Once again polls are showing that swing state voters aren’t simply more moderate on every issue. They’re more inclined to gravitate to a heterodox mix of policies, with corporate crackdown policies being particularly popular.
This polling comes from Blueprint, a Reid Hoffman-backed group. You might remember Hoffman as the prominent Harris donor who called for the ousting of FTC Chair Lina Khan. Unfortunately for him, his own polling shows Khan’s work is extremely popular.
This fits with our longstanding position that cracking down on shady business practices and corporate greed is overwhelmingly popular with the American public. We even encouraged the Biden administration to make VP Harris the face of this work. A lot of Americans know who is making their life more difficult, even if the pundits in the mainstream media are unable to name them; shady corporations. On issues from housing to travel to groceries, its corporate greed to blame all the way down.
Despite the media outrage at Harris’ embrace of anti-corporate price gouging (including an anti-Trump Washington Post columnist who compared it to JD Vance’s blood libel against Haitians), the policies clearly would resonate with voters if they only knew about them! The Biden Administration has taken bold action to rebuild lost capacity in executive branch agencies like the CFPB, FTC and others. And these agencies have delivered concrete wins for ordinary Americans. If only, as our Max Moran has written, Chief of Staff Jeffrey Zients wasn’t seemingly embarrassed by his administration’s record of accomplishment attacking business executives… similar to himself.
This includes:
Cracking down on Mortgage lenders charging borrowers illegal fees, cracking down on airlines offering customers vouchers for canceled flights instead of full refunds, banning unfair noncompete clauses, going after junk fees and lowering the cost of inhalers.
Despite what some pundits would have you believe, this break from centrist orthodoxy has actually proved to be more popular with moderate voters. It turns out, just staking out the most moderate position on a given issue isn’t actually the key to electoral success (despite what some pompous pundits like to think.)
Big donors and the “tack to the center” crowd should take heed. It looks like their desire to win an election is in direct opposition to their policy preferences. They’ll have to choose which is more important to them.