After the Supreme Court last week struck down the Biden administration’s vaccine-or-test requirement for large private businesses, new Morning Consult polling shows that more than half of adults are in favor of vaccine mandates from employers.
What you need to know
- More than half of private-sector workers, notably, are in favor of employer vaccine mandates, while nearly 2 in 5 oppose them. Remote workers were even more likely to support the requirement, at 66 percent.
- Adults who are already vaccinated are much more likely than those who haven’t gotten a COVID-19 shot to say they back employer vaccine requirements, 69 percent to 23 percent, while the gap between Democrats and Republicans is roughly the same size.
- The findings underscore the politicized nature of the COVID-19 vaccination drive. Republican-leaning states led the pushback to the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate, with federal judges in Missouri and Louisiana blocking the employer requirement before it went into effect because they said the administration lacked the authority to issue such broad mandates.
- Separate Morning Consult data indicates that Republicans are also more strongly opposed to getting vaccinated, with 27 percent saying they have no plans to get a shot compared with 9 percent of Democrats.
The Jan. 13-14, 2022, poll was conducted among a representative sample of 2,200 U.S. adults, with an unweighted margin of error of +/-2 percentage points.