This is even true for climate policy. Long a target of GOP derision, denial, and disdain, the Trump idea of taking whatever climate-related stuff the government had going and doing the exact opposite appears to be too much even for conservative voters.
“A large majority of registered voters oppose eliminating programs related to global warming,” reads a new report from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. In a country where a person or thing polling at 60 percent can look like a waterfall of support, “large” may be underselling it: 79 percent of registered voters oppose ordering all federal agencies such as NOAA, NASA, and the EPA to stop doing warming research, according to polling that was conducted in 1,040 adults between May 1 and May 12. As one might expect that includes almost all Democrats, but that’s not all: 73 percent of “liberal/moderate Republicans” and 56 percent of “conservative Republicans” share that opposition.
Similar numbers oppose ordering the agencies to stop providing information about climate change to the public — like, say, shuttering the climate.gov site, maybe? Or stopping the tracking of billion-dollar disasters? — including 78 percent of all voters and 69 and 58 percent of those two categories of Republicans. A decent number of GOP voters also aren’t on board with Trump’s war on certain forms of energy; 57 percent of liberal/moderates and 46 percent of conservative Republicans don’t like the idea of stopping offshore wind farm construction.
The same group showed back in March that more people in the country are concerned about climate change than the people currently in charge would have you believe. But now that Trump’s burn-it-all-down approach to the issue has started to take shape — exiting the Paris Agreement, flipping the EPA and its mission inside out, hollowing out NOAA and its ability to track both weather and climate, hindering renewable energy development and absolutely hucking money toward fossil fuel companies, and so on — the polling is showing how out of touch even with their ostensible supporters a lot of this really is.
Fully 55 percent of conservative Republicans think the government should fund more research into renewable energy sources; 66 percent of liberal/moderate GOP voters and 45 percent of conservative ones think there should be tax credits to buy clean and efficient appliances; half of the conservative faction even think the government should regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant, a project Lee Zeldin and the EPA only just announced they want to abandon entirely.
Those numbers do mean, of course, that some people support the full-on climate denial machinations — but it is useful to take stock of just how small a group that is. In this sample at least, 40 percent of the sample were Republicans of any kind, and 28 percent considered themselves conservative Republicans. When you’re only getting half or less of that 28 percent, you’re into true weirdo outlier territory; unfortunately, its those outliers who are running the country.
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