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Nathaniel Stinnett, founder and executive director of the Environmental Voter Project, is striving to get environmentalists to vote in elections.

Stinnett joins CBSN's "Red & Blue" to explain his goals.

This year, if you care about the environment, you should spend April 22 and every other day working toward a more important date ― Nov. 6, Election Day. That’s when we can force policymakers to protect our climate and natural resources. Nov. 6 is this year’s Earth Day, and all of us need to show up.

Campaigns are built around winning the next election—not changing the electorate in the long term. But changing the long-term shape of the electorate is all Stinnett is focused on, and to do it, he’s bucking one of the most enduring features of U.S. politics. The system is set up to cater to people who voted in the last few elections. Unlikely voters are nearly invisible.

But, if Stinnett is right, they may be the key to saving the world.

In campaigns, so much turns on identifying, persuading, and turning out the perennial likely voter. LVs, as they're known, are a consistent target of pollsters and, depending on if they're your supporters, the campaign's broader mobilization efforts. But in 2018, this question persists: How precisely can we measure which voters actually intend to vote, and which don't?