Emily Swanson and Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar | the Associated Press

May 3, 2021

WASHINGTON (AP) — A majority of Americans agree that government should help people fulfill a widely held aspiration to age in their own homes, not institutional settings, a new poll finds.

There’s a surprising level of bipartisan agreement on some proposals that could help make that happen, according to the late March survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Still, Republicans lag Democrats in support of some policies, including the most far-reaching idea: Only 42% of Republicans favor a government long-term care insurance program for all Americans, compared with 78% of Democrats. Overall, 60% of the public supports that approach.

Other government options to help people deal with the costs of long-term care get solid support across the political spectrum.

For example, 63% favor more funding to help low-income people age at home, a policy reflected in President Joe Biden’s stimulus plan and his COVID-19 relief law. That includes about half of Republicans and about three-quarters of Democrats. Overall, only 10% are opposed.

There’s also bipartisan alignment about proposals involving public-private partnerships.

The poll found broad backing for facilitating the purchase of long-term care coverage through a supplemental insurance plan like Medicare Advantage (supported by 70% of Americans, including 77% of Democrats and 65% of Republicans) and for tax breaks to help purchase long-term care insurance (supported by 61%, including 64% of Democrats and 58% of Republicans).

Behind it all is a deep desire among Americans to maintain their independence in an aging society.

Contrary to common belief, Medicare does not cover long-term care. Relatively few people plan ahead, and it remains prohibitively expensive for most middle-class people. Nationally, nursing home care averages more than $100,000 a year. Home and community-based services can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Private long-term care insurance has failed to catch on because premiums are high and preexisting conditions restrictions apply.

“I’d like to age in place as long as I can,” said Steven Martens, of Nashville, Tennessee, retired from a career in banking. “It’s the privacy, the feeling of independence. That feeling that you are still taking care of yourself means something to me and others. We feel good about ourselves because we are still taking care of ourselves.”

The poll found that 88% would prefer to get long-term care services as they age at home or with loved ones. Just 12% would want to receive care in a senior community or nursing home.

However, Americans’ concerns about nursing homes have eased somewhat since the ravages of the pandemic last year. The share saying they’d be very or extremely concerned about a loved one needing long-term care in a nursing home dropped from 60% in September to 44% in March. Nursing homes and senior communities are coming out of a year in lockdown because of a sustained campaign to vaccinate residents and staff, to break the cycle of infections and deaths.

Los Angeles-area resident Tevina Quintana says she’s now able to see her mother, who lives in a community for older adults. Both are vaccinated. During the COVID-19 surges last year, “it seems like they were never not on lockdown,” said Quintana, who works with special education children.

Although Quintana is in her 30s, she says long-term care should be part of the foundation of social supports. She favors a government program like Social Security to provide long-term care.

“I think it should be available for everybody,” she said.

“If we have to get taxed a little bit more, we get taxed for lots of things anyway,” added Quintana, who describes herself as a progressive Democrat. “We might as well do something that benefits our elders.”

But Nashville retiree Martens doesn’t think that’s the best way.

“I’m concerned that fiscally, how do we pay for that?” said Martens, who describes himself as a moderate Republican. “Our Medicare and Social Security systems are challenged the way it is. If we increase the level of support for long-term care, how do we fund it?”

It would be a challenge. Democrats, who control both chambers of Congress and the White House, are working slowly and deliberately, testing the feasibility of potential approaches.

In the House, Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Frank Pallone, D-N.J., has been working on a plan that would establish a new benefit under Medicare, paying a modest daily sum to help defray the cost of home-based or institutional care. And Rep. Thomas Suozzi, D-N.Y., has proposed a public-private partnership to provide long-term care insurance for services in the home.

A new Medicare benefit would have the advantage of leaving no one behind, since all Americans would be guaranteed a basic level of coverage. But public-private partnerships would also make long-term care insurance more widely available. It’s not necessarily an either-or choice. For example, many Medicare recipients buy private insurance to fill the gaps in their government benefits.

Retired dentist Fred Rich, of Syracuse, New York, said he tried to buy private long-term care insurance but wasn’t able to get it because his medical history includes cancer.

“There’s a great need,” Rich said. “The baby boomers are getting older. They’ve had fewer children, and their children aren’t as affluent as they were. So I think it’s going to be a problem.”

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The AP-NORC poll of 1,114 adults was conducted Feb. 12-March 3, with funding from The SCAN Foundation. It used a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.

Christina A. Cassidy and Hannah Fingerhut | the Associated Press

April 2, 2021

WASHINGTON (AP) — Democrats’ proposals to overhaul voting in the U.S. won solid — although not overwhelming — support from Americans in a new survey measuring the popularity of major pieces of the sweeping legislation in Congress.

