I’m publishing this as a companion piece to the one I co-wrote with my colleague, Stephen Clermont. In that piece, we reference the fact that there is no one “true” public opinion, and I wanted to elaborate on why and how that is true and the implications for conducting rigorous, accurate attitude polling.

Polling is back under the microscope

My line of work is getting a lot of scrutiny these days. This is typical for this point in an election cycle, but the intensity and focus this year is somewhat unique. The piece I co-wrote with Stephen delves into polling methodology and the handwringing coverage about whether any polls are trustworthy anymore. This piece focuses on a specific aspect of poll scrutiny and criticism, and that’s the issue of bias.

It’s true that reducing certain types of bias in surveys is crucial for accuracy. But in my view, there are certain biases that we should lean into, rather than away from, in order to capture public opinion accurately. Because what does it mean to conduct accurate vs. biased public opinion measurement, anyway? I think this is where the disagreement originates.

Bias-free thinking isn’t something survey writers are capable of doing…

There’s a pretty simple reason: because it isn’t something any human being can do. (And no, I am not implying that AI can.) There’s a concept that underpins social psychology as a discipline, and it’s called naive realism. This refers to the tendency to believe that I perceive the world as it is, while everyone else perceives it as they want to, out of some combination of bias and ignorance. We tend to assume that people who don’t see the world as we see it must lack objectivity, information, or cognitive abilities (and this is especially pronounced if we’re evaluating people or groups with whom we are in conflict.) The reality is we are all operating with filters, and we aren’t even aware of most of them.

…for the same reason that bias-free thinking isn’t how voters’ brains work.

I understand and respect the impulse to treat “bias-free” survey writing as a goal. But there’s a reason why framing matters so much: most voters are malleable. We may not want that to be true, but it is. By definition, that means that most voters don’t have a “true opinion” in the way that overzealous anti-bias advocates want them to have. If you strip away the framing, you typically take out the meaning, the cues, the heuristics— everything that voters actually use to form and express opinions and then vote on them. If you take that away, you won’t automatically get a “true” opinion. What you’re more likely to get is a “not sure” or an unstable response pattern that’s subject to considerable movement once context is added. And if you don’t probe below the surface to understand how abstract attitudes play out in real-world contexts, you’re missing another crucial piece of the puzzle.

Consider abortion attitudes. I’m re-upping some data I’ve written about before to illustrate that oftentimes, the “neutral” framing of an issue actually masks the reality of public opinion rather than capturing it. In a 2024 Gallup poll, respondents were asked to indicate whether they consider themselves “pro-choice” (54%) or “pro-life” (41%). Compare that against a 2025 Change Research poll, in which we asked people to sort themselves into one of these three categories:

• I personally support a woman’s right to an abortion and believe it should be legal and available

• I am personally against abortion but I do not believe government should prevent a woman from making that decision for herself

• I personally believe having an abortion is wrong and should be illegal

47% of voters say they are "personally pro-abortion rights, falling into that category that most of us associate with the term “pro-choice.” But another 33% say that while they’re personally against abortion, they do not believe the government should make it illegal to obtain one, and that’s also a pro-choice position. Only 20% of voters believe—in the abstract—that abortion should be illegal. Moreover, even most of the voters who indicate in the abstract that abortion “should be illegal in most/all cases” are in favor of making abortion legal in most of the circumstances we asked about. If we stopped at the so-called neutral framing and didn’t dig any deeper or provide any context, we’d fundamentally misunderstand where the public stands on this issue; all we’d be capturing is what labels they feel comfortable using to describe themselves, and those labels aren’t even an accurate representation of their views.

The ACA vs. Obamacare is another example. Consider this 2013 poll data from Gallup: “the ACA” polled at 45% approve, 49% disapprove, while “Obamacare” polled at 38% approve, 54% disapprove. What was the “truth” here — that voters liked the ACA more than they liked Obamacare, even though these are two different names for the exact same policy? Frustratingly yes, that’s exactly what it means. A Morning Consult poll from 2017 found that more than 1 in 3 voters still didn’t know these were two different names for the same policy.

[Note: Some people mistakenly equate measuring how frames impact answer choices with push polling, and I want to clarify the difference. Push polling is not public opinion research, it’s a negative campaign tactic that’s meant to spread innuendo and often outright lies about a candidate by pretending to be a public opinion poll.]

So, what biases are worth eliminating from survey research? Here are four that I think are important.

• Can the respondent tell there’s a desired or “correct” answer to the question? There’s an episode of Parks and Recreation where Ann and Leslie are door-to-door canvassing on behalf of a new park project. When one of the neighbors says she’s opposed to a new park in her area, Leslie responds, “would it change your mind to learn that 9 in 10 meth users said the same thing?” That’s a near-perfect depiction of how not to write a poll question.

