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Welcome back to the Data for Progress newsletter, your weekly update on our research, blog posts, and memos.
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Trump is finally out. But while we’re all taking a huge sigh of relief, we’re also hitting the ground running.
The first few months of the Biden presidency are progressives’ best window of opportunity to push for ambitious policy. Last year, we polled the “Day One agenda” to highlight executive orders the president can enact immediately. Now, we’re showing the new administration that it can build voter support by pushing for universal pre-K, creating manufacturing jobs (particularly in clean energy), a health insurance public option, and a $3,000 child allowance. Our polling finds that clear majorities support using deficit spending to finance each.
Support also extends across partisan lines — each of these items is favored by a majority of Independent voters and at least 45 percent of Republicans.
Climate is perhaps the most exciting window of opportunity for the Biden administration — it’s both a highly-urgent issue and a clear political winner. In a new blog yesterday, we call for the Biden admin to create a Civilian Climate Corps in its first 100 days — providing unionized, living-wage jobs that rebuild our economy, empower communities of color, and address the climate crisis.
Here are some other highlights from DFP this week:
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How do Americans describe the rioters at the Capitol? We collected hundreds of open-ended responses, and here’s what we found:
The most common word by far was “terrorists.” One in ten respondents used the word without prompting — so much so that it was the most common word cited by both Biden voters and non-voters/third party voters.
What was the top word for Trump voters? “Antifa.” But “terrorists,” “criminals,” and “idiots” also showed up in Trump voters’ top ten. That attests to just how upsetting most Americans found the attack on the Capitol building.
Read our writeup here, and scroll through the responses yourself here.
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Rep. Jamaal Bowman is just beginning his tenure, and he’s already making a huge impact: he’s introduced the COUP Act to create a commission to investigate the deadly insurrection at the Capitol and to prevent future attacks. We released polling showing that not only do most Democrats support Bowman's act (76 percent), but most Independents (59 percent) and Republicans (61 percent) do as well.
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There’s a lot going on in the news, but we can’t lose sight of the fact that a lethal pandemic is still surging across the country. The 40th wave of our coronavirus tracking poll gave us some unsettling findings: about 30 percent of Americans know someone who has been hospitalized with the coronavirus and about 20 percent know someone who’s died from it.
- Another thing we can’t lose sight of is the horror caused by our broken healthcare system. Our polling with The Appeal finds that 19 percent of Americans have foregone necessary healthcare because of cost, while an additional 32 percent have delayed (but not foregone) healthcare due to cost.
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