Environmental Polling Roundup – February 4th, 2022
HEADLINES
- Navigator – Three in five voters continue to support the Build Back Better plan; even more respond positively to its investment in clean energy jobs (Release, Slide Deck, Topline)
- Data for Progress – Informing voters about the Build Back Better plan’s popularity in polls increases voter support (Slide Deck)
- ecoAmerica – More Americans say that changing seasonal weather patterns influence their level of concern about climate change than any other factor; three-quarters say they’re concerned about climate change, but only half believe that other people around them are concerned about it (Release, Memo, Topline)
- POLITICO + Morning Consult – Climate change and the environment continue to be the Democratic Party’s biggest issue strengths over the Republican Party (Topline, Crosstabs)
GOOD DATA POINTS TO HIGHLIGHT
- Voters support the Build Back Better plan by a greater than two-to-one margin (60%-28%) after reading a brief description including some of its major provisions and estimated price tag [Navigator]
- 75% of Americans say they’re concerned about climate change, including 45% who say they’re “very” concerned [ecoAmerica]
- 70% of voters say that creating clean, renewable energy jobs that help combat climate change is a good reason to pass the Build Back Better plan [Navigator]
- 62% of voters say that passing a bill to address climate change and its effects should be an important priority for Congress [POLITICO + Morning Consult]
- More Americans say that climate change and the environment is the single most important issue to them than any other issue besides health care and the economy [Economist/YouGov]
FULL ROUNDUP
Navigator
Three in five voters continue to support the Build Back Better plan; even more respond positively to its investment in clean energy jobs (Release, Slide Deck, Topline)
Polling on the Build Back Better plan continues to tell a consistent story: whatever form the Build Back Better package takes from here, the core elements of the plan remain very popular. This new Navigator poll finds that voters support the legislation by a 60%-28% margin when it’s described as “Biden and Democrats’ new economic plan” that is “expected to cost $1.75 trillion and will establish a universal pre-K program, expand Medicare for seniors to include hearing coverage, and lower health care costs by allowing Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices.”
While that initial description doesn’t specifically reference the bill’s climate and clean energy components, Navigator tested several of the plan’s components elsewhere in the poll and found that 70% of voters believe that “creating clean, renewable energy jobs that help combat climate change” is a good reason to pass the plan.
Data for Progress
Informing voters about the Build Back Better plan’s popularity in polls increases voter support (Slide Deck)
More polling on Build Back Better here, courtesy of Data for Progress, shows how informing people about the popularity of the Build Back Better plan makes them more likely to say they support it.
In the first of Data for Progress’s experiments covered in this deck, half of poll respondents read a brief description of the Build Back Better plan and half read the same description with one additional line: “Polling shows that 66% of voters support the proposed plan.” People who saw the line about the plan’s majority support in polls were 10 points more likely to say they support the plan on net than people who read the description without polling data.
This notion that people are more likely to support viewpoints when they learn that others share them is well-grounded in social science research, so the effect that Data for Progress reported here is likely to hold true for a variety of popular climate and environmental policies beyond the Build Back Better plan.
Here are the recommendations that Data for Progress provides in the deck for communicating about the popularity of Build Back Better – which, again, should be broadly applicable if you’re communicating about other popular policy ideas:
- Use the policy’s popularity to sell the policy.
- Focus on topline numbers – and print the number (e.g. “66%”) to hammer home the effects.
- Avoid breaking out partisan results unless they are supportive across the board – voters will sort if they see their peers sorting.
That last point is important because people are more swayed by the attitudes of people they identify with; telling Republican voters that a policy is popular with other Republican voters is likely to boost their support for it, for example, but telling them that it’s popular with Democratic voters would likely have the opposite effect. And on issues like climate and the environment, where voters feel pressure to align with their party’s positions, telling conservative audiences that other conservative people support a climate-friendly policy can provide an important permission structure for them to acknowledge that they support it as well.
ecoAmerica
More Americans say that changing seasonal weather patterns influence their level of concern about climate change than any other factor; three-quarters say they’re concerned about climate change, but only half believe that other people around them are concerned about it (Release, Memo, Topline)
This new poll release from ecoAmerica underscores how extreme weather is a powerful proof point – possibly the most powerful proof point – to make the public understand climate change as a pressing issue. When asked about five different factors that might influence their level of concern about climate change, more people said that changing seasonal weather patterns (58%) and experiencing a climate change-related event like wildfires, severe storms, flooding, or extreme heat (46%) had an effect on their level of concern than seeking out information about climate change (33%), national politics and media (29%), or talking to a friend, family member, or colleague (15%).
The poll also shows that Americans seriously underestimate how much the people around them are concerned about climate change. In ecoAmerica’s survey, three-quarters (75%) said they are at least “somewhat” concerned about climate change and 45% said they were very concerned about the issue. However, when asked to rate the attitudes of other people around them, only 51% said that the people around them are at least “somewhat” concerned about the issue and just 14% said that people around them are “very” concerned about it.
As the Data for Progress experiment linked above showed, social norms have a strong effect on people’s policy attitudes. And this new data from ecoAmerica indicates that people don’t realize how much others around them share their concerns about climate change, making it all the more important for climate advocates to highlight the broad public support for climate action.
POLITICO + Morning Consult
Climate change and the environment continue to be the Democratic Party’s biggest issue strengths over the Republican Party (Topline, Crosstabs)
This new poll from POLITICO and Morning Consult is one of several recent surveys to find that climate change and the environment are the Democratic Party’s biggest issue strengths over the Republican Party heading into this year’s midterms.
The poll asked whether voters trust Democrats in Congress or Republicans in Congress more to handle each of 13 issues, and the wide margins in favor of Democrats’ handling of climate change and the environment were the two biggest issue advantages measured in the survey:
- Climate change – Democrats +20
- The environment – Democrats +18
- Health care – Democrats +9
- Protecting Medicare and Social Security – Democrats +9
- Education – Democrats +8
- Voting rights – Democrats +8
- Coronavirus – Democrats +7
- Energy – Democrats +2
- Gun policy – Republicans +3
- Jobs – Republicans +6
- Immigration – Republicans +7
- The economy – Republicans +10
- National security – Republicans +14
The poll’s crosstabs also confirm once again that there is a significant wedge between the national Republican Party and its own voters on climate and environmental issues: while 85%+ of Republican voters say they trust Republicans in Congress over Democrats in Congress to handle issues such as the economy, jobs, and immigration, considerably lower percentages of Republican voters say they that trust their own party over Democrats on climate change (62%) and the environment (65%).
Related Resources
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