• Does the survey lack balance? Have I incorporated some wording and framing that could appeal to Democrats and some that could appeal to Republicans, or did I only do one or the other? Note that, again, the solution here is not simply to eliminate partisan cues altogether. The “top issues” question is a good illustration of the limits to this approach. I could offer “immigration” or “abortion” as answer choices when asking people what’s most important to their vote choice this year — they’re both technically neutral terms — but that approach doesn’t yield nuanced information. What about immigration or abortion is salient and to whom? If that’s important to learn, we’ll need more questions beyond this one as currently worded. An issue that has become highly salient in all my polls this year is “government corruption,” and it’s equally important to both Democrats and Republicans, but we can be reasonably certain that both sides are not completely aligned on what constitutes corruption these days or who is most at fault for perpetuating it.

• Have I established a premise that not all survey-takers will agree on? Even when there’s a strong majority opinion, we still need to ensure that the survey doesn’t imply a universal truth where there isn’t one.

• Have I made it too obvious who is behind the survey? One of the biggest giveaways is language (“illegal aliens”, “late-term abortions,” “woke”). Another is survey structure (loading up on opposition messaging and not testing any positives, or vice versa). We have tricks up our sleeves to try to work around these signals, but they represent real threats to data quality when pollsters don’t take pains to mitigate them. When it’s obvious that a survey is sponsored by a group with a specific perspective, some survey-takers will drop out early because they’ve “figured out” who’s behind it, and if that’s disproportionately happening among a specific demographic group, that can pose a threat to data quality.

So what?

A better approach than striving to eliminate bias and putting absolutely no spin on the ball is to accept that framing effects are real and legitimate, not an obstacle to public opinion measurement, and to test each side’s framing to understand how it lands. Rather than anchoring on supposedly neutral questions as the “true” measure of public opinion, I think it’s more worthwhile to appreciate that voters sometimes believe X when framed one way, and believe Y when framed another way. Investigating the limits and impacts of framing is a far better use of polling than attempting to eliminate it altogether in order to capture a “truth” that doesn’t exist.

This piece shares my personal views and lens on public opinion data and does not reflect any stances or positions of Change Research.

_{New Yorker Cartoon by Dabin Han}

As has become routine practice in every election cycle, polling is once again a main topic of conversation in political coverage. In the wake of some high-profile public polling ahead of various Democratic primaries—much of which “missed”—pundits, journalists, and strategists are questioning the validity of polling and musing about how its purpose has mutated in response to new trends, demands, and financial incentives.

We are two of the principal researchers at Change Research. Stephen Clermont is the company’s Head of Polling and has over three decades of experience as a pollster and campaign strategist. Lauren Goldstein is a political psychologist and pollster and leads the company’s advocacy polling practice. We set out to co-write this piece because we’d like to pull back the curtain on some of the intricacies of how electoral research is conducted, as we answer for whether the criticisms of our industry are fair or off-target. In particular, we address some of the claims and arguments made in a recent NYT piece that was published last weekend.

Myth #1: Polls Are Supposed To Measure, Not Move

“Polls are traditionally used to measure public opinion, not mold it.”

“Every candidate in 2028 will have their own cooked poll factory,” said Lis Smith, a Democratic strategist who was a senior aide on Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 campaign for president. “Polls now are not just a way of measuring the horse race. It’s a way for candidates and their allies to influence the horse race.”

We characterize both of these assertions as off-base. Here’s why.

If your only purpose in doing a poll is to find out who is “winning” and “losing,” it’s not worth the effort or expense of running one. Polls have many purposes, and one of those has always been to mold public opinion. One way pollsters help clients meet this goal is through narrative research, where we typically conduct qualitative research along with rigorous message testing to determine the most effective communication strategy for a campaign to use in order to move the public in their direction.

The other is by publicly releasing data that can help drive momentum for a campaign. Sometimes that’s by showing a viable path to victory to drive donations and fundraising efforts, other times it’s by persuading other candidates to drop out of the race and coalesce behind the leading candidate. This is neither new nor nefarious, when the research is methodologically sound and the pollster is transparent about how they sampled voters and what questions were asked. This is a mainstay of electoral campaigns and has been for decades.

Some consumers of polls and political news will take issue with the idea of a poll serving any purpose other than a straight, down-the-middle measurement of public opinion. There are two problems with this all-or-nothing view of the utility of polling.

1. The candidate horserace is the least important question in any poll. While it is necessary to benchmark where a race currently stands, other questions such as name identification and favorability, which candidates voters would consider, which candidates people reject outright, strength of vote choice, and what would happen once voters gain equal information about all the candidates tell far more about who will ultimately prevail. That is the purpose of campaign polling, and all of that information is closely held by the campaign and is not figured in any of the polling aggregators or the broader polling dialogue.

2. There’s no such thing as “true” public opinion. Firstly, most voters aren’t ideologically coherent, they’re malleable. Trying to extract a “true” baseline is not a fruitful pursuit. We can assess what we call an “uninformed” baseline before we provide information, framing, or messaging. But that is one read on public opinion, it’s not more legitimate than a read with framing, context, and cues built in. Framing effects pervade all forms of political communication and polls are no exception, so it’s better to acknowledge that reality and explicitly test it than to treat polling as a purity test. More on this from Mind the Gap later this week.

