Voters Overwhelmingly Prefer the Warren and Sanders Tax Plans
By John Ray (@johnlray) and Sean McElwee (@SeanMcElwee)
Since the rise of Occupy Wall Street, wealth inequality has become a central part of American political discussion. This cycle both Senator Bernie Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren have released tax plans that seek to raise revenue and combat inequality by restoring rates on the wealthiest Americans to prior rates. Recent academic work, particularly the Tax Justice Now project by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, has found that stagnating earnings for the middle class combined with an increasingly regressive tax code has contributed to rising inequality in the modern era. We tested whether voters would support a more progressive tax policy to address inequality.
On behalf of Data for Progress, YouGov Blue fielded a survey of 1,024 US voters on YouGov’s online panel. The survey was weighted to be representative of the population of US voters by age, race/ethnicity, sex, gender, US Census region, and 2016 Presidential vote choice. As part of the survey, we asked voters to consider four plans for what the nation’s income tax rates ought to be for Americans at different income levels. Those tax plans corresponded to proposals by Democratic presidential candidates Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and Vice President Joe Biden; and to the income tax rates under Donald Trump’s most recent tax cut bill.
Our survey fielded online, giving voters the chance to take in a graphic summarizing how several candidates’ proposed tax plans would affect the distribution of tax rates. We took the chart directly from the Zucman and Saez Tax Justice Now project. You can see the items the way respondents saw them here, with each image name corresponding to the order in which they were shown. The tax plans were anonymized and were presented together in a graph as follows:
Tax Plan A correspondents to Bernie Sanders’s tax plan, Plan B to Elizabeth Warren’s, Plan C to Joe Biden’s, and Plan D to Donald Trump’s. Voters were given a brief instruction page beforehand to explain how to interpret these tax plans on a graph. Each plan includes proposed tax rates across the income spectrum, including estimated effects for the top 1 percent of earners up to the top 400 families in the United States, whose effect on the country’s tax revenue is profound. Voters were shown this graph and then asked,
And of each of these plans, which would you say you prefer the most?
Among all voters, Senator Warren’s plan was the most popular, with 36 percent of voters selecting that plan, followed closely by the Sanders plan at 29 percent. Among Democrats, Senator Warren and Senator Sanders were tied for most popular plan, at 38 percent and 42 percent of Democrats respectively. Perhaps surprisingly, Warren’s plan was more popular than the current Trump tax rates among both Independent and Republican voters. Independents were also evenly split between the Trump tax plan and Sanders’ tax plan, with 24 percent preferring Trump and 22 percent preferring Sanders. Trump’s extremist tax regressivism has the support of barely 1 in 5 voters, including less than 3 in 10 Republican voters.
Combined, the two more progressive tax policies are clearly more popular than the more centrist alternatives. Even among Republicans, a narrow majority prefer at least one of the more progressive plans to the others, and Independents clearly prefer a more progressive tax policy to a more centrist one.
After asking voters which of those plans they preferred, we asked voters to report how fair or unfair they considered each plan. Voters could respond with whether the plan was very fair, somewhat fair, somewhat unfair, very unfair, or if they were unsure. All respondents in the sample received this question for all four tax plans, not just the one they said they preferred.
Voters view Senator Warren’s tax plan as the most fair of these four. Fully 50 percent across the full sample viewed the Warren plan as very or somewhat fair, down to just 29 percent who said the same about Trump’s tax policy, about the same who viewed Biden’s tax policy as very or somewhat fair.
Remarkably, with each plan anonymized, Trump and Warren were statistically tied in perceived fairness among Republicans, 33 percent of whom viewed Warren’s plan as fair along with 36 percent of whom viewed Trump’s plan as fair. Warren’s plan is viewed as most fair among Independents, 42 percent of whom viewed her plan as fair, along with 32 percent for Sanders’s, 29 percent for Trump’s, and 27 percent for Biden’s plans.
While it is already well known that Trump’s tax cuts are unpopular on their own, the unpopularity of the mainstream Republican position is even more stark when voters are presented with a series of choices. Barely 1 in 5 would choose the mainstream Republican position when offered even a small set of reasonable alternatives. Notably, the “centrist Democrat” proposal is at least as unpopular. Tax reform that specifically targets existing inequality is overwhelmingly popular, with Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders both enjoying clear public support for their tax plans.
John Ray (@johnlray) is a Senior Political Analyst at YouGov Blue. Reach out to him with polling questions at john dot ray at yougov dot com.
Sean McElwee (@SeanMcElwee) is a co-founder of Data for Progress.
Note: YouGov Blue often randomizes the order of some sections of surveys to guard against ordering effects, and so here, “image_1” does NOT necessarily represent the absolute order in which respondents saw each page, but represents the relative order in which these particular pages were seen.