The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found about half of Americans support expanding access to early and mail voting, while about 3 in 10 opposed the ideas and the rest had no opinion. Automatic voter registration was the most popular Democratic proposal in the survey, endorsed by 60% of Americans.

Generally, the partisan divide was stark, as many Republicans opposed measures that make is easier to register and vote and most Democrats embraced them. About three-quarters of Democrats supported no-excuse voting by mail, for example, but about 6 in 10 Republicans were opposed.

There was one striking exception: Nearly three-quarters of all Americans — including majorities of both parties — said they support laws requiring voters to present photo identification, even as the Democratic proposal would ease those laws.

The sizable number of Americans who expressed no opinion on many of the measures suggests both parties have some room to try to sway public opinion as they ramp up efforts to pressure the Senate to act on the bill.

“When you ask questions that are focused specifically on voting, you can’t help but step into what is a super-charged debate that is still resonating coming off the 2020 election,” said U.S. Rep. John Sarbanes, one of the lead sponsors of the Democrats’ bill. “There continues to be a lot of misinformation around what it means to have accurate and fair elections and voting in this country.”

The 2020 presidential election was dominated by coronavirus pandemic-related voting changes and a flood of misinformation and false claims of voter fraud. There was no widespread election fraud, and those claims were rejected by Republican and Democratic election officials in state after state, by U.S. cybersecurity officials and by courts up to the U.S. Supreme Court. And then-Attorney General William Barr said there was no evidence of fraud that could change the election outcome.

Still, now there is a collective sense of urgency to change how elections are run. But each side is taking a dramatically different path, with state Republicans looking to tighten rules and Democrats in Congress seeking national voting standards.

The two approaches reflect a partisan disagreement over the problem that needs solving. The AP-NORC poll shows a significant split over whether voter suppression or voter fraud is the more pressing concern. While 62% of Democrats say people who are eligible not being allowed to vote is a major problem, just 30% of Republicans do. Sixty-three percent of Republicans but just 19% of Democrats say people voting who are not eligible is a major problem.

Phil DiMenna, a 67-year-old retiree from Ashland, Ohio, who participated in the poll, said he did not think voter suppression or voter fraud were major problems, and he wished politicians of both parties would stop making voting so political.

“Put aside the party lines and do what’s best for the people of the United States,” said DiMenna, who voted for Joe Biden in November. “There is always common ground somewhere.”

The poll found bipartisan agreement on requiring all voters to provide photo identification at their polling place — something that more than a dozen mostly Republican-led states have implemented. Not all these states have strict rules, though, and many allow voters to sign an affidavit if they don’t have their photo ID with them.

Overall, 72% are in favor of requiring voters to provide photo identification to vote, while just 13% are opposed. Ninety-one percent of Republicans and 56% of Democrats are in favor. The bill in Congress would require all states with an ID requirement to allow voters to sign a sworn statement under penalty of perjury and have their ballot counted.

The measure is one of several in Democrats’ legislation, which also includes various changes to campaign finance and ethics laws. The House approved its bill in early March, and a companion measure has had its first hearing in the Senate.

Final passage, however, depends on whether Democrats, who have a tie-breaking vote in the Senate, are willing to toss out legislative rules that currently require 60 votes for most bills to advance. Republican lawmakers are universally opposed to the voting overhaul, calling it a Democratic power grab and federal intrusion into states’ rights to administer elections.

Democrats are hoping to use the federal effort to thwart state proposals that would restrict access to the polls. The Brennan Center for Justice counts 360 voting restriction bills introduced this year. Five have already been enacted, and 29 others have passed at least one legislative chamber, the group says.

The AP-NORC poll suggests a strong base of support that voting advocates can build on, according to Wendy Weiser, who leads the democracy program at the Brennan Center.

“The two things that increase support are people learning more about the reforms and how they work and people experiencing those reforms in practice in their own communities,” Weiser said.

This has been the case with Ann Cobb, a 56-year-old former customer service representative who lives in Calhoun, Georgia, where state lawmakers years earlier did away with requiring an excuse to vote absentee. She supports keeping it that way so long as voters show proof of identification.

“I think there are more opportunities for fraud with the mail-in voting, but I think if they can make you send in your driver’s license and identification then it should be OK,” said Cobb, who voted for President Donald Trump in November but changed her party registration to independent after a pro-Trump mob’s deadly Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Georgia lawmakers have done just that, recently passing a bill that now requires absentee voters to include driver’s license information when requesting and returning mail ballots. And Republican lawmakers in Congress say that is how voting changes should be done — at the state level.

