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To recap the year, here are our top 18 highlights of Data for Progress’ 2021:
1. Our Polling Made Inroads in the White House and Congress
In just three years, we went from not even existing to having our polling cited by President Biden on a call with House Democrats. As Politico wrote, that call demonstrated Data for Progress’ growing impact on national politics: “Data for Progress may not have been in existence when Biden was vice president, but it’s become a mainstay for activists and lawmakers on the left.”
Within the first seven days of April, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki cited our polling in two separate press briefings. She’s not the only one: White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy, and former senior advisor Anita Dunn have all used our polling to advocate for progressive policies. In September, Axios obtained internal documents from White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield laying out Democrats’ messaging strategy around Build Back Better. It turns out, it was loaded with Data for Progress polling. Our polling was cited six separate times to show the popularity of Biden’s investment agenda, far more than any other pollster. Our polling also made an appearance in two White House press releases, and in September, President Biden tweeted our polling to show the popularity of the Build Back Better agenda.
Every progressive policy that gets included in the Biden agenda is a win for our movement — and our position of influence in the White House is helping progressives push for these wins.
2. We Pushed for #DebForInterior — And Won
Today, the Interior Department is led by the first-ever Native American Cabinet secretary — Madam Secretary Deb Haaland. Julian Brave NoiseCat was one of the key advocates for Haaland’s appointment and confirmation, leading a sophisticated inside-outside strategy utilizing writing, earned media, organizing, advocacy, social media, and lots of memes. This incredible campaign is one of the many reasons Julian was named to the TIME100 Next 2021.
That’s not the only way we worked to make Biden’s cabinet more progressive. We also consistently showed with our polling that voters support antitrust enforcement to take on Big Tech, which we used to push for Jonathan Kanter as the Justice Department’s antitrust chief — a position he ultimately received.
3. We Showed Georgia Democrats That Stimulus Checks Are the Path to Victory
It feels like ancient history since last January, but this year started on a high note: Democrats sent Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock to the United States Senate. We were only able to pass the historic American Rescue Plan this March because they won both of Georgia’s crucial special election races, and throughout these elections, we sent one message loud and clear to both campaigns: run — and win — on passing coronavirus stimulus checks.
Our polling found that Independents’ support for Georgia Democrats rose from 38 percent to 52 percent when voters were told Dems would pass another round of stimulus checks. Sen. Bernie Sanders cited our polling on the Senate floor, and we even got Sen. Chuck Schumer on the blog to push for $2,000 checks. In addition, our polling was also covered by Chris Hayes, The Washington Post, FiveThirtyEight, In These Times, Vox, and New York Magazine.
4. The New York Times Profiled Our Work and How Much We’ve Impacted National Politics
“President Biden mentions it in private calls. The White House reads its work. And Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, teams up with its leaders for news conferences, blog posts and legislation.” That’s how The New York Times opened their profile of our work, published in June.
“We’re relatively young, but my belief about progressive politics is that first and foremost we have a moral obligation to win,” our founder Sean McElwee told the NYT’s Lisa Lerer. “The demands in a lot of corners for policymakers to hold positions that are highly unpopular is wrong.” Read the full profile here.
5. We Produced Best-in-Class Polling in 2020 — And We’re Only Getting Better
Our polling has consistently been best-in-class, and we’re constantly working to make it even more accurate. In May, we turned our research inward by publishing a 2020 Polling Retrospective that examines how we’re improving our methods — from a new zip code weighting scheme, to downweighting responses from the liberal activist types, to enticing right-leaning voters to engage with our surveys. For a summary of our findings, check out this New York Times article on our retrospective.
And we’re only getting better: Our analysis finds that in the June 2021 New York City primary, DFP outperformed every other pollster. Our root-mean-squared error (RMSE), which is how pollsters determine their accuracy, was the lowest of the 13 polls we analyzed leading up to the New York City Democratic primary, across partisan and non-partisan pollsters.
