America Couldn't Be Much Less Excited About The GOP's Tax Plan

With the Senate’s middle-of-the-night vote to pass the Republicans’ tax plan, the GOP has once again mobilized to push through a bill with remarkably little public support, found a new HuffPost/YouGov survey finds.

According to the poll, which was taken several days before the vote, just 30 percent favor the GOP’s tax proposals, with 39 percent opposed, according to the poll, which was taken several days before the vote. The remaining 30 percent aren’t sure.

Views are segmented largely along political lines. Voters who backed President Donald Trump in last year’s election support the proposals, 75 percent to 8 percent, while those who favored Hillary Clinton oppose it, 7 percent to 82 percent. The rest of America is split, with 20 percent in favor, 32 percent against, and nearly half saying they’re not sure what to think.

Public support for the tax plan is only modestly higher than it was for the GOP’s disastrously unpopular attempts to repeal Obamacare, efforts which regularly polled in the 20-to-30-percent range. But the GOP’s tax reform proposal does seem to have drawn less fervent opposition than the repeal bills, which were regularly rejected in polling by a majority of Americans.

Fewer than one-fifth of Americans currently pick tax reform as among two issues most important to them, placing it significantly behind health care, which currently stands at 41 percent. Even that level of engagement is largely driven by its proponents: 40 percent of those who support the Republicans’ tax proposals consider tax reform a top issue, compared to just 12 percent of people who oppose them.

Slightly below 60 percent of the public reports that they’ve been following news about the tax bill at least somewhat closely, although only about a third says they’ve paid very close attention. Just over half of Americans polled say they understand the bill at least somewhat well, and just 14 percent that they understand it very well.

Under a third of Americans say they’ll be disappointed if Congress doesn’t pass a tax reform bill. And few anticipate the current push for tax reform will leave either themselves, or other Americans, better off. Only 26 percent expect that the reform proposals, if passed, would make things better for most average Americans, with 36 percent saying they would make things worse, 8 percent that they wouldn’t change much, and the remaining 31 percent unsure.

There’s even less optimism about their own fortunes, with 15 percent of Americans believing that the tax proposals would make things better for them, 31 percent believing that reform would hurt them, 19 percent that it wouldn’t have much effect, and 35 percent unsure.

Even among those who generally favor the tax plan, nearly three-quarters expect it to help most Americans, but just 45 percent expect personal benefits. Just 36 percent of all Trump voters, and 29 percent of those Trump voters in households making less than $50,000 annually, expect the proposals to help them.

As other recent polling shows, compared to previous tax bills, the current one is historically unpopular.

On average, as of last week, Americans disapproved of the tax plan by about a 14-point margin, according to FiveThirtyEight’s Harry Enten. That makes it less popular than most major bills dating back to the 1980s, and puts it, at best, roughly on par with some efforts to raise taxes in the 1990s.

Use the widget below to further explore the results of the Huffpost/YouGov survey, using the menu at the top to select survey questions and the buttons at the bottom to filter the data by subgroups: