Mapping public support and polarization for U.S. climate policies and policy packages

Effective climate policy requires both public support and durable partisan consensus, yet little research has simultaneously mapped their predictors, including policy configuration, policy packaging, and socio-political context. Here, we use a discrete choice experiment ( N = 5,463) to examine how these predictors affect support and polarization for 4,654 climate policy proposals across three domains in the United States. Applying multilevel regression and poststratification, we found that push policies, such as taxes, were less supported than pull policies, such as subsidies, without a systematic difference in polarization. On average, policy packaging reduced support, while its effect on polarization was heterogeneous, with a more pronounced reduction observed for less polarized policy packages. State-level predictors, including per-capita emissions, existing climate policies, and domain-specific predictors, such as meat price and registered electric vehicles, partly explained geographic variability in support. Our findings highlight the limits of policy packaging for improving political feasibility and the value of state-specific, evidence-based climate policy design.