October 2020 Poll: 84% Of GQP Voters Supported New CCC, But Then Biden Said He Liked The Idea . . .

[hatrack]

EDIT

Republicans have found plenty of things to criticize in the Build Back Better package, but they’ve found particularly harsh words for the Civilian Climate Corps. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky called the program “pure socialist wish fulfillment” in a speech on the Senate floor in October. Representative Jim Banks of Indiana described it in a memo as “​​a cabal of federally funded climate police.”

Amazingly, just over a year ago, your average Republican liked the idea of reviving the Civilian Conservation Corps. A poll from October 2020 found that 84 percent of Republican voters, compared to just 78 percent of Democratic ones, supported creating a program to fight fires, plant trees, and do conservation work modeled after the CCC of the 1930s. About half a year later, however, after Biden announced his program and swapped “climate” for “conservation” in the title, polling shows that Republican support dropped almost in half, to 44 percent.

“It’s just so unfortunate that a program like this has been caught up in these divisive politics,” said Neil Maher, a history professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and the author of the book Nature’s New Deal, which chronicles the history of Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps. “Because if any program was going to help everyone across the political divide, it would be a program like this.”

EDIT

It didn’t take long for opponents to start characterizing the proposed Civilian Climate Corps as some kind of socialist plot. In May, a prominent climate denier appeared on Fox News to decry a CCC proposal backed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, suggesting that the Democrats were trying to buy loyal voters by giving out good-paying jobs. “Are they gonna lose the R in climate ‘corps’ and become ‘climate cops’ and start admonishing people, knocking hamburgers out of their mouth at a park?” he asked. In July, the Wall Street Journal ran a widely-circulated editorial describing the proposal as a Democratic plan “to tax you and other Americans to pay your children to spend years lecturing you.”

EDIT

https://grist.org/politics/republicans-polarization-civilian-climate-corps/

[kysrsoze]

1. Here's a dumb question - why change the name to something that's a lightning rod?

Why the hell does this party do these things to itself? Yeah, it's stupid to change your opinion on an initiative based on the name, but "climate" is a third rail if you want to get all the knuckledraggers to support something.

Have we not learned anything in all these years on messaging?