Finding common ground: 109 national policy proposals with bipartisan support

Taylor Orth
Director of Survey Data Journalism


Is there anything that Democrats and Republicans agree on? Most public opinion polls today — including many of our own — highlight large differences in where members of each party stand on political issues, and on lots of other things. But if you look hard enough, you can find some common ground.

In a series of recent surveys, we identified more than 100 national policy proposals with bipartisan support — meaning they're supported by more than half of Democrats and more than half of Republicans. Some issue areas with the most policies getting bipartisan agreement are government and electoral reform, criminal justice, and health care. Placing more restrictions on political candidates, and making health care more affordable, are popular among Democrats and Republicans.

How we chose the policies
We asked Americans whether they support or oppose 155 policies that our team hypothesized — based on past polling and, in some cases, intuition — could be bipartisan. We define bipartisan as being strongly or somewhat supported by over 50% of Democrats and also by over 50% of Republicans.

Our goal was to identify policies that are popular, on the merits and not because of question wording that makes them sound particularly appealing. We attempted to phrase the questions as neutrally as possible. Each question had response options of strongly support, somewhat support, somewhat oppose, strongly oppose, and not sure. We combined responses of strongly and somewhat support to determine the overall share of each party supporting a policy.
https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/50343-national-policy-proposals-with-bipartisan-support


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