The 4 Democratic candidates on the prime of the polls heading into the Iowa caucuses have been paired by pundits into what they prefer to name lanes. It’s a freeway analogy, as in “keep in your lane.” One, seen as extra progressive and liberal, accommodates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. The opposite, consisting of Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, is extra centrist and reasonable.
However do most voters truly suppose this fashion? Our analysis suggests in any other case. Ideological labels — whether or not folks consider themselves as a liberal or reasonable — do distinguish candidates’ supporters. However in terms of specifics, most Democratic voters have remarkably comparable views on insurance policies and prioritize these points in roughly the identical methods.
We interviewed greater than 150,000 folks across the nation, tens of hundreds of whom intend to vote within the Democratic primaries and caucuses. Our information come from the Democracy Fund + U.C.L.A. Nationscape Project and embody questions on 41 insurance policies at present being debated. The info span the final six months and canopy points like whether or not to extend taxes on households incomes greater than $250,000 a 12 months, or whether or not transgender folks needs to be prohibited from serving within the navy.
As we checked out similarities and variations of views amongst Democratic supporters of six candidates in search of the presidential nomination for president, we discovered a powerful quantity of consensus, no matter whom they help.
Along with asking folks whether or not they agree with coverage outcomes, all of them additionally answered a collection of questions that allowed us to measure the significance they connect to every difficulty. Right here’s how that labored: Every particular person noticed two randomly chosen collections of as much as 4 coverage positions, and we requested them to decide on which assortment of outcomes they most popular. All of them did this 10 occasions and, in the middle of doing so, revealed which positions they prioritized and which of them have been comparatively much less vital.
We in contrast the outcomes throughout supporters of the 4 Iowa front-runners, in addition to Amy Klobuchar (though we had much less information on her supporters). Regardless of variations within the demographics of people who help them and their ideological labels, there have been few variations within the beliefs and priorities of the candidates’ supporters.
The entire candidates’ supporters needed to question Mr. Trump and positioned that difficulty within the prime 5 priorities among the many 41 issues we requested about. (We wrote concerning the prominence of this previously.) However it’s not the one factor Democratic voters agree on.
The entire candidates’ supporters imagine that stopping a whole ban on abortion is a prime precedence, with help starting from 82 % amongst Ms. Klobuchar’s backers to 91 % for Mr. Buttigieg’s, and with priorities starting from first to fourth in significance.
Not separating youngsters from their households on the border is a well-liked difficulty, too. When it comes to priorities, it’s an important difficulty for supporters of Mr. Buttigieg and Mr. Sanders and is available in second for Mr. Biden’s voters, fourth for Ms. Warren’s group and eighth for Ms. Klobuchar’s.
Different prime points with large help amongst these candidates’ backers and with high-priority standing embody not constructing a border wall, not banning Muslims from coming into the nation, providing a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants referred to as Dreamers and doing background checks earlier than gun purchases.
Maybe surprisingly, one factor that’s not a prime precedence for anybody’s supporters is well being care. We provided voters 4 possibilities to prioritize well being care by asking them about enacting ‘Medicare for all”; offering all People with the choice to purchase government-run medical insurance; subsidizing medical insurance for lower-income folks not receiving Medicare or Medicaid; and offering government-run medical insurance to all People.
Enacting Medicare for all is the one health-related coverage that voters put within the prime half of the 41 points we requested about, however there weren’t important variations throughout the candidate teams: Nobody’s supporters put it within the prime 10.
Mr. Sanders’s supporters could place barely extra significance on subsidizing low-income well being care relative to the others, and Ms. Warren’s supporters be part of them with respect to the significance of offering government-run insurance coverage to everybody, however these variations should not massive, and the problems nonetheless rank decrease than many different insurance policies.
Just a few attention-grabbing variations emerged. The fifth-most vital difficulty for Mr. Buttigieg’s supporters is investing in a giant, technology-based answer to local weather change — one thing that each one Democratic voters need (virtually 90 % throughout all of the candidates’ supporters) however that no different bloc thinks is a precedence. Equally, supporters of Ms. Klobuchar stood out by rating 12 weeks of paid maternity go away as an important difficulty.
However examples like these have been uncommon. When most individuals agree on insurance policies, vote selection could…