Politics
More Biden Voters Than Trump Voters Want To Live Where Marijuana Is Legal, But Majorities In Both Parties Support Legalization
More Biden voters than Trump voters want to live in a place where marijuana is legal, according to a new survey. But a separate poll shows that legalization itself has majority support among both Democrats and Republicans.
Nearly half (48.6 percent) of U.S. homeowners and renters who plan to vote for Joe Biden in November’s presidential election said they want to live in a jurisdiction where cannabis is legal, says a new report published last week that was commissioned by the real estate platform Redfin and conducted in February by polling firm Qualtrics.
Among likely Trump voters, just 12.4 percent said they’d like to live somewhere with legal marijuana.
Of the 2,995 people surveyed in the Redfin poll, 1,171 (39.1 percent) said they plan to vote for Biden and 1,162 (38.8 percent) said they will vote for Trump. The other respondents said they don’t intend to vote for either candidate.
The plurality of those surveyed—41.3 percent—were indifferent as to whether or not they’d want to live where cannabis is legal. About a third (32.3 percent) said they don’t want to live in a legal jurisdiction, while just over a quarter (26.4 percent) said they do.
Redfin
People with college degrees and those who earn higher incomes were both more likely to want to live where cannabis is legal, the report found.
Despite the strong partisan difference when it comes to whether people want to live in an area with legal marijuana, majorities of voters from both parties said in a separate new poll published last week that they support legalization as a policy.
The Data for Progress survey of 1,207 likely voters, conducted April 11–12, found that 75 percent of Democrats, 54 percent of Republicans and 67 percent of Independents favor the reform, as measured by either strong or somewhat support.
Overall, 66 percent of respondents said they approve of legalization. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percent.
NEW POLL: Sixty-six percent of voters, including 75% of Democrats, 67% of Independents, and 54% of Republicans, support legalizing marijuana at the federal level for all adults over the age of 21.https://t.co/Ie22Sqk9EC pic.twitter.com/gMFo86QyND
— Data for Progress (@DataProgress) April 20, 2024
Across party lines, 76 percent of voters also said they favor the Biden administration’s pardons of Americans with past federal convictions for simple marijuana possession. Those actions had 87 percent support among Democratic voters, 65 percent support among Republicans and 76 percent support among Independents.
The report also found broad support for rescheduling marijuana—59 percent overall, lower than support for legalization. Support for a move to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act, as the Department of Health and Human Services has recommended, was most popular among surveyed Independents, at 66 percent support. Meanwhile 60 percent of Democrats favored the Reform, as did 52 percent of Republicans.
A fourth question on the Data for Progress survey asked whether respondents “think marijuana is addictive.” Overall, 23 percent of people said they believe marijuana is “highly addictive,” while 46 percent said it’s “somewhat addictive.” Another 27 percent said cannabis is “not addictive,” and 4 percent said they didn’t know.
Data for Progress
Meanwhile a separate Gallup poll published earlier last week found that rates of marijuana use are nearly the same in states that have legalized versus those that maintain prohibition, which the polling firm said suggests that “criminalization does little to curtail its use.”
Overall, one in 10 American adults said they had used marijuana 10 or more times in the past month, while one in five had used cannabis at least once in the past month. Notably, the use rate in the West (California, Oregon and Washington State) was slightly lower, at 10 percent, despite all three states having established adult-use cannabis markets.
While a minority of Americans report regularly using marijuana, polls have consistently found that there’s increasingly bipartisan majority support for legalizing cannabis.
For example, nine in 10 Americans say marijuana should be legal for recreational or medical purposes, a Pew Research Center poll that was released last month found. And most agree that legalization bolsters local economies and makes the criminal justice system more fair.
A separate Gallup poll from last November found that support for marijuana legalization reached a new record high nationally, with seven in 10 Americans—including a sizable majority of Republicans, Democrats and independents—backing an end to prohibition.
Another survey released last month found that a strong majority of voters in three states—including more than 60 percent of Republicans—support congressional legislation to protect states’ rights to set their own marijuana laws.
Pew also released a separate report in February that found eight in 10 Americans now live in a county with at least one marijuana dispensary. The analysis also shows that high concentrations of retailers often “cluster” near borders abutting other states that have “less permissive cannabis laws”—indicating that there’s a large market of people who live in still-criminalized jurisdictions who cross state lines to purchase regulated products.
