Sometimes on this blog I back into the news at a leisurely pace. For this one, well… here’s the story I would have written back when I was a reporter:
Supermajority now favors year round Daylight Saving Time
WASHINGTON — A new poll shows that preference for permanent Daylight Saving Time has grown to new highs with 68 percent of respondents saying that they support the move and 14 percent opposing.
The poll conducted by Morning Consult and Politico asked nearly 2,000 registered voters if they supported bipartisan legislation to make Daylight Saving Time permanent. Fully 45 percent said that they “strongly support” the legislation, and another 23 percent said that they “somewhat support” it. Seven percent each said they either strongly or somewhat oppose the bill, and another 18 percent said they didn’t know or did not have an opinion.
While previous polling has shown a plurality of support for Permanent DST, this is the first national poll from a professional polling company that has shown such a strong majority.
The Politico/Morning Consult poll surveyed 1,993 registered voters and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. A breakdown of the data showed nearly identical results for men and women, as well as Democrats, Republicans and independents. There was also no significant difference based on education, religion, employment, area of the country or if the respondents live in an urban, suburban or rural area.
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If I was still a reporter, this would be the point in the story that I would insert a quote from someone, well, probably someone like the current version of me, saying something like: The momentum was clearly on the side of fixing Daylight Saving Time when you looked at all the action in the state legislatures and in D.C., so it’s no surprise that this poll shows that the legislatures really are doing what the people want them to do, and that’s to lock the clock into what we now call Daylight Saving Time, but will soon become known as just ‘time.’
Then I would probably do what all the news stories do these days, and insert a paragraph about all the negative health consequences of changing the clocks, especially in the spring when we are robbed of an hour of sleep.
Since I got this news, I have been grappling with a question that I don’t really have an answer to, and that is: Why?
The polls have never been really clear because they often ask the wrong questions, but in general all the polling breaks down something like about 50 percent want Permanent DST, 25 percent want Permanent ST, and about 25 percent don’t care or are fine leaving things as they are.
What would cause about half of the Permanent ST and half of the “don’t care” people to move to the side of Permanent Daylight Saving Time?
I really don’t know, but here are a couple of guesses:
Guess one: They asked the question right around the Spring Forward change.
It could be that people just so dislike being robbed of an hour of sleep that they essentially said: Please, just make it stop! That could be. I hope the pollsters ask that question again, but at the rate things are moving they may not get another chance because it may be fixed soon.
But that guess doesn’t really hold up because the poll asked about a specific bit of bipartisan legislation, so I don’t think that’s it.
Guess two: The people arguing for permanent Standard Time are doing it so badly that opinion is turning against them.
This is something I’ve seen firsthand a couple of times now. Permanent Standard Time proponents will show up at a state legislature, and basically pontificate about how they have a monopoly on truth and science, and make statements that amount to: If you don’t do what we tell you to do then you are an idiot. Before this year I bridled a bit when one of them would show up to testify, but now I welcome it because they are so off-putting that they actually help swing votes over to the side of fixing DST.
But the reality is that all the efforts being made to convince people that we should only lock the clocks if we do so in Standard Time are getting essentially zero traction, so I don’t think that’s it. Indeed, if circadian sleep scientists hadn’t been speaking up, the “strongly oppose” may have gone even lower than seven percent.
Guess three: Young people are leading the way.
For years now I’ve thought that younger people are better than people over 50 (like me) at realizing that the conventions of the past are not rooted in what’s best, but instead just rooted in doing things the way they have always been done. I give them credit for looking at older people who tell them we have to change the clocks twice a year for the farmers, and saying: Wha… Huh? And then those young people get elected and decided to do something about it.
But the one part of the crosstabs that shows some deviation from the rest of the results is that GenZ has only 22 percent who strongly support the legislation. (Then again, only four percent strongly oppose it. Maybe that generation just doesn’t have “strong” feelings just yet.) So, again, not a really clear indicator of much.
So, is this all good news in the fight to #LockTheClock?
Yes. It is.
Politicians do look at polls, especially on stuff like this where they are not getting direction from their party leaders. As we’ve seen, there is no partisan angle on this at all.
When you can cast a vote that has only 14 percent of the voters who might potentially be mad at you, well, that is an easy Yes vote.
But because I am in this for the long haul, I do have a little bit of a worry that it is so popular, that we won’t take the time to do it properly, and then we could have a rebound problem in the years to come.
This is why I wrote that my idea for a federal proposal would give states a bit of breathing room.
As much as I would LOVE LOVE LOVE to never have to change the clocks again, unless Congress can act really quickly (like, before June), my personal opinion is that we should actually wait and put the change in next year, in 2022.
That will give each state enough time to really decide what time zone it wants to lock into.
In general, and this poll confirms it, most people and most states want to lock into permanent Daylight Saving Time, the one we use in the summer.
Look at the heartland states like Kansas, which neighbors my home state of Colorado, but is on the western edge of the Central Time zone. (Well, mostly.) I spoke to the legislator working to Lock the Clock there and told him that maybe Kansas could unify the state in one time zone, and lock into Standard Time. He told me that his constituents really want to be in Daylight Time year round. The poll confirms that. Also, they already are getting up in the dark and going to school in the dark, and they just want a little sunlight at the end of the day.
But is that really the case in, say, Indiana? Most, but not all, of that state is in the Eastern Time Zone, but in permanent DST the sun wouldn’t come up until about 9 a.m. in the winter. If they go through a whole winter and look at what that might be, then the legislature could take that up in their session that starts in January of 2022, and make a decision about what that state wants to permanently. They may want to reunite their state into one time zone, and join their neighbors in Illinois. Then when we have the last-ever Spring Forward time change in the U.S. in March of 2022, Indiana would just stay the same.
This is why I say that if the U.S. Congress wants to act this year to #LockTheClock permanently it needs to do so now. NOW!
If they wait past about the first of June, maybe the first of July, then the state legislatures won’t practically have time to take any action before the Fall Back time change.
Bottom line: This is great news, and I hope Congress takes action based on this. I just hope they either do it really quickly, or that they amend the current bills to make it easier for states that are on the border of a time zone to pick which side of the line they want to end up on permanently.
But to amend the bill, the first thing we need to do is get a bill a hearing. That’s why my previous post calling everyone to exert whatever influence they have on Senator Maria Cantwell asking her, politely, to give the Sunshine Act a hearing. Now you have all the data you need to convince her that this is something the people really want!