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Myth #2: It’s Become Too Expensive To Do Good Research

“It has become even more expensive and difficult to conduct high-quality public opinion surveys.”

“Ms. Stevens sent The Times a memo about her experience dealing with polling that did not reflect the reality of the race…In the interview, she attributed the polling miss to an industry that has largely moved away from expensive “live caller” phone interviews with voters. Instead, most contemporary polling is done online or through texting, mediums likely to include more young people even though the voting electorate skews older. (Live-caller polls can be seriously flawed, too, and it is generally considered best to analyze surveys from a range of pollsters using a mix of methods.)”

There are a few points to tackle here. We break them into three parts: the known upsides and downsides associated with different polling approaches, the importance of methodological transparency, and the extent to which successful, representative sampling boils down to something simpler than the commentary suggests.

1. The North Star in any survey research is giving the broadest possible audience, randomly selected, an equal opportunity to participate. Limiting a likely voter universe to people who have voted in X of the last comparable elections not only excludes people aging into the electorate, but it also fails to account for how turnout might look different than prior cycles depending on the current environment (for example, a historically unpopular president that may motivate infrequent voters to participate, a motivation advantage for Democrats, and indicators that Trump’s gains with Black and brown voters in 2024 were a transient phenomenon that won’t hold this year). We have seen record Democratic participation in primaries this year, which makes limiting the polling universe in this way even more fraught.

2. There are plenty of wrong ways to poll, but there is no one “right” method. One way to assess poll quality is to look at how much of their methodology is disclosed publicly. Live calling, text recruitment, online recruitment, online panels, and other methods have advantages and disadvantages in reaching targeted voters. It is on the researcher to detail the choices they made in recruitment, the processes they used to reach voters, and the tradeoffs made between using one research method over the other. Without that context, the results should be viewed even more skeptically.

3. The fact that certain methods are more or less successful at reaching certain groups is not an excuse for inaccurate or incomplete sampling. The fact that online and text-to-web recruitment methods historically skew towards younger poll participants1 is not an excuse for accepting imbalances in the final dataset. We are often asked by clients, “how do you ensure a proportional representation of underrepresented groups in your polling?” We give methodological answers about Change’s success with multi-modal recruitment methods and our data team’s constant iterating on how to improve our response rates. But an equally important answer to this question is simply this: we aren’t lazy about it. We don’t just upweight underrepresented groups to make up for the fact that they’re harder to reach. We make every effort to interview the correct proportions, including when it’s hard. We conduct tests on efficacy of different outreach messages, we allocate higher budgets to harder-to-reach demographics, we lengthen fielding time, we adjust our ratio of recruitment methods on a poll-by-poll basis depending on what’s proving most effective and with whom. When it comes to sampling methodology, one thing that distinguishes a good pollster from a shoddy pollster is actually attempting to poll a representative sample, not just taking whatever data comes in, applying large weights to move the proportions around, and manufacturing a representative dataset.

Myth #3: The Modern Polling Industrial Complex (!) Is Lawless

“...this year, several Democratic campaigns have seized on unreliable polls to push the perception that their candidates are surging to try to solidify support, attract donors and scare off rivals. The rise of prediction markets has also created financial incentives for untrustworthy or even fake political polls.”

“The modern polling industrial complex is a Wild West in which numbers often circulate online with little regard to whether they come from reliable sources.”

We’d characterize most of this as true, but there are two different dynamics at play to explain why. There are longstanding features of primary polling that pose challenges for even the best pollsters. At the same time, there is a new problem of bad actors. We take each separately.

Primary polling is challenging to do well, and correctly interpreting these polls requires a level of polling literacy that is often absent from simplistic horserace coverage.

First, every state has different rules on who can participate in a primary. States with no party registration, where every registered voter is eligible to vote in a Democratic primary, requires a broader outreach than states with closed primaries. It also makes sampling more challenging because it’s harder to determine what the demographic proportions of a likely electorate should look like. In closed primaries, the demographic composition of a primary electorate is less unpredictable. Notably, Michigan and Wisconsin are both states with open primaries.

Second, restricting your sampling to only include people with a past vote history in midterms means your poll will exclude all potential new voters in a high turnout environment. This was perhaps most evident in the 2018 Florida gubernatorial primary, when most pollsters polled from a list of previous primary voters and had candidates other than Andrew Gillum, the ultimate winner, ahead. Change Research took a broader approach to the race and found Gillum ahead in multiple surveys. Picking a new primary voter out of the electorate can be like picking a needle out of a haystack. The only way to account for that is to reach more people and ask them more questions to determine their likelihood to vote. There are few shortcuts.

