Memo: New York Polling
Gov. Andrew Cuomo released his proposed $178 billion budget this week. With a Democratic trifecta in New York State, Cuomo has a strong mandate to expand the governmental services New Yorkers depend on. In order to determine what New Yorkers would like to see coming out of Albany, Data for Progress undertook a survey of 1,890 New York likely voters. The survey was conducted from January 13 through January 19, 2020, and measured support for various progressive policies and local, state, and federal candidates for office.
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Regenerative Farming And The Green New Deal
The Green New Deal is a broad and ambitious agenda that includes a commitment by the federal government to invest in communities, infrastructure, technology, and good jobs to help the United States meet the challenges of climate change and achieve economic and environmental justice.
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Green New Deal Scorecard: Frontrunner Comparison
Earlier this year, Data For Progress released a Green New Deal scorecard to identify which candidates have released plans to address Data For Progress’s 48 elements of a Green New Deal.
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Memo: Ending the Insulin Crisis with the Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act
Seven million Americans need insulin every day to control their blood sugar and avoid life-threatening medical events. This includes everyone with type 1 diabetes as well as many who have developed type 2 diabetes. The World Health Organization has designated insulin an “essential medicine”, which means that governments have a duty to make it affordable. In America, however, the cost of a vial of insulin has tripled over the past two decades. Put simply, because insulin is no longer affordable here, America is failing its duty.
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Memo: The Case for Nationalizing Rural Hospitals
The healthcare debate mostly focuses on how to reach universal insurance coverage, but the actual provision of healthcare carries its own unique challenges that insurance reform can’t and won’t solve.
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Memo: Data For Progress Achieved Excellent Targeting in the 2019 Fuck Gerrymandering Program
To study a targeting program, the variable of interest is not wins or losses, but closeness of margin to zero, since the goal is to direct money where it has the most chance of influencing the outcome(and accepting some loses in the process). Too high of a win rate suggests that resources are not being optimally allocated to the most competitive seats, and too low of a win rate suggests that either the program is not successful, or that resources are again not being optimally allocated.
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Memo: Voters Support the Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act
The Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act, introduced into Congress by Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Jan Schakowsky would allow the government to manufacture generic versions of drugs in some circumstances. Because the legislation is likely to face strong industry push-back, we tested it in two environments: with and without a Democratic message in support. This is designed to simulate how the legislation would perform in an environment where it is massively outspent on television. We find that in both scenarios, voters overwhelmingly support the legislation.
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Memo: Medicare for All
Over the last several months, Data for Progress has been working to test Medicare for All in a wide range of electoral environments, using a range of different vendors and our analysis of the evidence suggests that Medicare for All will remain on net positive even after facing rightwing push-back.
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Memo: Voters See Glaring Environmental Problems in the USMCA
On December 19, the House of Representatives will vote on the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA). Data for Progress has the most recent polling on this topic as well as on trade issues more broadly. Trade agreements were a central component of the 2016 campaign, and have already moved to the forefront for 2020.
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Memo: The Senate is an Irredeemable Institution
Over the last several years, progressives have increased their focus on how American political institutions are biased against groups in the Democratic coalition such as people of color, working class people, and young people. Efforts to increase access to the ballot box, reduce gerrymandering, and abolish the electoral college have gained attention, as have efforts to reform the Supreme Court. However, the most antidemocratic institution in America has received relatively little scrutiny: the United States Senate.
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Memo: Public Housing at Risk - Adaptation Through a Green New Deal
Confronting climate change means more than just the aggressive abolition of carbon pollution. We must also adapt to extreme weather, sea level rise, and chronic effects from climate change like heat and drought that are already locked into projections of the near future.
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Memo: Even with Millions Spent Against it, a Progressive Pharmaceutical Agenda Can Win
On December 10, Democrats in Congress passed the Elijah Cummings Lower Drug Costs Now Act, which would allow Medicare to negotiate the price of many drugs with pharmaceutical companies and would prevent drug prices from rising faster than the rate of inflation. It is likely that H.R. 3 will be outspent on the airwaves by the right. This polling memo explores a new, innovative experiment designed to test how this spending could affect support for the policy and for Democrats in the 2020 election. We test opposition messages—even deceptive ones—in a five-way split sample, with a control. We find that H.R. 3 is durable to arguments, both when delivered by Republicans and when delivered by a “coalition of pharmaceutical companies and unions.” We also explore some other, over-the-horizon progressive pharmaceutical ideas, which enjoy strong support.
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Memo: Primary Warning Signs for Chris Coons
Data for Progress conducted a poll from November 15 through 25, 2019, in the state of Delaware, to assess the upcoming Democratic primary race for Chris Coons’s Senate seat. Senator Coons has been serving as the Junior Senator from Delaware since 2010. The primary election in Delaware is separate from the state’s presidential primary, and will occur in September 2020. Despite Hillary Clinton winning Delaware by over 10 points, Senator Coons currently sits as the eleventh-most-likely Democrat to vote with the president, according to FiveThirtyEight’s tally of support for President Trump’s policies.
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Memo: A Brief History of Worker Displacement
As the ice thaws and the temperatures rise, the embers of the climate crisis are heating up. There’s simply no denying it anymore: The climate crisis will be the defining issue of our time. But how we, as a society, will address it remains an open question. The biggest fear is that we’ll simply fail to act until it’s too late, locking in 4, 5, or even upward of 8 degrees Celsius of warming—the consequences of which would be simply devastating. Thanks to growing pressure from the scientific community and grassroots activists on the immediate need to address the climate crisis, we’ve seen a growing number of policy proposals laying out some of the most detailed climate plans ever. While many of these plans aim to avert the climate crisis, we’re left asking if they’ll create another crisis: a crisis for fossil fuel workers and communities.
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Memo: Voters Support More Regulation of Social Media Companies
Over the last few years, the growing role that social media companies play
in American life has become increasingly clear. Our polling shows that
voters broadly enjoy using social media, and that this is true across partisan
identification. Voters also support a new tax on social media companies and a
requirement that social media companies make their algorithms public. Voters
strongly oppose a private, digital currency.
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Report: Redefining Green Jobs for a Sustainable Economy
The movement toward a Green New Deal policy platform has become the predominant idea for addressing climate change. It would involve a massive government investment in equitable decarbonization, which would create millions of “green jobs.” The impact would be this large not only because greening the economy will be labor intensive across all sectors, but also because a green jobs guarantee would be required in order to ensure that all workers would be supported throughout this green transition.
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Memo: H.R. 3 Can Stand Up to Scrutiny
Voters strongly prefer capping the costs of drugs at the lowest levels possible and invoking new fines and fees on pharmaceutical companies that raise their prices too high
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Memo: Voters Support Expanding the Impeachment Inquiry
Up until now, the central focus of the impeachment hearings has been Trump’s conduct regarding military aid to Ukraine. Here, we test other reasons to expand the inquiry. We find that substantial numbers of voters support an inquiry that focuses on obstruction of justice, seeking foreign interference in elections as well as additional grounds such as Trump’s bigotry, detention of immigrant families, and profiting off of his office. This memo briefly summarizes the results.
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Memo: BDS and anti-boycott laws
Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) is a global, grassroots movement responding to a call from Palestinian civil society organizations to pressure Israel to recognize and honor Palestinian rights through nonviolent economic and cultural means.
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Memo: Childcare For All
Childcare-for-all is a critical part of a progressive platform that is committed to gender, racial, and economic equity. Americans deserve a progressive policy solution that provides higher quality childcare options in every community.
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