Americans underestimating popular climate policy support by nearly half

I think part of the issue is that, on average, left wing voters’ votes count less due to urban concentration, the electoral college, and equal numbers of senators per state.

One has to be particularly careful with climate policy because fuel prices have a long track record of high political relevance.

That is because it's easy to support an abstract policy like "better social safety net" or "solve climate change".

When the actual policy implementation is revealed and people see how it will affect them, they realize it's not free of trade-offs and downsides.

For example, higher taxes and higher gas prices will make a lot of people drop support for climate policy.

Part of the issue is that people are generally in favor, but those things aren't their top priorities and they're not willing to pay a high cost for them. A lot of the polling changes if you ask things like "How much would you be willing to pay for X".

All the issues you mentioned do have popular support. Abortion rights in particular are supported by 60-70%+ of the US population. The reason it doesn't translate to policy is simply because voting power isn't equally distributed. The electoral college, Senate seat distribution, Supreme Court appointments all distort people's individual representation in this country. If there truly were direct referendums on these topics then the outcome would be very different.

Kansas, a super-conservative state, just voted overwhelmingly in favor of abortion rights.

The reason the votes don't materialize is that we don't have direct democracy and voting is a complicated and imperfect proxy for measuring support of any single issue. Candidates are a mixture of party, identity, and policies.

Americans support measured and reasonable policies. The ones presented politically are often unreasonable and relatively extreme, or try to smuggle in fringe ideological objectives that have little to do with the nominal problem. This is where the perception that the political class is not serious about these problems comes from.

Just because people want solutions to these problems doesn't mean they will support stupid or wasteful policies to address them.

People don't vote for policies, they vote for parties.

They asked about specfic policies:

> For each policy, we asked participants to estimate the percent of Americans who would support it. Our list of policies included support for a carbon tax levied against fossil fuel companies and redistributed to Americans through tax breaks. The list also included a renewable energy standard that mandates 100% electricity generated by renewable energy in the near term—an essential step in decarbonizing our energy production34. And, as decarbonizing our energy infrastructure will require rapidly siting of wind and solar across the US, we also included support for siting renewables on public lands34. Given the need to consider infrastructure, jobs, and social equity in transitioning to renewable energy, we also asked participants to estimate the support for the Green New Deal (GND). Notably, large environmental policy packages like the GND and the American Jobs Plan may play a key role in passing environmental legislation, as research shows that bundling more redistributive, social equity, and job-creating measures into major environmental policies makes them more popular35