(The Center Square) – A new poll has found that voter’s opinions on the Biden administration’s Title IX rules are divided while LGBTQ+ issues continue to wedge Democratic voters ahead of the November election.
The Center Square Voters’ Voice Poll found that more voters are opposed to the Biden administration’s expansion of Title IX than support it.
“The Biden Administration recently expanded Title IX – which originally protected people from discrimination based on sex in federally funded education programs – to include LGBTQ+ people,” the poll’s question reads. “Some effects of the change include strengthening anti-harassment protections for LGBTQ+ people and allowing transgender women to use women’s bathrooms and locker rooms. Do you approve or disapprove of the changes to Title IX?”
The poll was conducted in conjunction with Noble Predictive Insights from July 8-11 and surveyed nearly 2,300 likely voters, including 1,006 Republicans, 1,117 Democrats, and 172 true (non-leaning) independents. It has a margin of error of 2.1%. The Center Square Voters’ Voice Poll is one of only six national tracking polls in the United States.
The poll found that while more voters disagreed with the rule, the divide wasn’t stark: 48% said they disagreed with the changes to the rule while 42% agreed with expanding the statute to include protections for gender identity.
Democratic-leaning likely voters signaled the highest support for expanding the rule to protect LGBTQ+ students with 72% in agreement. The majority of Republicans (77%) and almost half of true independents (41%) said they disagreed with the expansion.
David Byler, chief of research at Noble Predictive Insights, wasn’t surprised by the results given how Americans feel and think about a complicated administrative update.
“On issues like Title IX, public opinion usually isn’t really well formed,” Byler told The Center Square in an interview. “The average voter is not deeply tuned in to the nuances of education policy, so oftentimes, they rely on general impressions and broad instincts rather than the type of detailed analysis you’d see in a white paper.”
Byler said his team wrote the question to get to the core of the debate on protections for transgender students and concerns around fairness and safety without getting into the minutiae of federal nondiscrimination law.
“What we tried to do with this polling question was take arguments from both sides that we saw as some of the most common and persuasive,” Byler said. “We know, generally speaking, from other polling, that Americans are very against discrimination. They really like fairness.
“At the same time, we know from extensive polling on the debates around trans issues, especially trans issues in schools, that one of the most powerful conservative arguments is probably going to be around bathrooms and locker rooms rather than abstract arguments around small government,” Byler said.
“So one of the ways that we wanted to gauge Title IX support was not to hit someone with Title IX, this massively detailed thing that no one is going to recognize unless you’re an education policy wonk, was to present the arguments from both sides and see where people fall out,” Byler said. “What’s unsurprising for me here is there is a base of support on both sides.”
The poll signals the divisiveness of the topic ahead of the November general election. Byler said that LGBTQ+ issues, especially as they relate to schools, are a winner for Republicans.
“On the issues of bathrooms and locker rooms, the American public has shifted towards the right,” Byler said. “People are generally wary of the most progressive stances on these type of issues in schools, and it’s no coincidence that you often see Republican politicians hammering this very issue and Democratic politicians avoiding it and emphasizing other ones.”
The poll comes after the Biden administration this year drastically expanded sex discrimination protections for all students in the nation’s education institutions to include gender identity. Critics have called it an illegal rewrite of the federal statute and have challenged the Department of Education in court.
In a number of those cases, federal judges have issued preliminary injunctions, signaling critics of the changes have standing and are likely to succeed while also preventing the Biden administration from implementing the ruling ahead of the Aug. 1 implementation deadline in over a dozen states.