Across three surveys conducted between February and April 2026, The Argument asked Americans to place themselves on five-point scales measuring social and economic ideology. On average, respondents described themselves as moderate on social issues and slightly conservative on economics.
Their answers to specific policy questions complicate the picture, however.
Large majorities favor more government spending on Social Security, healthcare, and education, with substantial support even among self-described economic conservatives. On social issues, the pattern is more mixed. The issue polling suggests that a successful electoral strategy could involve increasing the salience of popular government spending programs but treading with more caution on polarized fights over ideology and culture.
Americans say they’re not liberal, but they want many liberal policies
Our respondents’ self-description doesn’t neatly mesh with the policies that voters actually claim to want. For instance, Americans overwhelmingly believe that the federal government should be spending more on Social Security rather than making cuts to the program. That even includes a whopping 56% of economic conservatives.
That isn’t the only issue where a large group of self-identified conservative voters wants to spend more money. When it comes to healthcare, just about every ideological group thinks the government spends too little, including a plurality (41%) of economic conservatives.
And it’s a similar (if somewhat less pronounced) story for education, where 62% of voters want to see the country spend more, including 37% of economic conservatives. Only 21% of those conservatives say the government spends too much.
It’s not that everyone just wants the government to spend money indiscriminately on progressive causes. For instance, when it comes to welfare benefits for ex-felons, 47% of respondents think that ex-felons should be subjected to some period of disqualification, compared with just 36% who feel that ex-felons should never be disqualified.
On the whole, our poll certainly doesn’t suggest that the public is economically conservative, at least in the way that the Republican Party has traditionally defined the term. If anything, the results point to a popular case for the kind of economic liberalism that the Democrats have coalesced around, with everyone from Sen. Elizabeth Warren to Sen. Chuck Schumer in broad support.
It could also help explain why Mitt Romney got torched in 2012: The constituency that thinks we spend too much on healthcare is roughly the size of the constituency that thinks America could use a king. Indeed, dropping the Republican stances on health care and Social Security (rhetorically, at least) was a key part of why Donald Trump surged in the Midwest in 2016.1
An agenda promoting popular welfare spending, centered around heavy government investment in areas such as healthcare and education, could serve the political left very well. In fact, this is perhaps the single best poll finding I have seen for the progressive movement in over a year of surveys we’ve conducted at The Argument.