I hate this sort of thing. It’s depressing and enervating. But sometimes it just has to be said. Voters believe a lot of contradictory thing and it’s very important that people not fool themselves into believing they have a strong point of view that tracks closely with your own. There are a few, of course. But most Americans are all over the place and many don’t even know what politics actually are. They often say what they think they are supposed to say when queried by pollsters.
So, I’m afraid this from David Lauter at the LA Times is correct and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise but rather face it and figure out ways to deal with it:
One of the enduring beliefs of progressive voters and officials is that public opinion invariably favors their side. The corollary is that if their plans fail to pass, unreasonable obstruction must be to blame.
Here, for example, is Sen. Bernie Sanders in a recent appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” talking about the Democrats’ bill to increase social spending and combat climate change, which has stalled in the Senate:
“What is in the reconciliation bill … is enormously popular,” the Vermont independent said. “It’s what 70%, 80% of the American people … the American people want us to take on the greed of the drug companies to lower the cost of prescription drugs. Ask people whether they want to expand Medicare to cover dental, hearing and eyeglasses. Ask people whether they want to improve home healthcare, whether we want to deal with climate change. All of those pieces of legislation are enormously popular, the bill itself in its entirety.”
It’s certainly possible to find polls that appear to back up that statement.
But such surveys don’t give a true picture of what the public wants, unfortunately for Sanders and his fellow progressives — and for President Biden, who spent much of the first year of his term pushing the spending bill to no avail.
The reasons why and the implications for progressives are worth a closer look.
Ask people if they want Congress to “take on the greed of the drug companies to lower the cost of prescription drugs,” as Sanders put it, and a substantial majority almost surely will say yes. People like lower costs, don’t approve of greed and aren’t terribly fond of the drug industry, so a question worded that way will reliably produce the expected result.
Advocacy groups routinely produce polls with wording only slightly less subtle than that. Often, they’re testing language for potential campaigns to see what phrases best connect with the public. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that; the danger comes only when people, including elected officials, come to believe their own propaganda.
The public does side with Democrats on some major issues, but not all, by any means.
A Pew Research Center survey this week, for example, found that Americans gave Democrats a big advantage over Republicans when asked which party they more often agreed with on climate change (44%-22%), healthcare (42%-26%) and COVID-19 (41%-27%), but not on economic policy, guns and immigration, on which the two were basically even. Consistently, about 30% said they agreed with neither party.
Despite a lot of Republican efforts to profit from Americans’ anxieties about schooling during the pandemic, the survey found that Democrats held a small edge over the GOP on which party they more often agreed with on education.
A survey from Fox News, whose polling unit is widely respected in both parties, asked a slightly different list of issues and pushed those who initially said they didn’t favor either party to say which side they leaned toward. That produced different numbers, but a similar lineup:
Democrats have a strong advantage, roughly 20 points, as the party likely to do a better job on climate change, racism and healthcare. They also have a smaller, but still significant, single-digit margin on the pandemic, education and bringing the country together, Fox found.
Republicans have a strong advantage on national security, the border, immigration, crime, the economy, the federal budget deficit and taxes. The two came out roughly equal on protecting American democracy — a finding sure to frustrate Democrats who see Republican eagerness to push former President Trump’s falsehoods about the 2020 election as a major threat.
So what does that tell us about the Democrats’ big spending plan? As Sanders would point out, the public sides with Democrats on healthcare and favors ideas such as expanding Medicare to provide hearing aids and dental coverage. That majority for Democrats melts away, however, when the question turns to taxes to pay for all that and the impact on the budget. The public gets pulled in both directions.
A second, less-obvious issue involves what political scientists call salience.
Ask people in January to name their favorite ice cream flavor, and the results will be accurate (chocolate routinely edges out vanilla in most surveys). But that doesn’t mean most Americans have a strong hankering for a cone in the midst of winter; there’s a reason ice cream production in June typically runs 70% to 80% higher than in December. (Biden’s all-season taste for ice cream marks him as an exception.)
A similar truth applies to politics: Voters might favor or oppose a policy but not consider it a top priority at the moment. Unless a survey measures both dimensions — support and salience — it’s only giving part of the picture.
On the big Build Back Better bill that Sanders touted, for example, a Monmouth University poll released Wednesday found that 61% of Americans said they supported the social spending at least somewhat — not quite the 70% to 80% that Sanders cited, but still a majority. Similarly, 56% supported spending to combat climate change.
But asked “how important it is,” those surveyed gave a very different verdict: Only 24% said passing the bill was a top priority while 37% said it was “important, but there are other more pressing matters for Congress to deal with,” and another 37% said it either wasn’t important or shouldn’t be passed.
Americans have been consistent about what they see as the top priorities right now: The economy, especially rising prices, and the continued COVID-19 pandemic. A majority of voters see the Democrats’ plans as largely unrelated to those two concerns.
Biden has pointed to economists who say his program would reduce inflation over time, but voters either haven’t absorbed that message or doubt its truth.
The same issue of salience affects other items high on the Democratic agenda. An NBC News poll this month found, for example, that while 42% of Americans cited jobs and the economy as one of the top two problems facing the country, and another 23% cited the cost of living, only 15% listed social and racial justice, 14% climate change and 12% voting rights.
That doesn’t mean Democrats should stop pursuing issues they care about: A political party can’t let polls entirely guide its direction, or it won’t end up standing for anything. And elected officials can raise the salience of an issue by focusing on it, although the power of the presidential pulpit is often overrated.
But if a party is going to try to persuade voters about its priorities, it’s important to recognize that persuasion is called for and not insist that the public already believes in the program.
Consider the voting rights bill that Democratic leaders brought to the Senate floor this month in a doomed effort to break a Republican filibuster: The Monmouth poll found that 26% of the public supported it, 24% were opposed, 19% had no opinion and 31% knew nothing about it.
Equally important: If a party is going to spend time and energy on topics that voters don’t see as job number one, then it’s crucial to ensure that voters believe job one is under control. On both those counts, Democrats this last year have conspicuously failed.
Perhaps the most frightening number for Democrats in that NBC News poll was this: Asked to characterize the year 2021, 44% called it “one of the worst years” for the U.S., and another 37% called it below average. Only 18% called the year about average or better.
When you’re the party in charge, you can expect to suffer when voters have that grim a view of current conditions. Telling yourself that despite it all, the country really agrees with your side is a form of denial that can only deepen the problem.
This is politics and it can be dealt with. You contrast yourself with the other side, tout accomplishments that affect people in their own lives, give people reason to hope, make good policy decisions when you have the chance.
People are worn out from the Trump era divisiveness (which is a feature not a bug for the GOP) and they are exhausted from the pandemic. Inflation is immediate and obvious and it’s causing real hardship especially for people who have never experienced it before which is most people under the age of 50. It’s a shock. Hopefully it will be temporary and average folks will begin to feel the fruits of an expanding economy without the price shocks of inflation when things settle down.
I wish that the Democrats had been able to push through BBB because it was the right thing to do and it would have benefited vast numbers of people over the long haul. But I’m not sure it would have been the magic political bullet we all thought it should have been. Our politics right now are operating on another level and good progressive policy is something you just have to do without putting too much store in its immediate political salience.