“Each state has different election laws because each state is different,” said U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil, a Republican from Wisconsin, at a recent congressional hearing. “At a time of real record voting turnout, I don’t think it’s time to be mandating a one-size-fits-all to our voting system.”

Other elements of the Democratic bill would restore voting rights to felons and require same-day voter registration. The poll found 51% of Americans in favor of allowing a citizen who has completed a prison sentence for a felony to vote upon release, while 20% are opposed. Fifty-three percent of Americans say they support allowing citizens to register and vote on the same day at polling places, while 27% are opposed.

Democrats are more likely than Republicans to be in favor of both proposals.

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Cassidy reported from Atlanta.

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The AP-NORC poll of 1,166 adults was conducted March 26-29 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.6 percentage points.

Will Weissert and Hannah Fingerhut | the Associated Press

April 5, 2021

WASHINGTON (AP) — More Americans disapprove than approve of how President Joe Biden is handling the sharply increasing number of unaccompanied migrant children arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border, and approval of his efforts on larger immigration policy falls short of other top issues — suggesting it could be a weak point for the new administration.

A new poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research also shows that solving the problem of young people at the border is among Americans’ highest immigration priorities: 59% say providing safe treatment of unaccompanied children when they are apprehended should be a high priority, and 65% say the same about reuniting families separated at the border.

Former President Donald Trump built his presidency around hard-line policies that expanded and fortified border walls, made it tougher for people fleeing drug violence and other desperate circumstances in Mexico and Central America to seek U.S. asylum and separated immigrant families.

Biden has tried to seize political momentum on the issue by promising a more humane and orderly system, but his administration has struggled to cope with rising numbers of migrants coming to the border, especially unaccompanied children.

Overall, 40% of Americans disapprove of Biden’s handling of children reaching the nation’s southern border without their parents, compared with just 24% who approve. Thirty-five percent don’t have an opinion either way.

“I don’t know how to politically correctly say this: I do feel that, because there’s this new administration, that people feel that they can come to the country,” said Mindy Kiehl, a 40-year-old real estate agent in Erie, Pennsylvania, who otherwise approves of Biden’s handling of the presidency so far.

“I get it. They’re seeking refuge,” Kiehl added. “But bringing these children, it’s not good for the children, it’s not good for the families. I don’t know how that’s going to solve the problem.”

Biden said at a recent news conference that “we’re sending back the vast majority of the families that are coming.” But his struggles on the issue go beyond unaccompanied minors.

Just 42% of Americans say they approve of how the president is handling immigration in general, and a similar share, 44%, say they approve of how he’s handling border security. Both are significantly lower than the 61% of Americans who say they approve of how Biden is handling his job overall and fall short of the president’s rating on some other issues, including his response to the coronavirus pandemic and managing of the economy.

That gap comes despite the White House endorsing the most ambitious overhaul of the nation’s immigration system in a generation on Biden’s first day in office. It has stalled in Congress, though, and Republicans and even some top Democrats say passage will be difficult.

The plan would provide an eight-year path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million people in the U.S. illegally, but the poll shows doing so isn’t high on the public’s priority list. Only 29% of Americans overall, including 42% of Democrats and 14% of Republicans, called legal status for people in the country illegally a high priority.

Additionally, only a third of Americans each say that allowing refugees to come to the U.S. or expanding “guest worker” programs should be high priorities.

The gap between Biden’s overall approval rating and his handling of immigration crosses party lines. Seventy-four percent of Democrats and 10% of Republicans approve of Biden’s handling of immigration, compared with 96% of Democrats and 22% of Republicans who approve overall.

The difference also comes across racial and ethnic groups. Overall, 92% of Black Americans, 67% of Hispanics and 52% of white Americans say they approve of how Biden is handling his job. On immigration, 74% of Black Americans but only 50% of Hispanics and 34% of white Americans say they approve.

Jack Henes, a retiree in Sebastian, Florida, said Biden hasn’t handled immigration as well as some other hot-button issues while calling what’s happening on the U.S. southern border an “administrative nightmare.”

While awaiting the larger legislative package, the Democratic-controlled House has passed smaller-scale reforms that face uncertain futures in a Senate split 50-50. Biden also has used executive actions to attempt to roll back many Trump administration immigration policies but has been criticized for failing to do enough fast enough.

Others feel he’s already gone too far.

“My concern is that President Biden has allowed the world to feel it’s OK to just come on in,” said Matthew Behrs, a Trump supporter in Wisconsin.

