Patagonia CEO takes aim at political apathy
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Photo collage: Ryan Gellert, CEO of Patagonia, at Axios event in September 2026 (Sam Popp for Axios); Patagonia store logo (Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images); Bears Ears National Monument, Utah. (George Frey/Getty Images)
Patagonia has a blunt goal for this year's midterms: Get more environmentally minded Americans to care enough to vote.
Why it matters: The outdoor apparel company is betting millions of dollars that political apathy can be overcome — even as the issues it champions struggle to compete with affordability and other voter concerns.
Driving the news: Patagonia's $11.2 million get-out-the-vote campaign, launched Sept. 26, met its goal within four days.
- Patagonia offered $100 credits to 112,000 people who each helped three friends make a plan to vote, resulting in nearly a half-million voting plans, the company said.
- The number was intentional, matching the 11.2 million environmentalists who did not vote in the last election, according to the nonprofit Environmental Voter Project.
"I think apathy is a huge part of it," Patagonia CEO Ryan Gellert said when asked what he thinks is keeping people politically disengaged.
- "It's probably the single biggest thing that concerns me right now," he told Axios in an interview.
- He said President Trump was "flooding the zone" with so much that it is overwhelming people. "I just think people are just really feeling beat up, and I get it," Gellert said.
The big picture: The California-based company has long owned a rare spot in corporate America: consistently taking high-profile, and sometimes controversial, positions on environmental causes.
- Founder Yvon Chouinard transferred ownership of the company in 2022 to a trust and nonprofit organization, with profits not reinvested in the company directed toward fighting climate change.
Catch up quick: Patagonia has sued the Trump administration twice over efforts to shrink Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, including the second one last month.
Yes, but: Patagonia says its midterm campaign is strictly about voter participation — not particular candidates or elected officials — even as Gellert himself is an outspoken critic of Trump's environmental record.
- Gellert said Patagonia has worked constructively with Republican presidents and fought Democratic administrations when it disagreed with them.
- "We center candidates and we center issues that we consider to be pro-environment," he said.
"Candidly, I never imagined an administration that was so wholly set from one end of government to the other end attacking these things," Gellert told Axios, referring to Trump administration moves to roll back environmental and conservation policies.
- White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers rejected Gellert's criticism, arguing Trump has rolled back costly climate regulations while maintaining longstanding environmental protections.
Reality check: Climate and the environment aren't breaking through as a leading midterm concern. In a July Pew poll that asked voters without prompting what one issue they most wanted congressional candidates to discuss, climate and the environment didn't meet the 4% threshold to be included.
Environmental and pocketbook concerns overlap around AI infrastructure. Roughly 8 in 10 Americans say they're concerned about data centers' impacts on electricity prices, water supplies or grid reliability, according to a September AP-NORC/University of Chicago poll.
- "Energy prices and data centers are the proxy for a lot of the frustration around a lot of these issues," Gellert said. "And that's everything from affordability to climate and nature."
Gellert is taking another unusually outspoken position on this topic.
- "It's unmissable the outsized impact that they have had," Gellert said about data centers, questioning whether tech companies can follow through on promises to limit their environmental footprint.
- Tech companies say advances in cooling and energy efficiency, along with investments in new power supplies, can reduce data centers' environmental footprint even as AI demand grows.
Zoom in: Gellert has conflicted views on the technology itself.
- Patagonia supports employees' access to AI and is using it to optimize inventory, he said.
- "And do I, as a human, feel good about the future of AI? I'm really, really, really concerned about this."
Zoom out: Gellert said fear among corporations about speaking out against the Trump administration that he first discussed at an Axios event last year has worsened, but he hopes the midterms will change that.
- "I do think after the midterms, perhaps the landscape will feel a bit more settled, and we'll see a bit more leadership from the business sector than we've been seeing," he said.
Editor's note: Amy Harder is a fellow at the University of Chicago's Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth, but was not involved in the polling and received no advance access beyond that provided to other journalists.