Third, the economic principle of the “indifference curve” applies most strongly to primaries. An indifference curve shows all the combinations of two things that make you equally happy– you’re “indifferent” between any of them. Say you’re choosing between pizza slices and beers. Maybe 4 slices + 1 beer feels just as good to you as 2 slices + 3 beers, and also just as good as 1 slice + 6 beers. Plot those combinations on a graph and connect them: that’s one indifference curve. When choosing a primary candidate, voters balance between different things such as perceived “electability,” alignment with candidates on issues, candidates’ personal traits, and other factors. When nobody is strongly disliked, all the candidates land in a narrow band. This contributes to results varying so much from poll to poll, and gaps between polling results and electoral outcomes.

Fourth, intervening events between polls and elections can and do have an impact on results. Think of the 2008 New Hampshire Democratic primary where most polls had Barack Obama leading after winning Iowa 5 days earlier. Many voters liked both him and Hillary Clinton. After a shaky debate (“you are likeable enough, Hillary”) many voters moved to Hillary in the final hours. She won by 2 points. This is less about “polling error” or “polling misses” and more about voters adapting to new, sometimes inconsistent, information flows.

Finally, polling literacy plays a role in how people evaluate poll accuracy. When it comes to assessing polling accuracy, most coverage focuses on the margin (X candidate leads Y candidate by 15 points), but whether or not either candidate clears 50% pre-messaging is the actual litmus test by which polls should be evaluated. If a candidate is not polling over 50%, the campaign should not feel secure, and the campaign pollster is calculating all the ways the candidate could lose and making recommendations to inoculate against those weaknesses. That never gets seen or heard publicly.

Political campaigns and the polling world are also confronting a new problem: bad actors conducting shoddy polls in the name of “social experiments.”

New groups deliberately stoking disruption by introducing fake poll data into the political ecosystem is absolutely a problem. But this phenomenon is also an outlier in the world of polling that’s generating excess attention, and we should take pains not to conflate this with general polling methodological challenges. Media outlets, poll aggregators, and political news consumers can be part of the solution by building their readers’ poll literacy and demanding high transparency standards from pollsters.

Every pollster should disclose the following: who paid for the poll, how many people were interviewed, when the poll was conducted, where the sample for the poll came from and how voters were selected, what methods were used to interview voters, what limitations each method has, what questions were asked in what order, what weighting variables were used, what assumptions went into adjusting the poll to reflect the likely voter universe, and how much impact that had on the survey’s margin of error. Change Research is part of the Transparency Initiative of the American Association of Public Opinion Researchers (AAPOR). We urge every serious researcher in this field to join. It will make all of our work stronger and marginalize the bad actors.

Takeaways

Trying to use polls to perfectly predict results will only lead to disappointment. We understand the temptation to treat polls as harbingers of outcomes, but doing so only amplifies the misperception that polling is broken and flawed. Quality polls are more than a collection of numbers on a spreadsheet. They provide solutions to problems, such as, “how can I get people to pay attention to me so they will vote for me?” A reliable and worthwhile poll provides context around a race with methodological rigor and transparency. While horserace numbers provide excitement that people can take to the prediction markets, the meatiest information is usually elsewhere in the dataset.

This piece shares our personal views and lens on public opinion data and does not reflect any stances or positions of Change Research.

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Back in March, I had the pleasure of appearing on Farrah Bostic’s Cross Tabs podcast to talk about public opinion on abortion rights. Farrah and I have since realized we have a whole lot more to say, on that topic and many others, so we’ve decided to collaborate more often. You can check out the first episode of what we hope will be a monthly conversation, Mood Swings, here. And one of the things that came up in that conversation was this question of whether polls “matter” in the Trump era, and I decided to elaborate.

Since Trump took office in January and began implementing Project 2025 with his signature blend of destructive brutishness and vacuous showboating, I’ve seen many people muse about whether public opinion even matters anymore. If the executive branch is hell-bent on pursuing a specific set of policies, regardless of public pushback or outcry about violations of democratic norms and Constitutional rights, then what does it matter if any given Trump policy polls below 50%? Doesn’t holding up polling data to show that Trump is unpopular betray a certain misunderstanding of the moment we’re living in? Don’t you see the authoritarianism that’s right in front of your eyes? Do you think he cares?

I think these questions imply two sets of assumptions, and I want to take a little time to address both.

Political Fatalism

The first assumption is political fatalism. Trump will do whatever he wants, with absolutely no constraints, and what the voters think simply does not matter and will have absolutely no bearing on his actions or his hold on power.

Trump is certainly the least constrained president in modern history. No predecessor has been so openly contemptuous towards the half of the country that didn’t vote for him. But Trump isn’t wholly impervious to criticism, either. Take tariffs, for one example. Trump initially announced sweeping import taxes on dozens of countries, only to reverse course after criticism, backlash, and market turmoil within a matter of hours, a move he’s now pulled repeatedly. Nor are Republicans impervious to the electoral consequences of Trump’s agenda: they’re reportedly very worried that the One Big Beautiful Bill will result in a 2010-level shellacking in the midterms next year. So yes, Trump is the least constrained president in modern times, but we also can’t expect poor poll numbers to do all the heavy lifting for us, and that holds even when we do have an executive in power who respects the will of the people. Trump won’t consistently self-correct in response to public opinion data, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be powerful. Which brings me to assumption #2.

