presidential election cycle.
That post-2016 increase coincided with heightened debate over energy policy after President Donald Trump, then beginning his first term, moved to approve projects such as the Keystone XL pipeline, an issue that drew sustained media and political attention.
No such rebound has followed the 2024 election.
There are only about two decades of meaningful data on the phrase “climate change” in the Nexis archive. The term began replacing “global warming” in the mid-2000s as the dominant descriptor of a similar phenomenon.
“Global warming” rose sharply in the mid-1990s, peaked ahead of the 2008 presidential election, and then steadily declined as “climate change” gained prominence. From January 2007 through the end of 2008, “global warming” appeared about 216,000 times.
The older term experienced a brief resurgence ahead of the 2024 election, but tapered off again.
The decline in “climate change” mentions also aligns with shifting political rhetoric among Democrats after their losses in the 2024 election. In California and other Democratic-led states, party leaders have paused or rolled back elements of climate policy amid concerns about affordability and cost-of-living pressures, a recalibration detailed in a Politico report last year.
The “climate change” issue has been politically damaging to the traditional base of the Democratic Party.
In 2023, then-President Biden came under fire from former UAW leadership after he imposed an electric vehicle mandate on the federal fleet, an action that labor leaders felt would reduce auto jobs in the United States, The Dallas Express reported. Eventually, Biden marched with the UAW picketers in a strike.
At the same time, some left-wing advocates have argued that retreating from climate messaging is a strategic mistake, pointing to polling that shows voters still trust Democrats more than Republicans on climate and clean energy, according to a 2025 analysis published by The New Republic.
Public debate has remained visible at the national level, particularly after Trump told the United Nations in September 2025 that climate change was “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” NPR reported.
The LexisNexis Archive is a database of nearly every printed document in the English language; it includes newspapers, advertisements, legal cases, congressional testimony, blogs, T.V. news transcripts, presidential speeches, press releases, and similar material. The LexisNexis archive largely lacks social media posts and podcasts. Data in the archive can sometimes be filtered by language and location.