I recent­ly saw a con­fer­ence speech sug­gest­ing that geo­graph­ic polar­iza­tion was ter­ri­ble for tran­sit, because as Repub­li­cans have become a more rur­al par­ty, they have become more anti-tran­sit than ever. How­ev­er, a recent Data for Progress sur­vey sug­gests that pub­lic opin­ion is a bit more nuanced. Although Repub­li­cans are gen­er­al­ly not as pro-tran­sit as Democ­rats, pro-tran­sit propo­si­tions often met with sig­nif­i­cant or even major­i­ty sup­port from Repub­li­cans.

The good news is that when asked to agree or dis­agree with the state­ment “The Unit­ed States would ben­e­fit from bet­ter pub­lic tran­sit,” only 26 per­cent of sub­ur­ban Repub­li­cans dis­agreed, along with only 29 per­cent of rur­al Repub­li­cans. When asked about their own com­mu­ni­ties, rur­al and sub­ur­ban Repub­li­cans were almost even­ly split—understandably giv­en the extreme­ly low den­si­ty of most of rur­al and sub­ur­ban Amer­i­ca.

Since Repub­li­cans are often more skep­ti­cal of gov­ern­ment spend­ing, one might expect a strong par­ti­san split about any poll ques­tions involv­ing the word “fund­ing.” Six­ty-five per­cent of Democ­rats favored more fund­ing for tran­sit, only 4 per­cent favored less fund­ing, and 21 per­cent favored keep­ing fund­ing the same. Repub­li­cans over­whelm­ing­ly favored the mid­dle posi­tion; 48 per­cent favored keep­ing fund­ing the same, as opposed to 20 and 19 per­cent favor­ing increas­es and cut­backs, respec­tive­ly.

But Repub­li­cans can also be skep­ti­cal of road spend­ing, depend­ing on how a ques­tion is asked. Sev­en­ty-three per­cent of them favored fix­ing old roads before build­ing new ones, and 63 per­cent favored a ten-year mora­to­ri­um on new roads (a num­ber rough­ly com­pa­ra­ble to the per­cent­age of Democ­rats tak­ing these posi­tions).

One bit of bad news for tran­sit advo­cates is that Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats are more sharply divid­ed when tax­es are men­tioned. The sur­vey asks whether respon­dents would be will­ing to pay high­er tax­es for tran­sit. Democ­rats over­whelm­ing­ly sup­port­ed the idea; Repub­li­cans were most­ly against the tax increase, though 35 per­cent took the pro-tax, pro-tran­sit posi­tion. In addi­tion, Repub­li­cans who oppose new roads usu­al­ly weren’t will­ing to go fur­ther and remove exist­ing free­ways. After being informed of the case for remov­ing urban free­ways, Repub­li­cans opposed con­di­tion­ing fed­er­al trans­porta­tion fund­ing on free­way removal plans by about a 2–1 mar­gin.

On bal­ance, it seems to me that rank-and-file Repub­li­cans are gen­er­al­ly not anti-tran­sit, and are gen­er­al­ly per­fect­ly hap­py to sup­port exist­ing lev­els of fund­ing and service—a result that seems con­sis­tent with Con­gres­sion­al Repub­li­cans’ con­sis­tent sup­port of sta­tus quo-ori­ent­ed trans­porta­tion bills. Although Repub­li­cans are much more skep­ti­cal of major new tran­sit invest­ments, a sig­nif­i­cant minor­i­ty of Repub­li­cans are per­suad­able even as to new projects.