Who is the Audience?

The second assumption is that the only, or at least primary, audience of polling data is elected officials and their associates in power. And I think this is the more important assumption to tackle and refute. When it comes to most of the public polling from the last ten months, I think the most important audience for public opinion data is actually you. Beleaguered Americans who have reacted to the 2024 election outcome not with just dismay and horror, but also with a deep sense of resignation that, perhaps, their views are just not mainstream in American society; that apparently, most people in this country chose all this, are comfortable with all this. That we are the minority and that we need to learn to coexist, to cooperate, to question ourselves, to moderate, to appease, to backslide. And my professional take on that is: bullshit.

We are the majority. Most of us hate this. Most of us still support abortion rights (61% of Americans say abortion should be legal in most or all cases, and that number is a low-ball). Most of us oppose Trump’s conduct of mass deportations. I think that ensuring the public knows and internalizes this reality is a core purpose of polling.

Spotlight: Idaho

I’ve conducted a lot of research in deep red states where Republicans hold majorities or supermajorities, and one of the things I hear frequently from liberal voters in these states is the belief that they’re an island. They often assume that because a majority of people in the state voted for Republicans, that those Republicans in government must simply be fulfilling the will of that majority when it comes to how they govern and the policies they either champion or oppose. But that’s just not the case.

Take this recent poll I conducted for Reclaim Idaho, showing the overwhelming popularity of Idaho’s citizen-led ballot initiative process.

Why does this matter?

Idaho is one of only 24 states in the country where voters, not the state legislature, have the power to propose and pass laws through the citizen-led ballot initiative process. That process has led to landmark wins for and by the people of Idaho, including the Medicaid Expansion initiative, led by Reclaim Idaho, that passed with 60% of the vote in 2018 and remains equally popular now. Idahoans are now working to bring a ballot measure in 2026 to restore abortion rights to women in a state with one of the most draconian bans in the entire country, using the power of the citizen-led ballot initiative. And in my conversations with voters gathering signatures for that measure (I’m an Idaho resident), I’ve noticed that many of the people who sign the petition are first thrilled to see it’s happening, and then somewhat disheartened when they contemplate what they believe is a foregone conclusion that it will fail, offering me something along the lines of “good luck, thanks for trying.” Some openly ask whether the initiative has a snowball’s chance in hell.

If you ask me, answering that question, in that context, is one of the primary purposes of polling. Abortion rights poll in the 60s in Idaho. Protecting the citizen-led ballot initiative polls in the 80s! When the people in power fail to represent the public interest, instead pushing policies that the public is vocally, adamantly against, collective action is our only tool to fight back, and collective action can be motivated by the realization that we are not alone. So yes, I think in the Trump era, public opinion data absolutely still matters. But the key is not to consume it passively. Trump and his confederacy of cruel incompetents will not police themselves. Under the best of circumstances, vulnerable incumbents might, but they are few and far between. No one is coming to save us. But we are the majority. Let’s act like it.

This newsletter shares my personal views and lens on public opinion data.

Mind the Gap does not reflect any stances or positions of Change Research.

This weekend, certain corners of the Internet were abuzz with chatter about the Democratic polling and message testing apparatus. As a Democratic pollster who routinely conducts quantitative message testing, naturally I had some reactions. I want to share some thoughts about (1) the “distraction” framework and the urge to pivot to economic talking points, (2) the nature of how voters come to think about, and care about, issues in the first place, and (3) my concerns about certain message testing tactics and some thoughts on how we can chart a better path forward.

“It’s a Distraction”

A common directive from some Democratic research circles is to frame Trump’s many abuses of power as distractions from his inaction on voters’ purported top issue in 2024: “the economy.” Before critiquing this argument, I want to note the one element I agree with. It is absolutely important to point out that Trump is pulling a reverse Robin Hood, selling out 90% of Americans so that the top 10% can get even richer. But the “distraction” frame and the notion of pivoting away from every other topic and solely emphasizing this one is not an approach I think we should take. Here are two reasons why.

Reason #1: Perpetually pivoting to what’s already popular is to fundamentally misunderstand how the mass public comes to care about things in the first place.

Voters care about what public opinion leaders tell us is important. Not only do we rely on elite cues to form opinions, but when our elites change course on an issue, we will also often adjust our policy preferences to maintain alignment with them, rather than shopping for new leaders. Why? Because public opinion is primarily a product of elite cues and signals. Here are the three pillars of political science research on public opinion:

• Most average voters don’t have stable ideological belief systems. Instead, they tend to hold “non-attitudes”: weakly organized preferences that are malleable depending on framing and context.

• Party identification functions as a powerful “perceptual screen” that shapes how voters interpret political information. Partisan identity, rather than detailed policy positions or ideological belief systems, anchors political behavior.

• Voters develop opinions based on messages from political elites. If elite cues change direction, public opinion commonly follows suit.

