Environment & Infrastructure: Emerging Divides

Environment: the long, asymmetric drift

The topline for environmental spending is, on a fifty-year view, remarkably stable. About two-thirds of Americans, in nearly every wave since 1973, have said the federal government spends too little on improving and protecting the environment.

The country, in aggregate, has wanted more federal environmental spending for fifty years. But the aggregate stability of Figure 1 hides one of the larger partisan reversals in this book.

Two things in Figure 2 are worth slowing down on.

The first is that the Republican line in 2024 is lower than it was in 1973. Fifty years of broad American consensus on environmental spending — Republican voters included — has been partially reversed, on the Republican side. The Republican Party of the Nixon-era EPA, the Reagan-era Acid Rain Program, and the Bush 41 Clean Air Act amendments could be reliably counted on to deliver majority support for environmental spending from its own voters. The Republican Party of 2024 cannot. This is not a story of Republicans never having cared; it is a story of a coalition whose environmental commitments have been actively rolled back by a generation of partisan elite cues that started seriously in the 1990s and intensified through the Trump era.

The second is that the Democratic line has gone in the opposite direction. Democrats stood at 70% in 1973; they stand at 83% in 2024 — a 12-point increase. So the gap widened from 15 points in 1973 to 39 points in 2024 — a 24-point widening, which is roughly the sum of a 12-point Democratic rise plus an 11-point Republican fall. Both coalitions moved on this issue, in opposite directions, and the net result is one of the cleanest examples of partisan sorting in the entire GSS spending battery.

The companion question — "too much on the environment" — confirms what Figure 2 already shows.

Almost a quarter of Republicans, in 2024, actively oppose more federal environmental spending. Compare this to 6% of Democrats. On no other item in the GSS spending battery is the "spend less" position so disproportionately one-coalition's.

The age structure of environmental views is one of the longest-stable demographic patterns in this book.

The age-stability of environmental support is unusual. On most spending domains, the cohort composition of the country drives some of the long-run movement: today's 65-year-olds were yesterday's 35-year-olds, and where their attitudes converged or diverged across decades helps explain topline drift. On the environment, the under-35 line has been near-flat at 78% for fifty years, across totally different cohorts of young Americans — Boomers in 1973, Gen X in the 1990s, Millennials in the 2010s, Gen Z in the 2020s. If today's 18-34-year-olds become tomorrow's 65+ cohort and hold their position, the country's net environmental-spending support will rise about 20 points by 2070. The cohort-replacement projection is the rare case here where the demographic clock runs unambiguously in one direction.

The ideology view tells the same partisan story with sharper edges.

The Conservative line on environmental spending fell from 73% in 1990 to 39% in 2024 — a 33-point drop that is roughly contemporaneous with the rise of climate change as a partisan issue, the Republican Contract with America environmentalism backlash, and the long emergence of conservative media frames around the EPA and federal environmental regulation. This is the partisan sorting story of the last thirty years, in one chart.

Roads and bridges: the most bipartisan item in the chapter

If the environmental story is one of long, asymmetric partisan drift, the highway-and-bridge story is the opposite. Of the major spending items in the GSS battery, "highways and bridges" is one of the most bipartisan — and it has stayed that way for the entire history of the question.

The series shows Americans wanting more federal highway and bridge spending in roughly the same proportions for forty years. About half the country, in most waves, has said too little. What is striking — and what makes this section a useful counterpoint to the environmental section — is how flat the partisan structure has been.

A 0.8-point partisan gap on a 53% topline is, in the contemporary American political environment, almost a curiosity. No major American institution, no major spending category, no major social attitude tracked by the GSS shows a tighter partisan agreement than highway spending. The most likely explanations are mechanical and unromantic: highways and bridges produce concrete, locally-visible benefits whose use does not divide along partisan lines (Republican voters drive on roads as much as Democratic voters do); they generate jobs in ways that play well in any congressional district; and there is no widely-circulated cultural narrative that has assigned highway maintenance to one coalition or the other. The contemporary bipartisan infrastructure bills — the Trump-era attempts, the 2021 Biden-era IIJA — drew bipartisan support in Congress precisely because the underlying voters of both parties wanted them.

Mass transit: the medium case

Between the environment (deeply polarized) and highways (essentially unpolarized) sits mass transit — an item with a real partisan gap that is smaller than the environmental gap and larger than the highway gap.

Mass transit is interesting because it sits at the intersection of three forces — partisan, geographic, and generational. Cities are where most mass transit is, and cities are disproportionately Democratic. Republican-coalition voters increasingly live in places where there is no train to ride. The 16-point partisan gap on mass-transit spending is partly an artifact of where the parties' voters live, not a pure ideological disagreement.

This makes mass transit a useful case for thinking about how spending preferences get partisan-coded. Highways serve everyone regardless of party; the partisan gap is near zero. The environment, in principle, also serves everyone — but it has been partisan-coded through cultural and ideological narratives over thirty years, and the partisan gap is now huge. Mass transit's partisan gap is genuine but explained as much by geography as by ideology. Three infrastructure-and-environment items, three partisan gradients, all in the same chapter.

What this chapter changes

Two things to take into the rest of Part II.

The first is that "infrastructure" is not a politically natural category. Highways and bridges, mass transit, the environment, and (in the next chapter) energy and science research all get grouped together in policy-speak — "infrastructure" as the universal noun for things-the-government-builds-or-protects — but voters do not treat them as a single object. The same Republican voter who supports highway spending almost as much as the average Democrat does will, on environmental spending, sit 39 points to the right of that same Democrat. The cohesion of the contemporary "infrastructure bill" coalitions in Washington exists despite the underlying voter preferences being highly heterogeneous across the items the bills package together, not because of any underlying voter agreement on the bundle.

The second is that the environment is one of the few cases in the GSS spending battery where one coalition has actively reversed a long-held position. The 2024 Republican reading on environmental spending is below the 1973 Republican reading. On almost every other item in this book, both parties have moved upward on most spending questions over fifty years — the country wants more federal spending on most things in 2024 than it did in 1973. The environment is the exception. The partisan-sorting story on environmental spending is genuinely a story of one party leaving a previous consensus, not just diverging from a new direction.

The next section turns to scientific research and foreign aid — the spending items where the partisan gap intersects with a different demographic divide: the diploma divide.