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POLLING SHOWS VOTERS WANT TO SEE ACTION ON CORPORATE POWER  
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Luke Goldstein
August 27, 2024
The American Prospect
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_ Despite these detractors’ claims, a new polling survey
commissioned by More Perfect Union and provided exclusively to the
Prospect finds that the populist messaging Harris has leaned into is
good politics. _

Audience members applaud as President Joe Biden speaks about lowering
costs for Americans at an event at Prince George’s Community College
in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, August 15, 2024, Bryan Olin
Dozier/NurPhoto via AP

 

This policy rollout by Harris follows several years of debate about
the extent to which “greedflation” was responsible for the
inflationary pressures squeezing American pocketbooks since 2021.
Blaming corporate greed played a significant role in the rhetoric
across the speeches at the Democratic National Convention last week,
much to the consternation of corporate Democrats, the economics
profession, and Republicans, who have called this focus literal
communism.

Despite these detractors’ claims, a new polling survey commissioned
by More Perfect Union and provided exclusively to the _Prospect_ finds
that the populist messaging Harris has leaned into is good politics.
The main issue identified by the study is that, while voters almost
universally endorse challenging corporate power, very few voters
credit the Biden-Harris administration for what they’ve done in this
area, because most don’t know about those policies at all.

Conducted by polling firm GQR, the survey contacted 1,700 likely
voters of mixed political affiliations and racial makeups in Arizona,
Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and
Wisconsin. The data is weighted to try to reflect the demographic
compositions of each state.

Consistent with other polling, voters see the economy and specifically
inflation as a top issue. Fifty-six percent of voters report groceries
as the hardest basic good to afford, followed by health care (51
percent) and gas prices (48 percent). What’s novel about the polling
though is that the survey digs deeper into what voters attribute as
the source of these problems, and how they would prefer the government
to fix them.

The most notable finding is that when provided with a set of options,
61 percent of the polling respondents, including two-thirds of
Democrats and 63 percent of independents, selected corporate greed as
the main cause for rising costs they’re experiencing. The
second-highest is government spending at 51 percent—an explanation
certainly favored by Republicans—and behind that is the pandemic
supply chain crunch at 46 percent.

“As a candidate, when you’re going to engage in any kind of
persuasion strategy with voters, it’s corporate power that allows
you to talk to anyone across the political spectrum. It’s the number
one issue on people’s minds,” said Faiz Shakir, former Bernie
Sanders campaign manager and the executive director of More Perfect
Union.

These findings are consistent with another recent poll
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by the more centrist group Blueprint. When testing out messaging with
voters, Blueprint saw that independents specifically blamed corporate
greed by roughly ten points more than the overall polling sample, and
that “using antitrust to enforce laws against price gouging and
price fixing” was favored overall by a 42-point margin.

There’s a clear bipartisan consensus in the More Perfect Union poll
that voters think corporate monopolies are trying to screw consumers
in one way or another. Based on the poll, 81 percent of all voters,
and a majority of Republicans, agree with the statement “I am
concerned that big corporations and businesses are becoming too
powerful,” with just 18 percent disagreeing outright. Regionally,
that argument is strongest with voters in the Rust Belt region, the
states Democrats need to win to keep the White House.

To address these economic conditions, voters support the government
action to take on corporate power. After hearing messaging for and
against the stance that breaking up companies will help improve
competition and lower prices, respondents overwhelmingly chose the
former, by nearly a 2-to-1 margin.

At some level, the strength of populist messaging likely has a lot to
do with the fact that large corporations have lost public trust. A
majority of respondents have a net “very unfavorable” perception
of corporate monopolies; they are hated even more than Project 2025 in
this sample. Ticketmaster, which was polled individually, had a
stronger net negative rating than the federal government or government
regulations. It’s a stark contrast to the results for labor unions,
which held a strongly favorable rating.

The polling bears out that voters in a general sense still don’t
necessarily trust the federal government or government regulation. But
when weighing mistrust in the bureaucracy against their hatred of
corporate monopolies, voters pick the lesser of two evils and see
targeted government action against corporate power as tangibly
improving their lives.

The poll asked voters about highly specific government actions that
the Biden-Harris administration has pursued or proposed. The more
granular the polling gets about these types of regulators against
companies, the more they’re seen in a positive light by the public.

In particular, 80 percent of voters or more want the government to use
leverage to bring down costs of essential drugs or treatments such as
insulin or inhalers, investigate big oil companies for inflating gas
prices, enforce right-to-repair rules, ban noncompete agreements, and
break up monopolies like Ticketmaster.

But when asked whether these policies are already being pursued by the
current administration, the story is more sobering. Not even a third
of voters know the government is already trying to ban noncompetes,
crack down on junk fees by airlines and banks, break up Ticketmaster
and Big Tech, or even make it easier to join a union.

Voters do recognize at a much higher clip (63 percent) that the
administration has capped insulin prices and a handful of other drugs,
which is likely because Democrats have made this a much more prominent
talking point as of late.

Prosecuting fraud by cryptocurrency companies was also one of the
Biden-Harris administration’s policies polled in the survey that
voters had a comparatively higher degree of awareness of, at 41
percent. Over 90 percent support taking these actions.

These results contradict the recent shift by Democrats, including the
Harris campaign, to embrace the cryptocurrency industry. The survey
also specifically provided voters with two competing interpretations
of crypto as ridden with fraud versus a promising innovation. By 24
points, more voters opted for the statement that read: “if the
government does not regulate emerging industries like crypto or
artificial intelligence, it will lead to criminal activity like fraud
and harm to children.”

Those results make it clear that the crypto game this election cycle
is entirely about the enormous spending by the industry’s political
action committees instead of what voters think. If politicians went
with polling, they’d be moving in the exact opposite direction on
the issue.

The poll’s results also indicate that two major court cases, one
just announced and the other under way, by the Biden administration
should provide tailwinds to the Harris campaign, if she chooses to
highlight them.

Harris is not just proposing to crack down on high grocery prices. The
Biden-Harris administration is currently suing to block the largest
grocery store merger in decades between Kroger and Albertsons on the
basis that it could raise prices by reducing competition. The trial
started yesterday and will be a major subplot in the election.

The Department of Justice also sued
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the software pricing company RealPage for facilitating a price-fixing
scheme across the nation’s housing markets. In the survey, 72
percent of voters supported the idea to “prosecute corporate
landlords who are using algorithmic pricing tools to fix prices.”

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* Economic Policy
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