Look no further than The Big Lie for evidence of these findings. Per a 2022 Change Research poll, the majority (55%) of Republicans believe “Donald Trump is the legitimate winner of the 2020 election.” Just 17% accepted that Joe Biden was the legitimate winner; 28% said they were not sure.

Developing a message and crafting a communication strategy should begin by setting an agenda and determining how best to make it stick, rather than putting one’s finger to the wind to assess which way it’s already blowing. That’s tantamount to measuring what other elites have decided to make salient and then making a calculated decision about how and whether to respond. Don’t get me wrong, playing defense is part of the job of political communication, especially when we’re out of power. But I think we need a proactive strategy.

Reason #2: The economy is always the top issue. We have to be able to talk about the other top issues, too, especially because they all interconnect.

Below is Pew’s pre-election polling from the past 6 presidential cycles, dating back to 2004. “The economy” tops the list of issues every single year. The specifics of what’s salient will change depending on the circumstances—in 2012, it was the recession, in 2020, it was COVID, in 2024, it was inflation—but ultimately, it is a fundamental of presidential election polling that voters will choose “the economy” as their #1 issue.

I don’t dispute that we need a unifying economic message, one that can outlast any individual presidential cycle and instead come to define the party and its brand, long-term. We do need that. But the notion that we should focus on “the” top issue on voters’ minds and eschew all others that don’t poll as well implies that voters view these top issues separately. And they don’t.

Here’s an excerpt from a piece I wrote eight months ago about the interplay between the economy and everything else that voters care about:

The discourse is rife with “hot takes” about what went wrong for Democrats in this election and how best to fix it going forward, and one of the common arguments is that we should deemphasize so-called social issues and focus exclusively on an economically populist agenda. Not only would I dispute the two assumptions embedded in that argument – that Democrats are the party disproportionately focused on social issues, and that social issues are unrelated to people’s economic freedom and wellbeing – but I’d also argue that’s not a strategically viable solution because that’s not how voters think. They don’t assess these issues in isolation.

That’s also not what our opponent was offering. Trump didn’t exactly run a laser-focused campaign that focused narrowly on people’s economic woes and sidestepped the culture wars. Ultimately, the majority of voters chose the candidate who spoke to cultural resentments or anxieties and who made scapegoating immigrants a centerpiece not only of his campaign writ large, but his economic message. Last month, Trump vowed to enact a 25% tariff on all products imported from Mexico and Canada via Executive Order on January 20th, and noted the tariffs would “remain in effect until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country!”

I’d argue that simply leaning into an economic agenda and turning away from so-called social issues is a poor strategy because that’s not what led voters to Trump; what he offers is a narrative through-line that connects both. You are struggling financially because your government is not putting Americans like you first. Your government is giving other people–immigrants, foreign governments, international alliances–a blank check and leaving you out to dry. I will change all that.

If I were to distill my sociopolitical perspective down to one pithy remark, it might be this: it’s not the economy, stupid. That’s not to say that voters’ views on “the economy” don’t matter; they matter tremendously. It’s that more often than not, beliefs about “the economy” are proxies for other, more powerful predispositions, like partisanship and sociocultural attitudes. Voters do not base their economic appraisals exclusively on observed higher prices or personal financial pain points. They also judge “the economy” on peripheral cues: what the elites in their party say, what their trusted media sources say, who they perceive to be benefiting in today’s economy, and at whose expense. Ultimately, most of the punditry declaring that voters elected Trump because of high costs and inflation ignores the fact that voters’ self-interests are not just financial (money in one’s pocket); they’re cultural, too (perceived social status and importance).

Are We Giving Actionable Message Guidance?

Of late, I’ve been reflecting on the purpose of message guidance in our industry and whether we’re doing right by our intended audiences when we give them detailed instructions on what to say and what not to say. With that in mind, here are two best practices that I think we should work harder to uphold. These have less to do with methodological details like sampling frames or outcome variable specificity (all of which are important), and more to do with whether we are actually helping anyone communicate successfully with voters.

#1. We should explain why a “winning” message wins.

Imagine you pay for a poll and when the results come back, your pollster shows you that a particular message has tested especially well. Do you feel confident as to why it tested well, or do you feel the need to commit it to memory and practice relentless message discipline to avoid falling into unfriendly territory? I think that making sense of the “why” behind a winning message should be our north star. What are voters actually worried about when it comes to any given issue, like homelessness, or healthcare costs, or tariffs? Who do voters blame for a particular problem? Is there even any appetite for a “villain” on this issue? What values are voters drawing on when they think about this problem? How do those values connect to the most popular solutions to this problem? If leaders don’t feel connected to why the message works, they’ll only feel confident when they can adhere to a script and/or change the subject.

#2. Give practitioners confidence.

