Answer: no.

There has been a fair bit of musing in the media about whether voters have become more left-wing in their policy preferences since the onset of Covid19. It seems plausible to suspect that health and economic shocks of the magnitude of those experienced this year would cause people to update their beliefs about the appropriate role that the state should play in supporting/insuring people’s incomes. So, has Covid19 put wind in the ideological sails of the left?

We can get a sense of the answer to this question using a mixture of BES and PACER data. Each survey series has asked, at various points, the following two survey questions:

Using the 0 to 10 scale below, where the end marked 0 means that government should cut taxes a lotand spend much less on health and social services, and the end marked 10 means that government should