Midterms Matter

Photo by Jeremiah Watt

Every great adventure starts with training and preparation. You don’t summit a peak you’ve been eyeing for years by winging it, and you don’t crush an ultra marathon goal without putting in the miles. As outdoors people, we know preparation is everything. We need the right gear, conditioning, and mindset because in the mountains, the margins are thin and the stakes are high.

It’s time we brought that same intensity to the ballot box. Midterms Matter, and this November the stakes for the places we live, work, and recreate couldn’t be higher.

Let’s not sugarcoat it. The last year and a half has brought one of the most aggressive rollbacks of public lands and climate protections in modern history.

• 86 million+ acres of public land protections stripped since January 2025, an area bigger than 70 Grand Canyons
• Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears gutted by an executive order, cut from almost 3 million protected acres to less than 300,000
• 1.3 million acres of the Arctic auctioned off in a single lease sale for $163.7 million, including land a court had ordered protected
• The Endangerment Finding — the legal backbone of federal climate regulation — was overturned, stripping the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions at the source
• Limits on mercury, arsenic, and other toxic air pollutants from coal plants weakened, with dozens of plants exempted outright
• Wastewater discharge rules rolled back and the legal definition of protected waterways narrowed
• EPA inspections and penalties slashed, with “enforcement discretion” letting polluters off the hook entirely
• Independent scientific advisory boards weakened or eliminated, and tools like EJScreen which tracked pollution in vulnerable communities was pulled offline
• The 2025 House GOP budget reconciliation bill alone opened 460,000+ acres to drilling and mining, slashed $250B+ in clean energy tax credits, and put 1 million+ clean energy jobs at risk

And the list goes on.

This is what happens when the people writing the rules don’t have to answer to the people who use these lands, breathe the air, and drink the water. That changes only when we show up to vote.

One of Protect Our Winters’ core pillars is to Shift Who Decides by educating and activating the Outdoor State, the massive, often-underestimated voting bloc of skiers, climbers, hikers, paddlers, bikers, and anglers who love wild places and are done watching them get auctioned off climate progress protecting them rolled back. Our goal is to make clean air, clean water, and a healthy planet a defining issue lawmakers can’t ignore, because the people who elect them won’t let them.

For the 2026 midterms, POW aims to reach 45 million eligible voters and get them to the polls. These midterms will shape American politics for years to come and they’re one of the few tools we have to push back against the systemic dismantling happening right now.

We can’t do this alone, so we rally together. In 2022, voter turnout was above 52% of the voting-age population, one of only three midterms since 1978 to top 50%. That’s the momentum we need to build on. Climate policy doesn’t become a federal priority because we hope hard enough. It becomes a priority when we vote like it matters.

Think about the margins we operate in outdoors. A millimeter is the difference between sticking a crimp on a big wall and taking a whipper. Midterms run on margins just as thin, often decided by a small, motivated slice of the electorate. Your vote isn’t a drop in the bucket. It’s the crimp. 

POW is here to make voting easy. Consider us your backcountry guide to the top of Midterm Mountain. Choose action over apathy. Check your voter registration status, update it if you need to, and stay locked in on every critical date in your state.

The rollbacks aren’t stopping on their own. Let’s Shift Who Decides.

Author: Stacie Sullivan

Stacie always knew she wanted to pursue a career in the ski industry from a young age, having first clicked into skis at the age of 4 and writing her 8th grade career project on being a professional skier. While her dreams of becoming a professional athlete didn’t quite pan out the way she planned at […]