This has become increasingly top-of-mind for me lately. I worry that as message testing gets more, for lack of a better word, statistical — greater emphasis on methodological “rigor,” detecting small but statistically significant results using larger sample sizes that are sensitive enough to reveal small effect sizes, etc. — that our intended consumers may become more and more intimidated when it comes time to speak. If a messaging memo concludes that one specific arrangement of words narrowly but conclusively outperforms a different specific arrangement of words, have we inspired people to communicate with confidence or have we made them more timid and less trusting of their own instincts? I think our goal should be to make message guidance easy to implement and easy to adapt to someone’s personal style, priorities, and audience. And while public opinion research should always be regarded as a snapshot in time rather than shelf-stable, I also think our guidance should be rooted in core principles that don’t have short-term expiration dates.

Message testing gets a bad rap. People mock “poll-tested language,” the people who produce it, and the leaders who sound like they’re reciting catchphrases instead of connecting authentically. But that doesn’t have to be the output. When done well, messaging research provides insights on the most viable way to champion your ideas, and it empowers people to speak naturally and persuasively. But that effort has to begin with an appreciation for how public opinion works and a desire to actually set the political agenda, and it should end with thematic, actionable advice that empowers people to communicate rather than encouraging them to second-guess.

This newsletter shares my personal views and lens on public opinion data.

Mind the Gap does not reflect any stances or positions of Change Research.

Since the 2024 election, we’ve been inundated with “takes” about demographic group behaviors: how certain groups have swung left or swung right, the youth vote, the Latino vote, the Black vote. There’s been an uptick in these stories since Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York Democratic mayoral primary last month. I have many misgivings about this discourse, because I think these narratives are built on a few fundamental myths about how demographics relate to political attitudes and behaviors.

#1: Demographics and identities are not the same thing.

Being a member of a demographic group (e.g. young people, women, Latinos) doesn’t automatically translate to that demographic detail being core to your self-concept. Typically, in surveys where I ask respondents to name 3-5 words that describe who they are as a person, the majority cite personality traits, not demographic ones. Many people belong to multiple demographic groups, some of which can cross-pressure the others to form complex identities that don’t map neatly into one category. Identity salience can be situational; we don’t always feel that the same details are highly relevant or self-defining across different circumstances. In sum, identities are incredibly important when it comes to understanding political attitudes and behaviors, but simply belonging to a demographic group doesn’t guarantee it will be central to one’s identity.

#2: Members of the same demographic group don’t automatically feel solidarity with one another.

I remember reading a piece in The Atlantic shortly after the 2024 election, which noted that “the election of Donald Trump this year shattered a long-standing piece of conventional wisdom in American politics: that Latinos will vote overwhelmingly for whichever party has the more liberal approach to immigration, making them a reliable Democratic constituency.” I remember feeling mystified about that assumption. None of my work, especially from the last two years, supports that claim. “Latinos” are an exceptionally heterogeneous group, and nowhere is that more evident than immigration attitudes.

Being a member of a group doesn’t translate automatically to being high in group consciousness, a political psychology term for a politicized identity, a sense of shared interests and collective fate with other members of the group. Some groups, historically, are overwhelmingly politically aligned and high in group consciousness (Black Americans, for one), but this isn’t a one-size-fits-all concept we can apply to all groups, nor can we necessarily assume that trends rooted in historical events and eras will hold up in perpetuity for future generations.The notion that most Latinos will tilt left on immigration on principle assumes a sky-high level of pan-ethnic, pan-immigration-status Latino solidarity. Many do feel that type of solidarity; many also distance themselves from new immigrants, motivated by psychological factors such as insecurity about group membership and belonging and the need for positive self-regard and status (“I did it the ‘right’ way”).

#3: Members of different demographic groups don’t automatically see other groups as adversaries.

I, and others, have written about zero sum beliefs in politics, and while these are extremely potent, I’d argue they’re not rooted in demographic differences, they’re rooted in sociopolitical identities and symbolic predispositions. For example, take class. It’s a mistake to assume all working class people take issue with the wealthy. Not all working class people see their socioeconomic status as core to their self-concept, and not all working class people are committed to class-based political solidarity. Many view the wealthy aspirationally, with the intent to become wealthy one day themselves. They may see their socioeconomic status as something that expressly does not define them, because they believe it to be a transient situation, not an identity they carry.

Take race, for another. Whiteness shouldn’t be treated as a fixed demographic category—the definition has shifted over time, incorporating certain groups into the ranks for the purposes of maintaining racial social hierarchy—but as a power structure and a set of organizing beliefs that reach well beyond demographic limits. People who identify as white are not the only ones who buy into American mythology about bootstraps and personal responsibility and rugged individualism and meritocracy.

Political organizing has required us to make maximum use of what we know about demographic groups and their political leanings in order to make decisions about resource allocation and optimize strategy, but the reality is that symbolic beliefs and identity attachments are what make those demographic differences matter to political behavior.

Demographic Groups vs. People Like Me

It’s also important to note that being a member of a demographic group that is associated with a specific political party doesn’t automatically mean you think the party cares about people like you. I’ve suspected this for a while but had not directly tested it in a survey until recently. Change Research fielded a new poll earlier this month, and I probed at voters’ perceptions about which party cares more about certain groups of people, or whether the prevailing impression is that neither party cares at all. I asked about a list of various demographic groups—e.g. “middle class people”, “parents”—but I also included this item: “people like me.” Later in the survey, I gave respondents the same list of groups again, and asked them to check all that apply to them. I wanted to know whether members of these demographic groups (1) perceive that either party cares about the demographic groups to which they belong, and (2) whether that maps neatly or messily onto whether they believe either party cares about people like them.