The poll shows many Americans rank some of the major goals of the Democratic proposal as moderate priorities instead of high ones, suggesting Biden lacks a clear mandate for how best to proceed on the issue, potentially hurting his leverage with Congress.

And many want to see efforts to step up enforcement be part of the conversation: For 53%, increasing security at the border is a high priority. Some 47% of Americans also say the federal government should make strengthening policies to prevent immigrants from overstaying their visas a high priority.

Fewer, roughly a third, say penalizing companies that hire immigrants living in the U.S. illegally and deporting immigrants living in the U.S. illegally should be high priorities.

The poll also finds Americans are more likely to favor than oppose providing a way for immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children to stay legally, 53% to 24%, with 22% saying they are neither in favor nor opposed. Still, just 41% call extending legal protections to so-called Dreamers a high priority. A plan approved by the House but awaiting Senate action seeks to do just that.

Biden has now assigned Vice President Kamala Harris to work with Central American countries to try to address the root causes of illegal immigration. Henes, the retiree, suggested that Biden has given the problem to Harris as a way of buying himself some time — but that it hasn’t helped.

“They’re still in the huddle,” Henes said. “They’re not ready to call a play.”

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The AP-NORC poll of 1,166 adults was conducted March 26-29 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.6 percentage points.

Sarah Skidmore Sell | the Associated Press

April 13, 2021

While most Americans have weathered the pandemic financially, about 38 million say they are worse off now than before the outbreak began in the U.S.

Overall, 55% of Americans say their financial circumstances are about the same now as a year ago, and 30% say their finances have improved, according to a new poll from Impact Genome and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. But 15% say they are worse off.

The problem is more pronounced at lower-income levels: 29% of Americans living below the federal poverty line say their personal finances worsened in the past year. Roughly that many also find themselves in a deepening financial hole, saying they struggled to pay bills in the past three months.

Britney Frick, 27, is among those whose finances have taken a hit. She worked as a substitute teacher before the pandemic but her role was eliminated. Initially, she found a telecommunications job that allowed her to work from home, but the hours began to dwindle then dried up altogether.

Frick ended up unemployed for six months but was able to get by using her savings, reduced rent and help from her parents.

“I am slowly getting back on my feet but am nowhere near where I was before COVID,” she said.

Frick got a job at a daycare in March and the steady work is helping her rebuild her financial picture.

“I am still living paycheck to paycheck but at least the paycheck is covering the bills,” she said. “But I am happy to be back at work honestly and happy that things are kind of returning to normal.”

The pandemic has wreaked havoc on the economy — the United States still has 8.4 million fewer jobs than it had in February 2020, just before the pandemic struck.

The government has passed three major relief bills in response, which included direct economic relief payments to individuals. That has helped ease the suffering of some.

The latest round of government payments — $1,400 to individuals __ were sent out beginning last month. Households, on average, are using, or plan to use about one-third of the money to pay down debt, about 25% on spending and put the rest into savings, according to a report released last week from the New York Federal reserve. That closely mirrored spending of prior relief payments.

Overall, the Impact Genome/AP-NORC poll found 52% of Americans say they were able to save money for most of the past three months, while 37% broke even and 10% were short on paying bills. Among Americans living below the poverty line, 29% say they struggled to pay bills recently, while just 16% have saved. By comparison, 61% of those living far above the poverty line say they have been able to save. The federal poverty line for a family of four in 2019, prior to the pandemic, was $25,750.

There also are wide racial disparities, with 57% of white Americans, 47% of Hispanics and just 39% of Black Americans saying they have saved recently. Black and Hispanic Americans are about twice as likely as white Americans to say they have come up short on bill payments.

Andrew Holland said his family’s finances were fairly steady for most of the pandemic. The California resident worked as a hospice nurse and case manager and his wife kept her job with a refinery. But the stress and isolation of the pandemic led him to reconsider his work.

Unlike before the pandemic, he had no in-person interaction with colleagues or friends to relieve some of the pressure of his job. So he quit and found a new job in hospice care with fewer hours. His wife also got a new job with better pay.

While their family finances took a temporary hit and they spent some savings, he expects to recover. Holland and his wife have started tracking their spending more closely and are now planning for an earlier retirement.

“This really made me look at what do I want to do and when do I want to do it,” Holland, 35, said. “I feel incredibly lucky that the worst that happened is I lost a month’s of wages and got a job with fewer hours.”

The poll found many Americans — nearly a third — had not had investment or similar long-term savings accounts set up even before the pandemic. Another 19% say they have been able to add more to investments like a 401(k) or a college savings plan, and 38% say the amount hasn’t changed compared to last year.

