By John Ray (@johnlray) and Sean McElwee (@SeanMcElwee)

Since the rise of Occupy Wall Street, wealth inequality has become a central part of American political discussion. This cycle both Senator Bernie Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren have released tax plans that seek to raise revenue and combat inequality by restoring rates on the wealthiest Americans to prior rates. Recent academic work, particularly the Tax Justice Now project by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, has found that stagnating earnings for the middle class combined with an increasingly regressive tax code has contributed to rising inequality in the modern era. We tested whether voters would support a more progressive tax policy to address inequality.

On behalf of Data for Progress, YouGov Blue fielded a survey of 1,024 US voters on YouGov’s online panel. The survey was weighted to be representative of the population of US voters by age, race/ethnicity, sex, gender, US Census region, and 2016 Presidential vote choice. As part of the survey, we asked voters to consider four plans for what the nation’s income tax rates ought to be for Americans at different income levels. Those tax plans corresponded to proposals by Democratic presidential candidates Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and Vice President Joe Biden; and to the income tax rates under Donald Trump’s most recent tax cut bill.

Our survey fielded online, giving voters the chance to take in a graphic summarizing how several candidates’ proposed tax plans would affect the distribution of tax rates. We took the chart directly from the Zucman and Saez Tax Justice Now project. You can see the items the way respondents saw them here, with each image name corresponding to the order in which they were shown. The tax plans were anonymized and were presented together in a graph as follows: