It’s definitely not just that. You can ask people if they’d support a hypothetical social program and then describe a real one, warts and all (they’re usually not a tenth as bad as popularly supposed—you don’t need to shy away from the down sides to make them look good) and get very high rates of support. Name the actual program, and you get a “no” and a bunch of BS about it back. It’s a propaganda thing, it’s not the price tags. I mean, sometimes, sure, but you can go out all day long and get 20-30% swings in support for this stuff with straight descriptions (including costs) vs. the name under which a program has been vilified.
[edit] one of the funniest ones is foreign aid. It’s commonly supposed to be way higher than it actually is (you’ll get answers like 5%, 10% of the budget, wildly wrong stuff) so you can consistently get people to agree that a “cut” to double what it actually is would be a great thing for a fiscally responsible candidate to propose.
[edit edit] so point is the vast majority of voters have no clue what it is they’re opposing when they say they’re against lots of things they’re against. Describe it, and they’re on board. They don’t actually know what it is.
[edit] one of the funniest ones is foreign aid. It’s commonly supposed to be way higher than it actually is (you’ll get answers like 5%, 10% of the budget, wildly wrong stuff) so you can consistently get people to agree that a “cut” to double what it actually is would be a great thing for a fiscally responsible candidate to propose.
[edit edit] so point is the vast majority of voters have no clue what it is they’re opposing when they say they’re against lots of things they’re against. Describe it, and they’re on board. They don’t actually know what it is.