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In the latest installment of RealClear Opinion Research’s continuing exploration of Pennsylvania public opinion, we partnered again with Emerson Polling to survey 2,000 residents of the Keystone State. This battery focused on inequality and taxation and included some experiments designed to probe the values underlying those debates. The results offer both good and bad news for conservatives, liberals, and progressives alike.
We began by asking Pennsylvanians whether the law should cap how much wealth any one person may hold. The answer was a “no”: 62% oppose such a maximum, compared with 21% who support it, and 17% who aren’t sure. That might make Pennsylvania look comfortable with concentrated wealth, but the rest of the survey suggests otherwise. We also find that 64% of respondents support raising taxes on billionaires, wealthy corporations, and Big Tech to help pay for healthcare, food access, transit, and education. Another 62% support ending what the survey described as a tax exemption on hedge-fund and private-equity profits. And 42% support a higher rate on investment, trust, and estate income, compared with 28% who oppose it. Those positions may initially appear contradictory, but they aren’t really. Voters can oppose an absolute ceiling on wealth while supporting varying degrees of redistribution. They may also begin with very different assumptions about how much wealthy people currently pay. Mapping where Pennsylvanians fall along that continuum is one of the central goals of this project.
Republicans are overwhelmingly opposed to an outright wealth cap, but support for some forms of progressive taxation extends well into the Republican electorate: 51% support ending the hedge-fund and private-equity exemption described in the survey. Only 10% of Republicans want a wealth cap, and 78% reject the idea outright, compared with 30% of Democrats in favor. But move the question from “should there be a limit” to “should the money already at the top be taxed more heavily,” and that gap closes: 51% of Republicans still want to end the carried-interest exemption. In other words, even Republicans in Pennsylvania show substantial support for redistributive programs.
The bigger surprise comes when we begin to look beyond party. In particular, the group most open to a cap isn’t the working class (19.7% in favor) or the middle class, which is the least open of anyone (16.9%). It’s the small slice of residents (about 3.5% of respondents) who call themselves “wealthy.” They split almost exactly down the middle, 48.6% for a cap to 46.7% against.
That subgroup is small (about 3.5% of the sample, or roughly 70 people), so the precise split shouldn’t be taken too literally given the roughly 12% error margin. What we can say, and what is actually interesting, is that the wealthy are far less resistant to a cap than the middle class (16.9%) or working class (19.7%), even if we can’t pin the difference down to the decimal.
Even the minority who do want a cap can’t agree where it belongs. Nearly a quarter, 24%, would draw the line at $10 million. The rest spread almost evenly across every option offered, from $50 million to $100 billion or more. None of these individual responses draws more than 18% support. Bucket the answers into ‘$100 million or less’ and ‘more than $100 million,’ and it’s close to a coin flip, 51% to 49%. This, then, shows the real conundrum for the Left. Even among people who agree nominally that, at a certain point, you have enough money, there’s wide disagreement about what “enough money” means.
So that’s our first look. Pennsylvanians seem to have drawn a genuine distinction between limiting what someone is allowed to accumulate versus various other redistributive measures, which are supported to varying degrees across party and class lines. Even the people standing closest to the top of the ladder aren’t defending it as hard as the debate usually assumes.
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