A prominent ultra-conservative think tank with a long history of climate denial and close ties to the Trump administration is questioning whether all Americans should be allowed to cast ballots in elections.
“Look, I’m going to say something very controversial: Not every adult over the age of 18 should have the right to vote,” Jim Lakely, communications director of the Heartland Institute, said during an early April episode of the group’s In the Tank podcast.
Heartland was a contributor to Project 2025, the policy blueprint for Trump’s second term.
“We did not have universal suffrage when the framers of the Constitution founded this country. It varied a little bit state-to-state, but basically you had to be a white man. You had to be an owner of property, and a certain amount of property, and that pretty much was only white men,” Lakely said. “We’re never going back to that, of course, and I wouldn’t actually argue for that. But there’s something to be said for the way they set that up on purpose, and it was because they wanted only people who have a stake in the country — mainly the people paying taxes to support the government — should have the franchise and be able to select the direction of the government.”
Lakely’s comments, which DeSmog has quoted in full at his request, came just days before Heartland hosted a two-day conference in Washington, D.C. keynoted by Lee Zeldin, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Zeldin has been floated to replace Pam Bondi as Trump’s attorney general.
Zeldin praised the Heartland Institute, which has long been at the forefront of spreading climate disinformation and strongly backed the EPA’s recent repeal of the “endangerment finding,” the Obama-era determination that under-girded the federal government’s authority to limit climate-heating air pollution.
It was time to “celebrate vindication” of the group’s decades of anti-climate campaigning, Zeldin said.
All Americans should be worried that a top Trump cabinet official openly lauded a group that questions universal suffrage, said climate scientist Michael Mann, the director of the Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania.
“Heartland’s authoritarian, anti-democratic agenda is now exposed for all to see,” Mann told DeSmog in email. “The assault on climate action and the assault on democracy are one and the same, an effort to advance the authoritarian agenda of fossil fuel interests and the politicians in their pay.”
When approached for comment, the EPA told DeSmog: “Administrator Zeldin is doing something genuinely different at EPA, refocusing the agency on its core mission of protecting human health and the environment and exercising its statutory authority as written, not as expansively reimagined in prior years. Administrator Zeldin will continue advancing President Trump’s agenda on behalf of the Americans who elected him to do exactly that.”
‘Reduce the Franchise’
During the podcast, Heartland senior fellow S.T. Karnick backedresponded to up Lakely’s comments about voting. “The original plan in America was that votes would go one vote to each property-holding family,” Karnick said. “That has been hacked away at throughout the decades and for a two and a half centuries now.”
“Now, can you go back?” he added. “Well, anything’s possible, but it wouldn’t be the same country we’re living in in any way to start to reduce the franchise.” Karnick said that an alternative solution would be to “repeal the doggone 17th Amendment,” the 1913 addition to the Constitution that established the direct election of U.S. senators, and return to having senators elected by state legislatures. “It would be a way of pulling away from the popular votes,” he said.
Heartland Research Fellow Linnea Lucken and Editorial Director Chris Talgo also appeared on the podcast.
During the Heartland podcast, Lakely made the false claim that the use of mail-in ballots during the COVID-19 pandemic created “quite a bit” of “easy natural election fraud,” saying that “if you could go to the grocery store, if you could go to a BLM [Black Lives Matter] march, you can get in line at your local polling place and vote and participate in the election.” When DeSmog approached Lakely for comment about this last claim, Lakely responded: “I stand by that.”
Zeldin, a longtime Trump supporter, has previously endorsed similar claims. Following Trump’s loss of the 2020 election to Joe Biden, Zeldin — then a House member representing New York’s 1st Congressional District — “sided with Republicans who were amplifying doubts about its legitimacy,” according to The New York Times, and shared ideas with White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on how to discredit Biden’s win. On January 6, 2021, Zeldin voted against certifying the election results.
