While soak-the-rich progressives lead the Democratic presidential field, a new poll released Tuesday shows voters remain skeptical of their socialist policies.
Just 12 percent of likely voters reported preferring a socialist economic system, according to a new Heartland Institute/Rasmussen poll. Sixty-nine percent said they preferred “a free-market economic system.”
When it came to the 2020 contenders, only 26 percent of likely voters said they would vote for a presidential candidate that identified as a socialist. Fifty-percent said they would not. It’s no surprise then that Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who have both openly embraced socialism, scored high unfavorable ratings among respondents with 49 percent and 48 percent respectively.
The poll interviewed 1,000 likely voters of a relatively even partisan distribution by telephone between Nov. 13-14 with a +/-3 percent margin of error.
The Heartland Institute/Rasmussen survey’s results corroborate the findings of a wide-ranging survey published by the libertarian Cato Institute in September.
Cato found that 75 percent of Americans rejected the idea that it is “immoral for society to allow people to become billionaires,” in direct contradiction to Sanders who argues that billionaires have no place in society.
“I don’t think that billionaires should exist,” Sanders said in an interview with the New York Times on the same day of the study’s release. “I hope the day comes when they don’t.”
Sanders and Warren have both campaigned as the Democratic primary’s most left-wing candidates, each running on a platform to implement a wealth tax and single-payer health care in competition to be the progressive standard-bearer in a crowded field of candidates each pushing the party further left.
While the race’s frontrunner, former Vice President Joe Biden has attempted to carve out a moderate lane, Biden would be considered the most radical liberal in any other primary prior to the 2020 election cycle for his stances on health care and climate change, illustrating just how far left the party has swung.
The polls however, show that voters aren’t quite yet buying the socialist fantasyland that Democrats are selling “for free” on the campaign trail.
