It was another summer weekend in America, complete with wildfires in California, flash floods in Connecticut and violent storms in Tennessee.

Yet even as climate change is hitting home for more and more Americans, the issue remains a relatively low priority for many. Global warming is just the 19th most important issue with voters, behind issues like improving roads and the budget deficit, according to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

That isn’t stopping some Democrats from trying to make the issue central to the race for president.

Several climate groups this week launched a $55 million ad campaign to support Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential bid. Last week, John Kerry, Jane Fonda, Bill Nye and Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts joined a Zoom meeting called Climate Voters for Harris.

And on Monday, the Democratic National Convention opened in Chicago, with President Biden touting the success of the Inflation Reduction Act, which has unleashed billions of dollars in clean energy investments. “With your support, we passed the most significant climate law in the history of mankind,” he said.

Harris has yet to lay out a detailed climate policy as part of her presidential campaign. Nevertheless, climate-minded voters have flocked to support her.

As vice president, she cast the deciding vote to pass the Inflation Reduction Act. As a senator, she was one of the sponsors of the Green New Deal. As the attorney general of California, she took on big oil companies. That is enough to give her supporters confidence that, if elected, she will pursue an ambitious plan to reduce emissions and transition the country away from fossil fuels.

Former President Donald J. Trump, by contrast, has called climate change a hoax, has pledged to expand oil and gas production from already record highs and recently appeared to confuse nuclear power and nuclear weapons. On Monday, he called for rolling back pollution regulations. If elected, Trump has vowed to undo parts of the Inflation Reduction Act.

“The writing is on the wall, and Donald Trump would set us backward,” said Sweta Chakraborty, a behavioral scientist who organized the Climate Voters for Harris video call and is a surrogate for the campaign.

Yet even supporters of Harris recognize that when it comes to communicating climate issues, they face an uphill fight.

Most voters say they have not heard much about the Inflation Reduction Act, according to the Yale data, and fewer than half believe it will help them or the country.

“I definitely wish Taylor Swift was calling this the ‘Climate Kick Ass Act’ or something like that,” said Chakraborty. “That would just reach everybody and resonate with everybody.”

In the absence of that, Chakraborty said, she is working to enlist other celebrities to make the case that a Harris administration would take bold action to combat climate change.

“We have to be really smart about explaining the really wonky, long-term, monumental policy legacy that Biden left behind, which has actually really created jobs and really created a more breathable future,” Chakraborty said.

Finding ways to make the climate issue break through won’t be easy. Some of the disconnect is because of the temporal dynamics of climate change — it’s the ultimate long-term problem in a world consumed by short-term crises.

There’s also a partisan challenge in communicating the risks of climate change. Just 54 percent of Americans overall say climate chance is a major threat to the country, and while that figure is 78 percent among Democrats, it is just 23 percent among Republicans, according to the Pew Research Center.

Even the climate groups running the pro-Harris ads seem to understand that when it comes to reaching everyday voters, climate is not necessarily a winning issue.

“Three of the ads, shared with The New York Times before their release, frame President Biden’s climate policies and Harris’s prospective policies in terms of economic benefits rather than environmental ones, and also touch on economic issues not directly related to the climate,” Maggie Astor reported.

Chakraborty said that she expected Harris to lay out a more detailed climate agenda in the weeks ahead. That could well include expanding on President Biden’s work with the Inflation Reduction Act and his creation of the Climate Corps. It could also mean identifying new ways to reduce planet warming emissions, though the details remain to be seen.

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