As wildfires rage on in southern California, the toll on climate change has become too difficult to ignore.

While touring the sites ravaged by wildfires, Trump refused to link the recent conflagration with climate change, suggesting that a lack of proper forest management was to be blamed.

"It will start getting cooler, you just watch," said Trump when being told by California's secretary for natural resources that a warming climate is making the state's fires worse.

In the year of the pandemic, climate change was unlikely to be the top issue for the 2020 election. That was until the recent wildfires in California put the issue to the center stage. But underlying the surge in climate and environmental concerns is a big partisan divide. While addressing climate change has become a major concern for the Democrats, it still hasn't broken into the top ten priorities for Republican voters.

The fires couldn't have come at a worse time for Trump's reelection bid, which is already struggling on multiple fronts, including the COVID-19 pandemic, social unrest, and record unemployment. In the past week, the people in California, Oregon, and Washington are being reminded of another thing the president is notorious for climate change denial.

In an open letter to the president, Washington Governor Jay Inslee wrote, "your refusal to address climate change – and your active steps to enable even more carbon pollution – will accelerate devastating wildfires like those you're seeing today."

The Democrats quickly pointed to the devastation as a warning for what's to come with Trump in the White House. "It's clear we are not safe in Donald Trump's America," Biden said. Calling Trump a "climate arsonist," the Democratic candidate warned that if "a climate denier" gets a second term, more of these "hellish events" will ensue.

But for Biden, the fires are a reminder to his more progressive base that the Democrats have yet to warm up to the Green New Deal, a grand plan to tackle climate change by getting the U.S. off fossil fuels. 

However, supporting this ambitious plan is likely both economically and politically costly, since oil jobs in the Midwest are far more important to securing those swing votes than those made homeless in reliably Democratic California, which is represented by Biden's running mate Kamala Harris in the Senate.

"The Biden campaign understands that a full embrace of an aggressive climate-change agenda could create problems for them in [the] Upper Midwest," political strategist Dan Schnur told the Associated Press.

Though the debate around climate change is at a state of seemingly intractable polarization, the impact of climate change does not recognize party lines. 

According to the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institute, among the states that may suffer the most economic harm from climate change, including Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, to name a few, nine of ten states voted heavily for Donald Trump in 2016. 

And the increasing frequency of climate-induced natural disasters in recent years is forcing voters to realize the impact of climate change on their lives, whether it is wildfires in California, storms in Iowa, or hurricanes in Florida.

Two demographic groups' reckoning of climate change's impact on their lives is likely to swing election results. One is young voters who have consistently ranked climate as their priority issues. Their increasing frustration with established Republicans who considered climate change a "hoax" has led to conservative organizations' formation with an environmental agenda, e.g., American Conservation Coalition, a group of young Republican environmental activists. 

"Young people don't see climate in terms of Republicans or Democrats; Young people see it in terms of climate," said Benji Backer, president of the American Conservation Coalition, at a recent interview with CNN, adding that 77 percent of young conservatives want action on climate. 

Over the past four years, Trump has undone many major pieces of the Obama-era regulations on climate change. He led the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Change Agreement soon after his coming to office, lifted restrictions on drilling and exploration of public lands and offshore waters, and eliminated rules that increase carbon emissions costs. 

The second demographic group that matters is Latino voters, many of whom support pro-climate policies and a turnout of which is likely to make a big difference in states like Texas, Colorado, and Arizona. The interest in addressing climate change stems partially from personal experience – after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, survivors of the hurricane were left to fend for themselves. 

According to polling conducted by Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, a majority of Hispanics/Latino voters say global warming will be "very important" to their vote, and they rank the importance of global warming as equal to that of immigration reform, another issue that concerns about their survival. 

Repeated natural disasters have brought attention to U.S. voters on the havoc brought by climate change, and youth, in particular, are demanding stronger action on the environment. At a time when the globe has witnessed surging interest from the next generation on climate change, parties have to come up with some concrete proposals to deal with the ticking time bomb.