Nearly 90 Percent of Voters Want Another COVID-19 Relief Bill, Survey Says

Nearly nine out of ten U.S. voters believe that Washington needs to provide another round of COVID-19-related economic relief, according to new survey findings just released by the U.S. Travel Association.

U.S. Travel, the national non-profit that represents America’s travel and tourism industry, commissioned a survey that was conducted among a nationally representative sample of 1,000 U.S. adults, all of whom voted in the November 3 election.

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The results revealed that eighty-seven percent of respondents feel that Congress should pass a second COVID-19 stimulus package. The hefty majority support for another relief bill was found among every voter group, demographic subgroup and regional subgroup.

The struggle to buoy the U.S. economy continues amid a winter surge in coronavirus cases, and the new rounds of business closures and operating restrictions that accompany it.

U.S. Travel says that America’s travel and tourism sector has been the one that’s suffered the most by far because of the pandemic. Total U.S. travel spending in 2020 is projected to be down 45 percent from 2019, and the industry’s out-of-work workforce now accounts for more than one-third of the country’s current unemployment claims.

The organization has been pleading with government leaders for months to agree upon legislation for a fresh round of relief that would allow travel-related businesses to stay afloat long enough to rehire workers once conditions finally improve. At a minimum, U.S. Travel said that preventing further job losses in the sector requires enhancements to and an expansion of the Paycheck Protection Program.

Nearly 80 percent of the voters surveyed, regardless of their political inclinations, said that they want leaders to “work together to find common ground”, weary of the division and conflict that have prevented a second stimulus bill from passing for many months now. An overwhelming majority of both Biden voters (82 percent) and Trump voters (76 percent) expressed this shared viewpoint.

“The urgent needs of one of the country’s biggest job-creating sectors have been clear for some time, and it is now also clear that the voting public strongly desires action from Washington,” said U.S. Travel Association President and CEO Roger Dow. “Advancing a bipartisan coronavirus relief measure is both the right thing to do, and the right thing to do politically. And it needs to be done now, not in the next Congress, because large numbers of our small-business employers simply won’t survive that long and their lost jobs will then be permanent.”

Just today, Reuters reported that staffers for two U.S. Senators disclosed that a proposed $908-billion bipartisan COVID-19 relief agreement has been presented for the Senate’s consideration. Dow praised legislators’ cooperation, saying, “The relief framework proposed today is welcome evidence that there is bipartisan, bicameral support in Congress for a deal—just like among the American public at large—and we urgently need Congress to act now.”