Welcome back to the Data for Progress newsletter, your weekly update on our research, blog posts, and memos.

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We’re just nine days into 2021, and we’ve already experienced a year’s worth of news. But the most important story of the year so far — in terms of advancing progressive policy in the coming years — is an overwhelmingly positive one: Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won in Georgia.

Over the past few weeks, we dedicated our efforts to urging Georgia Democrats to run on stimulus checks. Our polling found that more than three-quarters of Democrats, Independents, *and* Republicans prefer $2,000 checks to $600 checks. 

Our surveys also showed that Independent voters increase their support for Democrats by 14 percentage points (!!) after hearing that they promise to pass stimulus checks.

We even got Sen. Chuck Schumer on the blog to push for $2,000 checks, as well as Sen. Ron Wyden, who outlined that to win in Georgia, “every Democrat should be talking about two things: relief checks and enhanced unemployment benefits.” 

Our findings drove tons of media attention. Chris Hayes cited our polling live on Election Night on MSNBC, the Washington Post emphasized the overwhelming public support for $2,000 checks, and Eric Levitz used our research in a great New York Magazine piece calling for Georgia Democrats to campaign on stimulus checks.

In the end, Georgia Democrats took this advice and made it clear to voters that the election was a referendum on stimulus checks — and it paid off! Ossoff and Warnock ran strong campaigns promising tangible economic benefits for voters, and they won convincingly — providing the absolutely critical 49th and 50th Democratic votes in the Senate.

Here are some other highlights from DFP this week:

• We now have 50 Democratic votes in the Senate, but that majority doesn’t mean much  for most legislation, which currently requires 60 votes to overcome the filibuster. In new polling, we show that voters **from both parties** want to replace the filibuster with a simple majority vote in order to pass a $2 trillion stimulus bill.
  
  
   

• When Republican voters cast their ballots for the GOP, do they realize what their party’s policy positions are? Our research finds that the answer is no. In an eye-opening new blog piece, we show that 76 percent of Republican voters think their party supports protections for pre-existing conditions, 38 percent think their party supports the Medicaid expansion, and 30 percent think their party supports the $15 minimum wage — even though the GOP has consistently opposed each of these issues.
  
  
   

• Rep. Jan Schakowsky penned a blog post for DFP about how U.S. trade policy should prioritize people over wealthy shareholders and why we should adopt a national industrial policy, including “Buy American” domestic manufacturing requirements.
   

Media Hits

• "Indigenous and Black people have been forced to flee in the face of lawless white mobs since before this republic was founded. How far have we come, really?" That’s a quote from a fantastic new op-ed in the National Observer by our VP of policy and strategy Julian Brave NoiseCat.

• Julian also went on PBS NewsHour to explain how tribal leaders, environmentalists, and progressive activists worked to get Deb Haaland the Secretary of Interior nomination.

• Our Deputy Climate Director Marcela Mulholland wrote about her journey through heartbreak and healing in the fight against climate change for Earthjustice’s quarterly magazine.

Meme of the Week