Victor Juhasz
This story is part of the Prospect’s series on how the next president can make progress without new legislation. Read all of our Day One Agenda articles here.
As his position for the nomination improves, Bernie Sanders has signaled that he wants to use the powers of the presidency to advance his agenda. His team is working up a series of executive actions that Sanders could take immediately upon entering office. If this sounds familiar to Prospect readers, that’s because we outlined just such a strategy, called the Day One Agenda, last fall. Lurking in existing federal statutes are a host of robust policies that could make progress on all sorts of issues, from climate change to financial regulation to health care. Other candidates, like Amy Klobuchar, have proposed an expansive Day One Agenda as well.
We now have a real sense of the popularity of using the tools of the presidency to make change happen. The progressive think tank Data for Progress decided to poll the Day One Agenda, asking the public about 29 different executive actions that the next Democratic president could take. The results showed that 21 of the 29 actions were looked upon favorably, with plurality or majority support. In other words, voters want the next president to use the authority granted to them by Congress.
Considering that we’re in an age where President Trump has consistently abused executive power, including the use of defense appropriations to fund the border wall, the perversion of antitrust laws to go after corporations he personally detests, and the withholding of appropriated funds for Ukraine in ways that got him impeached, the public’s continued support of executive action is notable. People want progress and don’t relate one president’s abuse of power to the next president’s capacity for change.
“There is broad support for a broad range of progressive executive action, particularly related to the costs of drugs and the climate,” says Sean McElwee of Data for Progress. “As Democrats look to excite their base while also pulling in persuadable voters, these executive actions offer an appealing way to run on an agenda Democrats can effectuate on day one.”
What is also interesting about the results are the areas where the Day One Agenda has less resonance. These fall into two main buckets: actions around immigration that have a high intensity for many Americans, and financial and economic-related actions that Democrats have chosen not to focus on much during this election cycle. It shows that there’s a lot of work to be done for Democrats to connect their values to an economic narrative that foregrounds equality and fairness and outlines tangible counters to corporate control.
First, let’s look at the many ways where the Day One Agenda appeals to the public. The most popular actions have cross-popular appeal. The right to repair, which would allow owners of smart phones, tractors, and other electronic equipment to fix and reuse technology without manufacturers limiting their access, was favored in the poll 61-23. The next president could direct antitrust agencies to force manufacturers to unbundle the product from its maintenance, allowing independent or self-directed repair. Using executive action to legalize marijuana has 58-33 support; several presidential candidates have vowed to “deschedule” cannabis under the Controlled Substances Act, effectively making it legal at the federal level. Both right to repair and marijuana legalization are broadly popular across party lines, and presidents taking action on their own does not diminish that support.
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Similarly, President Trump routinely pays lip service to lower drug prices and cleaner air. It’s no surprise, then, that survey respondents favor executive actions like march-in rights and patent eminent domain, which would seize patents on excessively priced drugs from manufacturers and lead to lower-cost generic versions, by a 62-27 margin. Clean Air Act enforcement that would regulate pollutants like mercury, coal ash, and methane gets support with a 59-33 count.
Other executive actions that polled well in the survey include: requiring background checks for gun purchasers via executive order (58-35); advancing “red flag” regulations that limit certain individuals from buying guns (54-38); restoring the Obama Administration’s plan to reduce power plant emissions (53-37); preventing new fossil fuel production on public lands (51-39); closing the carried interest loophole that allows hedge fund managers to pay a lower tax rate (50-33); and reversing the reduction in IRS audits of the wealthy and corporations (52-36).
This issue-set lines up decently with the concerns of presidential candidates and the constituencies they’re seeking to attract: drug prices, gun violence, the climate crisis, and easily explained inequality measures like tax policy. An Elizabeth Warren plan to require presidential candidates to release their tax returns, another heavily discussed policy, gets 57-36 support.
Where the primary campaign has not paid as much attention, support gets a little dicier. The next president could allow 800,000 home health-care workers union bargaining rights by reversing a Trump-era policy to prevent the automatic deduction of dues from Medicaid-funded wages. But this hasn’t been a major issue on the campaign trail, and it gets a lukewarm 44-35 response in polling, with lots of undecideds.
Wall Street hasn’t come up at all in the primary, and executive actions like denying deposit insurance to risky banks (46-39), breaking up “too big to fail” banks (45-41), restoring anti-discrimination rules in housing (37-51), and instituting a public credit registry (40-47) don’t poll as well. Postal banking, which would provide a public bank account option for the unbanked, did the worst of any of the 29 items in the poll, with only 38 percent support and 54 percent opposition. The unfamiliarity with obscure, complex concepts, and the long-term memory loss about Wall Street’s danger since the financial crisis, makes people less aware of the import of these policies.
Some anti-corruption measures, like preventing defense contractor executives and lobbyists from administration positions (45-38) and closing the revolving door between corporate America and government more generally (44-36) do OK, but could do better if Democrats connected Trump’s corruption to how the government doesn’t work for ordinary people. A proposal to have federal officials place assets in a blind trust is split (44-45), maybe because the concept itself is hard to understand.
Similarly abstract executive actions like banning non-compete clauses in employment contracts (46-41) and breaking up large companies through antitrust enforcement (40-45) also falter in polling. Though there has been as much talk about antitrust in this election than at any time since 1912, it remains a new concept to many, and Democrats have not stressed how much it connects to people’s everyday lives.
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One item that has gotten a lot of attention has been using existing authority to cancel student debt. Senator Elizabeth Warren has supported this idea, but it gets a middling 46-45 in the poll. I would attribute this to the relative newness of the concept, and how it has mostly been debated in academic journals rather than the light of day. Though Sanders has endorsed cancelling all student debt, he has still not endorsed doing it by executive action, which would probably add to its support.
Finally, immigration-related measures, which we did not include in the Day One Agenda, did not poll very well. Border decriminalization (39-52), a moratorium on deportations (39-50), and restoring the DACA (43-45) and DAPA (47-41) programs all revealed a split among the electorate on immigration that is well documented.
What I think we can say about these results is that the process of using executive authority rather than legislation for these issues doesn’t uniquely make them more or less popular. The poll tracks a lot of more general attitudes about public policy. In other words, the public doesn’t care if you find authority somewhere in a buried statute to lower drug prices; they just want lower drug prices.
Similarly, people want cleaner air, less gun violence, and more social and economic equality. To a lesser extent, they want better rights for workers and maybe a couple stiffer financial regulations. But the process by which these policies come about appears largely immaterial. And since the most direct way to actually get these things done is to actually have the president use their authority, it’s a big plus that there’s no faction of the public expressing concern that lowering drug prices a certain way turns a president into a king.
I would argue that these actions would only grow more popular over time, as the public sees the tangible benefits of the policy interventions. These numbers represent a low baseline, in other words. But they do show that Democrats need to tell a better story about the economy. Primaries are the one big moment where the nation tunes in to see where the political parties stand on the issues of the day. It can have a powerful impact on public opinion. By failing to directly confront corporate power and particularly Wall Street in an understandable way, Democrats aren’t building support for actions that can make America more safe, more prosperous, and more equal. Hopefully this polling points toward a better path.