The following year, while running as the Republican candidate for governor of New York, Zeldin was disqualified from getting his ticket an additional ballot line for the Independence Party, because nearly 13,000 of the petition signatures his campaign submitted to the state elections board were photocopied duplicates.
Soon after taking over the EPA in 2025, Zeldin promised that the agency would begin “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.” Since then he has revoked billions in climate funding, slashed thousands of EPA staff, and rolled back dozens of clean air and water protections.
In his Heartland keynote address, Zeldin argued that these rollbacks were “what the American public voted for” when they re-elected Trump.
The EPA chief praised the Heartland audience for being “right there on the front lines” of opposition to the endangerment finding. “I appreciate all of you for having the thoughtfulness years and decades ahead of your time.”
Attorney General Zeldin?
If Zeldin replaced Bondi, he would oversee the Justice Department’s defense of his EPA actions in court, including lawsuits by states and environmental groups over the endangerment finding repeal.
“The Supreme Court, in my opinion quite correctly, would say that the EPA should not be putting forth trillions of dollars in regulations without there being a vote in Congress,” Zeldin said in his speech, adding that members of Congress are “the ones who, as recently as this upcoming November [mid-term elections], put their name on the ballot, go before the people, and the American public will decide who in this republic will represent them.”
Zeldin’s record of election denial would fit right in at the top of the current Justice Department.
Since Trump took office, the department has shifted from enforcing voting rights laws — including scrutinizing whether states are conducting fair elections and prosecuting threats against election officials — to investigating alleged voter fraud. Most of the lawyers working in the Voting Section of the agency’s Civil Rights Division have left, according to reporting by Wired, and many of their replacements have ties to election denial groups.
Right now, Trump’s cratering approval ratings with voters paint a grim picture for Republicans in the November elections — but as part of his efforts to manipulate the mid-terms, the Trump Justice Department has been openly coming to their aid.
Under former AG Bondi, the department began collecting voter data from cooperative states — and suing dozens of states to get more — apparently hoping to direct purges of the rolls. The FBI in January raided an election office and seized 2020 voting records in Fulton County, Georgia, which Trump lost, although It’s well-established that voter fraud is very rare in the United States, and didn’t happen in 2020.
A number of red states have already answered Trump’s call to create more House seats for Republicans by redrawing their election districts. Now more are on the way because in late April the Supreme Court’s conservative majority gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, handing down a ruling that effectively lets states redraw their election districts in ways that weaken the voting power of Blacks and other minorities.
Within hours of the decision, several southern states begantaking steps to create election maps that will increase the number of Republican House seats.
Badge of Dishonor
The Heartland Institute, which has denied that humans are driving climate change, calling it a “delusion,” has boasted of its “strong” ties to “big individuals” in the Trump administration.
During Trump’s first term, as DeSmog reported at the time, Heartland advised the EPA on staffing and policy decisions. “They recognized us as the pre-eminent organisation opposing the radical climate alarmism agenda and instead promoting sound science and policy,” said Tim Huelskamp — a former Republican congressman who was then leading Heartland — in 2018 .
Heartland also advised a member of the administration’s National Security Council, longtime climate denier William Happer, on how to discredit the fact that burning fossil fuels was driving dangerous levels of global heating.
When Trump announced in 2017 that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, he invited Heartland’s then-CEO Joseph Blast to attend the announcement at the White House.
The Heartland Institute received at least $676,000 between 1998 and 2007 from U.S. oil giant ExxonMobil. It has received donations from Republican donors in the Mercer family. as well as foundations linked to the owners of Koch Industries – a fossil fuel giant and a leading sponsor of climate science denial.
“What a badge of dishonor it is to be a keynote speaker at this plutocrat-funded propaganda event masquerading as a ‘conference,” Mann said to DeSmog, referencing Zeldin’s ties to the group. “Polluting interests can only advance their agenda of a fossil fuel-dependent America by keeping Republicans in power.”
