WHar­ris and the Wall Street Jour­nal asked:

“Do you agree or dis­agree with this state­ment: Pro­tect­ing the envi­ron­ment is so impor­tant that require­ments and stan­dards can­not be too high, and con­tin­u­ing envi­ron­men­tal improve­ments must be made regard­less of cost.”

Three quar­ters of Amer­i­cans agreed, 69% of con­ser­v­a­tives vs. 82% of lib­er­als. That num­ber has­n’t been so high since 1997.

The ques­tion above is fas­ci­nat­ing and almost cer­tain­ly gives inac­cu­rate results because it says “regard­less of cost.” There are prices peo­ple would be unwill­ing to pay, and eco­nom­ic researchers can fig­ure that out if need be. They did­n’t ask “Would you pay 10¢ more for gas to pro­tect the envi­ron­ment?” even though there’s a grow­ing con­sen­sus that rais­ing gas tax­es would be the most effec­tive way to wean the nation off of gaso­line. I bet they’d get much low­er num­bers even though 10¢ isn’t that much.

What this ques­tion means, pre­sum­ably, is that peo­ple believe that rea­son­able envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tions are with­in the the spend­ing pow­er of soci­ety at a fair­ly low cost. Elim­i­nat­ing CFCs cost rel­a­tive­ly lit­tle, as did reduc­ing acid rain. Low flow toi­lets are annoy­ing at times, but they save water and are about the same price as toi­lets ever were. It’s encour­ag­ing that so many peo­ple real­ize that sav­ing the envi­ron­ment prob­a­bly won’t cost exor­bi­tant amounts, and that they think it’s worth that min­i­mal cost.

Anoth­er inter­est­ing result: only 30% of con­ser­v­a­tives think there’s too much reg­u­la­tion, com­pared to 19% of the gen­er­al public.

The inter­est­ing thing about the results is that Democ­rats and inde­pen­dents are pret­ty sim­i­lar on both questions.

This tracks pret­ty well with a lot of polls which show inde­pen­dents and Democ­rats agree­ing on pol­i­cy issues, while Repub­li­cans are off in their own lit­tle world.

Con­sid­er this graph of approval rat­ings, care of Pew’s lat­est sur­vey.

See how Democ­rats and inde­pen­dents have both respond­ed about the same way to events, while Repub­li­cans have stayed pret­ty steady? In the lat­est sur­vey, 488 peo­ple iden­ti­fied as Democ­rats, 488 as Inde­pen­dents, and 421 as Repub­li­cans. The Indy­crats could form a rul­ing coali­tion with­out too much trou­ble.
Of course, domes­tic pol­i­cy isn’t where nation­al elec­tions are won. We live in an age of ter­ror­ism and war. On those issues, inde­pen­dents split the dif­fer­ence. On the ques­tion of whether we should have gone into Iraq at all, 50% of the nation says “No,” but that rep­re­sents 18% of Repub­li­cans, 72% of Democ­rats, and 42% of Inde­pen­dents. The divide on the ques­tion “How well is the US effort in Iraq going?” is almost identical.

Tech­no­rati Tags: nature, polling