6. We Fought For A Progressive Industrial Policy and Climate Agenda in Congress
Throughout the year, we pushed for significant climate investments in Biden’s infrastructure packages. We pushed for an Indigenous-led land stewardship strategy to meet President Biden’s 30 by 30 conservation goal. We showed that Build Back Better’s investments to tackle the climate crisis and create new clean energy jobs are highly popular and critical components of the plan. We also partnered with Evergreen Action, Professor Leah Stokes, and Sen. Tina Smith to lay out a roadmap for a federal clean electricity standard — a report that was covered by The Atlantic, Axios, The Hill, and Vox. As those provisions faced cuts, we partnered with Sen. Ed Markey, who wrote a blog declaring that progressives would not cut climate investments from Build Back Better.
But we don’t just run polls here at DFP — this year, we added economic and environmental impact analysis to our arsenal. In March, we showed that the BUILD GREEN Act would create approximately 960,000 jobs and significantly reduce CO2 emissions — equivalent to taking 4.5 million cars off the road. And in September, we found that the 48C Advanced Manufacturing Tax Credit — a little-known tax incentive for companies to expand their clean energy capacity — would create 140,000 jobs nationwide over the next several years, and 15 to 30 percent more jobs could be created if the policy was paired with the Clean Electricity Performance Program. An $8 billion investment in 48C was ultimately included in the final BBB framework.
7. We Teamed Up With Partners to Push for Disability Justice
One of the most crucial investments in the Build Back Better Act is its funding for home and community-based care. There are currently 800,000 Americans with disabilities and senior citizens that are on waiting lists to receive home and community-based services, and as DFP Senior Fellow Matthew Cortland shared on our blog, 89 percent of voters with disabilities would prefer to receive care at home than live in a nursing home.
We’ve shown throughout the year that voters are on their side — Democrats perform +13 points better on a generic ballot when voters are told that the party is pushing to invest in home and community-based services and expand Medicare. Our polling with The Century Foundation also found that a bipartisan majority of voters want to increase Supplemental Security Income benefits to the poverty line — findings that were covered in a New York Times piece on the push for disability justice.
8. We Raised Money for Michelle Wu and Other Green New Deal Champions
Although Democrats suffered a tough series of losses in the 2021 down ballot races (don’t remind us about Virginia), there were also some major progressive victories across the country that same night. Michelle Wu is now Boston’s mayor — exactly as we predicted in our polling. We’re proud that Wu was represented on our Green New Deal Slate, which helped her and other GND champions raise crucial funds. Candidates like Abdullah Hammoud, who became the first Arab-American mayor of Dearborn, MI, and Justin Bibb, who became the fourth Black and second youngest mayor of Cleveland, OH, also made history on our GND slate.
9. We Co-Founded a Child Tax Credit Advocacy Group, Fighting Chance for Families
In June 2021, Data for Progress partnered with Groundwork Collaborative to launch Fighting Chance for Families, a war room advocating for a permanent extension of the expanded Child Tax Credit. Fighting Chance for Families has used polling, media, and partnerships with members of Congress to push legislators to expand the tax cut — all generating significant media coverage, from The Washington Post to Common Dreams to Huffington Post.
Senator Michael Bennet and Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro joined our blog over the course of the past few months to make clear the need to extend the expanded Child Tax Credit and make clear the popular mandate Congress has to do so. We also joined Congressman Ritchie Torres and a recipient of the credit in New York City for a press conference calling to extend this tax cut for working families across the nation.
10. Our Maps Showed Build Back Better Is Even Popular in West Virginia
Joe Manchin dealt a massive blow to progressives and our country when he announced his opposition to the Build Back Better Act earlier this month. As we move into 2022, that means we need to work even harder, and even more strategically, to win his vote for ambitious Build Back Better legislation. A key way we can do this is by promoting our polling of key states conducted this August, which showed that 68 percent of West Virginia voters — including 64 percent of Independents and 56 percent of Republicans — support Build Back Better.
11. We Showed America Just How Out-of-Touch Kyrsten Sinema Is
At the height of Build Back Better negotiations, Kyrsten Sinema flaunted her opposition to provisions, such as plans to raise tax rates on the wealthy and large corporations, that she had won her 2018 Senate race by supporting. As a result, we polled her standing among Arizona’s Democratic and Independent voters, and found that her support had pretty much cratered among every demographic — putting her at a significant risk of a primary.
