An AP-NORC poll released August 6, 2026 finds that 90 percent of U.S. adults say extreme heat has had at least a minor impact on their lives, up from 83 percent two years earlier, even as the share of Americans who believe climate change is happening declined from 73 percent in September 2025 to 66 percent in late July 2026. AP-NORC

The survey of 1,165 Americans, conducted in late July, captures a paradox that deserves careful attention from analysts and policymakers alike: the lived experience of extreme heat is becoming more widespread and more acute, while acceptance of the underlying climate framework is softening. Al Jazeera

Thirty percent of respondents said extreme heat had a major impact on their outdoor activities, up from 21 percent in July 2024. The share reporting a major effect on vacation and travel plans rose from 8 percent to 15 percent over the same period. When minor impacts are included, roughly four in ten Americans say extreme heat has affected their travel or vacation plans. Chicago Tribune

The economic channel is even more pronounced. Eighty-one percent of Americans said their electricity bills had been affected by extreme heat over the past year, a sharp increase from 69 percent in July 2024. That figure underscores how climate stress transmits directly into household budgets, not through abstract projections but through monthly utility statements. Al Jazeera

Regional variation tracks with what climatologists have documented on the ground. In the U.S. West, 35 percent of respondents described heat as having a major impact on outdoor activities, above the national average of 30 percent. Climatologists at Virginia Tech University estimated that as of May, roughly 60 percent of the country was in drought, with 20 percent facing extreme drought conditions. Al Jazeera

The partisan divide remains a defining feature of the landscape. Democratic respondents were more likely than Republican ones to report that extreme heat had affected their plans. The poll does not resolve whether this gap reflects genuine differences in exposure, differences in perception, or the tendency for climate-adjacent self-reporting to align with partisan identity. What it does confirm is that even the experience of heat is filtered through a political lens, which complicates any policy response that depends on broadly shared public acknowledgment of the problem.

Meanwhile, belief that climate change is happening dropped seven percentage points over roughly ten months. Seventeen percent of Americans now say they are unsure, and 15 percent say it is not happening at all. The decline does not necessarily indicate a corresponding shift in material conditions; the physical indicators of warming, from drought extent to energy demand, have moved in the opposite direction. The divergence between worsening heat impacts and declining climate acceptance raises a question that strategists across sectors will need to grapple with: whether personal experience of extreme weather can sustain public support for climate policy when the conceptual frame for that experience is losing ground.

The broader context here is one of mounting physical and economic pressure meeting an unsettled public mood. When 81 percent of households report heat-driven impacts on electricity bills and nearly a third report major disruption to daily outdoor activity, the material case for adaptation infrastructure, grid resilience, and heat-mitigation policy is, on its own terms, strengthening. Yet the concurrent seven-point drop in climate belief suggests that the political coalition needed to sustain ambitious responses may be narrowing rather than widening. For policymakers, insurers, utility regulators, and public health officials, the AP-NORC data point to a landscape in which the operational case for action and the electoral case for action are pulling apart. Strategies that lean on the lived experience of heat, rather than on climate framing per se, may find a more durable constituency. But that is an inference, not a finding of the poll itself.

What the survey establishes is straightforward. More Americans are feeling the heat, paying for it, and altering their routines because of it. Fewer are drawing the conclusion that climate change is the reason. Both trends intensified over the past two years. How institutions respond to that gap, between rising material strain and declining conceptual acceptance, will shape the politics of climate adaptation through the remainder of the decade.