As President-elect Joe Biden continues his transition to the White House, House Democratic progressives and centrists are fighting over how to frame the party’s agenda for the public. For instance, progressive Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) said “I can’t be silent” and will continue speaking about policy goals ranging from defunding police departments to passing the Green New Deal. But centrist Democrat Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) argues that if party members keep using such language, Democrats will get “torn apart in 2022.”
Which side is right? The answer depends in large part on how partisan lawmakers frame issues. Our research suggests Democrats’ most effective strategy would be to frame a progressive agenda in more moderate terms.
How we did our research
During the two weeks before Election Day, we used LHK Partners, Inc., a national survey firm to field a Web-based swing-state survey of 3,078 adults in Wisconsin and about 1,500 adults each in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Michigan. We used census data to build our samples on the basis of the region of the state people lived in, as well as their age and gender. Part of our survey included survey experiments where we randomly varied the ways different key policies were framed.
For example, for policies related to support for Black Lives Matter, we varied whether the survey called BLM activism a “movement” or “protests” and whether we asked people if they supported abolishing the police, defunding the police, reducing police budgets, or reforming the police.
For policies related to environmental regulation, we varied whether the survey framed policy proposals using the progressive label “Green New Deal” or “aggressive environmental actions.” We also varied whether the survey suggested environmental action would aim to reduce climate change-related flooding in the survey respondent’s state or reduce climate-induced wildfires from around the world, and whether it would either create jobs; or raise taxes. For both issues, we asked people to rate their support for the topic on a five-point scale, where 1 meant “strongly oppose” and 5 meant “strongly support.”
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We then analyzed results by how different ways to frame issues affected Americans from different parties. We also explored whether respondents held different attitudes if they lived in counties that, this past November, voted strongly for Joe Biden, were relatively evenly divided between Trump and Biden votes, or voted strongly for Donald Trump. Those analyses help determine how framing their agenda could affect Democratic lawmakers’ public support in the early going of the Biden administration and in the 2022 primary and general elections.
‘Police reform’ is more popular than ‘abolishing’ or ‘defunding’ the police
First, we found Democrats support Black Lives Matter’s goals much more strongly than do independents or Republicans. Democrats’ average support on the five-point scale was 3.43, 35 percent higher than the average independent’s support and 84 percent higher than the average Republican’s support. (In all results, we group people who said they “lean” toward a party with those identified with that party.) Framing the summer’s Black Lives Matter events as “protests” or as a “movement” did not affect support.
However, among Democrats, independents, and Republicans alike, calls to “reform” the police are far more popular than calls to “defund” the police, “abolish” the police or “reduce police budgets.” In August, Kyle Peyton, Paige E. Vaughn and Gregory A. Huber found and wrote here at TMC that they found protests to “defund the police” were far less popular than protests supporting BLM or opposing police brutality. Our results are consistent with theirs, showing significantly less support for such language about policing across the political spectrum. Compared to their support for reforming police, Democrats’ support for defunding, abolishing, and reducing the budgets for police were 19 percent lower. Republicans’ support was 21 percent lower and independents’ support was 27 percent lower.
We also looked at whether opinions varied by location and found that living in an overwhelmingly Democratic county makes someone more receptive to Black Lives Matter than if they lived in an overwhelmingly Republican county — regardless of whether they were Democrats, independents, or Republicans and regardless of how the goal of the movement is framed.
‘Aggressive environmental action’ is more popular than ‘the Green New Deal’
More people believed good would result from “more aggressive environmental actions” than from the “Green New Deal.” Specifically, respondents are 18 percent less likely to agree that a Green New Deal would help address climate fires around the world, 15 percent less like to agree that Green New Deal would help address flooding in their state and 9 percent less likely to agree that Green New Deal create jobs than believe “aggressive environmental actions” would lead to those results. That’s despite the fact both terms describe essentially the same things. Meanwhile, respondents are 4 percent more likely to agree the Green New Deal would “cost so much that taxes would have to be raised” than believe that of “aggressive environmental actions.”
Republicans really reacted against the Green New Deal — much more noticeably than to the fairly strongly worded phrase “aggressive environment action.” They were 7 percent more likely to think the Green New Deal would lead to tax hikes than the latter phrase, and 16 to 27 percent less likely to believe the Green New Deal would reduce flooding or fires or add jobs. Overall, we also found where people lived didn’t influence their views of environmental policy, no matter how it was framed.
Democrats in battleground and pro-Trump counties responded differently from those in strongly pro-Biden counties in one key way: They were more likely to dislike the Green New Deal compared to the phrase “aggressive environmental action.”
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Of course, it’s possible a phrase like “aggressive environmental actions” could lose popularity if Republicans and conservative media work to attack it as they have the Green New Deal, or if these terms are used by lawmakers who have been demonized as radical. Moreover, Democrats had some success reclaiming the once pejorative “Obamacare” label to describe the Affordable Care Act. But our results suggest if Democratic lawmakers want to win public support for progressive policies, they may wish to discuss those using more moderate terms.
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Jianing Li (@JianingJaniceLi) is a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Michael W. Wagner (@prowag) is a Leon Epstein Faculty Fellow and professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-author with Mallory Perryman of “Mediated Democracy: Politics, the News and Citizenship in the 21st Century” (CQ Press, 2020).
Lewis A. Friedland (@lewfriedland) is the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Dhavan V. Shah (@dvshah) is the Maier-Bascom Professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-author with Douglas McLeod most recently of “News Frames and National Security: Covering Big Brother” (Cambridge University Press, 2015).