Those polling results garnered significant media coverage at home and nationally – and we’ll continue to hold her accountable for her votes and her actions.
12. We Showed the Overwhelming Popularity of the American Rescue Plan
Our polling has consistently found that the American Rescue Plan and its key provisions are popular with voters across party lines. One of these key provisions is the expanded Child Tax Credit, which we teamed up with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senators Cory Booker, Ron Wyden, Sherrod Brown, and Michael Bennet in a February press call to (successfully) push for.
35 million families and 68 million children relied on this landmark legislation, and as it currently hangs in the balance, we must keep fighting for them.
13. We Found the Highest Support Ever for D.C. Statehood
Making D.C. a state is essential for representing the 700,000 Americans living in the district. Our poll, covered exclusively by CBS News, found a record level of support — 54 percent — for DC statehood, and it quickly went viral. It was picked up by Forbes, NPR, WUSA, and Yahoo News, among others — vaulting this issue into the national conversation and further galvanizing years of work by statehood activists in D.C. as well as our other U.S. territories.
14. When the Mainstream Media Hammered Biden’s Afghanistan Pullout, We Showed That Withdrawal Was Popular With Voters
In April, when President Biden first announced his decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan and end America’s longest war, he was met with a +50-point margin of voters supporting ending the war. Months later, after a messy pullout process, pundits seemed to forget that wars are pretty unpopular with Americans — and that, with the end of the war, Biden accomplished what three presidents before him could not. Several weeks after the Taliban’s capture of Kabul, we showed that voters continued to support Biden’s withdrawal by a +26-point margin. This polling was covered by MSNBC, Politico, NBC News, and others.
15. Our Polling Supported the Fight for Worker Protections
Over the course of the year, there’s been a groundswell of support for the resurgent labor movement. As workers in Amazon organized a historic move to unionize this summer, Data for Progress polling found that voters from both parties support the move to unionize — and oppose Amazon’s anti-union tactics.
This is especially important because two bills are up for consideration in Congress that would solidify worker protections. For instance, the PRO Act — which has stalled in the Senate since March — is a sweeping piece of legislation that would crack down on union-busting and make it easier for workers to join and establish unions. We partnered with Vox and found that the PRO Act’s provisions are popular with both Republicans and Democrats. Similarly, the provisions of the FAST Recovery Act, which would protect fast food workers from corporate malfeasance, garner similar support from both parties.
16. We Demonstrated Public Support for the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act
While the failure to pass the Build Back Better Act in 2021 overshadows much else this year legislatively, it's worth noting that Democrats did successfully pass major infrastructure investments this year. As part of our partnership with Invest in America over the course of the Infrastructure bill’s passage, we found that the infrastructure bill carried wide margins of support, including +5 points of net support among Republicans.
One interesting proof point for all of our comms professionals out there: when we message-tested the bill’s name, we found that voters support the bill more when it’s referred to as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act than when it’s called the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework. Further proof that messaging for progressive policy matters!
17. We Advanced Climate Industrial Policy
Throughout the year, we showed that rebuilding American manufacturing and tackling the climate crisis are deeply interconnected goals. This year we partnered with the National Wildlife Federation to release “Made Clean in America," a series of policy and polling briefs detailing how we can shore up clean energy supply chains, procure clean vehicle fleets and building materials, and more. In another series of reports led by DFP's climate team, we showed how the Biden Administration can use executive orders, new legislation, and reconciliation to advance the progressive climate innovation agenda. Our polling finds these investments are popular — The Hill covered our finding that 67 percent of voters support the Solar Energy Manufacturing for America Act, which would provide tax credits for solar energy manufacturers.
18. Like, Half of Congress Wrote for Our Blog
And as if that wasn’t enough, take a look at some of our guest contributors to the Data for Progress blog this year.
As we move into 2022, the fate of our climate and our economy is on the line. We need to put all our energy and resources into fighting for the passage of a Build Back Better Act that is as ambitious and comprehensive as possible. At Data for Progress, we're continuing to expand our polling operation, strengthen our partnerships with key players in national politics, and continue building our earned media coverage to push for a bold BBB investment.
Please help us make it happen by donating below.
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