A higher percentage of adults are calling for action on items like lowering prescription drug costs, increasing the minimum wage and infrastructure spending than reducing taxes. | Getty POLITICO-Harvard poll: Tax reform lags other issues on list of voters' concerns

Republicans plan on making tax reform one of their top policy priorities this fall, but it’s far from clear that’s what voters actually want.

One in five adults said that reducing taxes for businesses and individuals should be a major focus for Congress this fall, a POLITICO-Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health poll found, with a higher percentage calling for action on items like lowering prescription drug costs, increasing the minimum wage and infrastructure spending.


Even among GOP voters, support for tax reform was rather muted, with far more Republicans interested in continuing the battle over repealing Obamacare. A third of Republicans called for taxes to be a key part of the congressional to-do list, roughly the same as wanted more defense spending and a focus on reducing federal debt. About half of Republicans want Congress to maintain its efforts to roll back the Affordable Care Act.

The findings come as Republicans have once more moved their Obamacare efforts to the forefront, with a last-ditch effort at repeal planned for next week, even as key policymakers are scheduled to roll out new tax reform details.

The POLITICO-Harvard poll also suggests that GOP efforts to sell tax reform have so far fallen flat, with about nine in 10 Americans saying they’ve heard little or nothing about Republican efforts to craft a tax plan. President Donald Trump and key members of his administration have already visited several states in trying to spur public interest in his potential tax plan, though some of those visits occurred after the poll was conducted.

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Trump has vowed that the tax plan written by Republicans won’t cut taxes for the rich, even as outside projections found that the framework his administration released in April would do just that.

About half of those polled don’t believe that Republicans will follow through on that promise, instead believing the highest earners would be the biggest beneficiaries of a GOP tax plan. About 30 percent thought the middle class would be the big winners in a Trump tax plan.

But that question underscored America’s deep partisan divide on taxes as well. A strong majority of Republicans said that middle-income households would gain the most from Trump’s tax plan, compared with 15 percent of Democrats and one in four independents.

Republicans also were far more likely to believe that Trump’s tax plan would help them personally and spark the economy as a whole. Overall, a slight majority said the tax plan would not give them a financial boost, while respondents were split basically down the middle over whether the plan would help the economy.

On health care, the poll found that Americans could potentially back the type of universal system being pushed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), but the support depends on how the system is constructed and how the issue is framed.

Respondents were evenly split over enacting a single-payer system, with Democrats overwhelmingly supporting the idea and Republicans just as opposed. But according to the poll, about two-thirds of respondents expressed support for a Medicare-for-all plan, with even Republicans split on the issue.

At the same time, support for both universal Medicare and single-payer dropped significantly when people were asked whether they would be willing to pay more taxes to get those systems.

Trump said weeks ago that he would declare the opioid epidemic a national emergency, allowing for more funding and other tools to fight the problem. The president has yet to formally follow through on that statement, even as almost nine in 10 Americans believe opioid abuse is at least a serious matter. The POLITICO-Harvard poll found 45 percent believed the issue is a full-blown crisis, and 41 percent considered it a serious problem.

While Obamacare and taxes have gotten the most attention in Washington, the top priority identified by respondents was lowering prescription drug prices, according to the poll. About nine in 10 respondents indicated they believe the federal government should negotiate with pharmaceutical companies to lower prescription drug prices under Medicare, but support for that idea plummeted — to 38 percent — if it were to mean companies would no longer sell some drugs through the program.

And even though soda taxes have proven controversial in places like Philadelphia and Cook County, Illinois, the poll found 57 percent of respondents thought taxing sugary drinks to pay for preschool and children’s health programs would be a good trade-off.

The survey was conducted by SSRS, an independent research company, for POLITICO and Harvard from Aug. 30 to Sept. 3. It used cellphones and landlines among a nationally representative sample of 1,016 U.S. adults and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.