Holland said he is disheartened by the inequality of how the pandemic has played out for people, and is concerned the imbalance will never be corrected.

“I am glad that it gave me the push to look at my finances and plan a little bit more for the future,” Holland said. “I definitely wish it had come at a much lower cost for the world as whole.”

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The AP-NORC poll of 2,374 adults was conducted Feb. 12-March 3 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 2.9 percentage points.

David Bauder | the Associated Press

April 14, 2021

NEW YORK (AP) — A study of the public’s attitude toward the press reveals that distrust goes deeper than partisanship and down to how journalists define their very mission.

In short: Americans want more than a watchdog.

The study, released Wednesday by the Media Insight Project, a collaboration between the American Press Institute and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, suggests ways that news organizations can reach people they may be turning off now.

“In some ways, this study suggests that our job is broader and bigger than we’ve defined it,” said Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the American Press Institute.

The study defines five core principles or beliefs that drive most journalists: keep watch on public officials and the powerful; amplify voices that often go unheard; society works better with information out in the open; the more facts people have the closer they will get to the truth; and it’s necessary to spotlight a community’s problems to solve them.

Yet the survey, which asked non-journalists a series of questions designed to measure support for each of those ideas, found unqualified majority support for only one of them. Two-thirds of those surveyed fully supported the fact-finding mission.

Half of the public embraced the principle that it’s important for the media to give a voice to the less powerful, according to the survey, and slightly less than half fully supported the roles of oversight and promoting transparency.

Less than a third of the respondents agreed completely with the idea that it’s important to aggressively point out problems. Only 11% of the public, most of them liberals, offered full support to all five ideas.

“I do believe they should be a watchdog on the government, but I don’t think they should lean either way,” said Annabell Hawkins, 41, a stay-at-home mother from Lawton, Oklahoma. “When I grew up watching the news it seemed pretty neutral. You’d get either side. But now it doesn’t seem like that.”

Hawkins said she believed the news media spent far too much time criticizing former President Donald Trump and rarely gave him credit for anything good he did while in office.

“I just want the facts about what happened so I can make up my own mind,” said Patrick Gideons, a 64-year-old former petroleum industry supervisor who lives south of Houston. He lacks faith in the news media because he believes it offers too much opinion.

Gideons, though, said he gets most of his news through social media, which is skilled in directing followers toward beliefs they are comfortable with. He said he knows only one person who subscribes to a newspaper anymore — his 91-year-old father.

Polls show how the public’s attitude toward the press has soured over the past 50 years and, in this century, how it has become much more partisan. In 2000, a Gallup poll found 53% of Democrats said they trusted the media, compared with 47% of Republicans. In the last full year of the Trump presidency, Gallup found trust went up to 73% among Democrats and plunged to 10% among Republicans.

The survey’s findings point to some ways news organizations can combat the negativity.

Half a century ago, when newspapers were flourishing and before the internet and cable television led to an explosion in opinionated news, the public’s view of the role of journalists was more compatible to how journalists viewed the job themselves, Rosenstiel said.

“We were the tough guys, we were the cops,” he said.

The study indicates now that consumers are interested in news that highlights potential solutions to problems and want to hear about things that are working, he said.

“We tend to think that stories that celebrate the good things in society are soft stories, kind of wimpy,” he said. “But they may be more important than we think in providing a full and accurate picture of the world.”

People who put greater emphasis on loyalty and authority tend to be more skeptical of the core values that journalists try to uphold, as opposed to those who give greater weight to fairness, the study found. Changes in the way a story is framed can make it more widely appealing to different audiences.

In one example, researchers took a story about a canceled recreation center project in a low-income neighborhood and emphasized the element, less prominent in the original story, that the parks director had diverted funds designated for the project by the city’s mayor. The change led to the story being seen as more trusted and appealing by a broader set of the public, especially those who place value in authority.

The nationwide survey was conducted with 2,727 adults in the fall of 2019, with a second set of interviews done last August with 1,155 people who had completed the first survey.

The study found that majorities of Americans believe that the media doesn’t care about them and tries to cover up its mistakes. Despite the negativity, Rosenstiel said he believes there’s room for both sides to come to a better understanding of each other.

Believe it or not, most journalists are pretty sincere, said Rosenstiel, a former reporter for the Los Angeles Times and Newsweek.

“Regular people should note that when journalists say they are just doing their job, they actually mean that,” he said, “because they define their job a certain way. They’re not lying. They really don’t think of themselves as secret agents of the Democratic Party. They have these set of principles that they think they’re upholding.”