Overall, 1 in 4 registered voters believe neither political party cares about people like them. The rest are evenly divided, rather unsurprisingly: 38% say the Democratic Party cares more about people like them, and 37% say the same of the Republican Party. Who are these “neither” voters, by the way? 38% are Democrats, 35% are Republicans, and 26% are pure Independents who don’t lean towards either party. They are not very distinct from everyone else when it comes to race, age, gender, or education.

I dug into those “neither” folks’ answers, to see whether the people who think neither party cares about people like them also believe that neither party cares about various specific demographic groups, some of which they belong to.

Overall, a substantial proportion of these “neither party cares about people like me” respondents identify as members of these various demographic groups. For instance, 47% identify as working class, 46% identify as middle class, and 42% identify as Christians. When asked to think about those groups, a substantial proportion do believe that one party or the other cares about members of that group (these sub-n’s are small, but they’re interpretable).

But these judgments plainly do not equate to believing that either political party cares about them. To sum up:

• 47% of these “neither” folks identify as working class. Of those, more than 1 in 3 (38%) believe one of the parties cares about the working class. Yet all of them feel neither party cares about "people like me."

• 46% identify as middle class. Of those, nearly half (46%) believe one of the parties cares about the middle class. Yet all of them feel neither party cares about "people like me."

• 42% identify as Christian. Of those, most (65%) believe one of the parties cares about Christians. Yet all of them feel neither party cares about "people like me.”

Voters may sense that each party courts certain demographic groups for electoral advantage — Republicans push “faith and family” rhetoric to appeal to Christians, while Democrats have traditionally been the party of workers — but that doesn’t translate to members of those groups believing that parties or leaders care about them. People don’t see themselves as a demographic. Winning people over requires making them feel seen, heard, and understood for who they are, and a key ingredient in that effort is appreciating the heterogeneity of groups and the complexities of identity.

So what?

While demographics have historically been useful (or, at least, used) for targeted outreach and to model outcomes, it’s a very weak input when the goal is understanding people’s attitudes and behaviors as informed by their identities and symbolic beliefs. The assumption that demographic membership straightforwardly maps onto political solidarity or partisan alignment overlooks meaningful variability in how people integrate these details into their self-concepts and belief systems. People don’t just vote based on the boxes they check on a form. If we want to understand how people vote — or why they increasingly feel that no one in politics speaks for them — we need to pay closer attention. This is not an argument for ignoring the importance of race; entirely the opposite. But we need to focus more on how and why demographics like race matter to people, and that requires paying attention to how they see the world and their place within it, not simply how they’re categorized.

This newsletter shares my personal views and lens on public opinion data.

Mind the Gap does not reflect any stances or positions of Change Research.

For the past two decades, researchers and media alike have focused on the growing political polarization in this country. Americans are growing further apart: our neighborhoods, social circles, and dating pools have become increasingly sorted by political beliefs. The accompanying narrative also tends to emphasize that Americans are bothered by this dynamic and long to return to an era where politics didn’t encroach as deeply into friendships, romantic relationships, workplaces, etc. I’ve been pondering that narrative of late. How do we reconcile the fact that people are sorting their social worlds by politics with the narrative that people don’t want to be socially sorted by politics? Are these phenomena just being driven by two completely different groups of people, one contingent of Americans that are highly polarized and want to self-sort, and one that isn’t, and doesn’t? While it may be true that overall, most voters wish that we were less divided, does that imply that voters are willing to depoliticize their own social networks to achieve it? I decided to start poking around at these questions with some fresh polling data.

We hear about polarization a lot. What is it?

Political polarization is routinely discussed but infrequently defined, and I want to take a moment to do that, because researchers who study polarization actually draw a big distinction between two different types.

The first is ideological. This refers to the idea that Democrats and Republicans are taking increasingly polarized positions on key issues — Democrats staking out positions further to the left, Republicans further to the right. There’s plenty of evidence that ideological polarization is real and worsening among political elites (i.e. elected officials, high-ranking members of the party infrastructure, etc). But we don’t actually have conclusive evidence that this is happening to the same degree among regular voters. In fact, research has found that folks tend to overestimate the degree to which regular people are ideologically polarized. We often caricature the other side based on its most outlandish or vocal faction, but that’s not always representative of the group at large.

But the kind of polarization that is unmistakably happening among regular voters is affective: the tendency to evaluate members of your own party positively and members of the opposing party negatively. There’s a mountain of evidence that this is widespread among the mass public, and with far-reaching consequences. Affective polarization influences not just how we evaluate each other in the context of political conversations. It extends to who we want to hire, or who we are willing to date. It’s also a domain of intergroup bias that is less tethered to social norms about prejudice than others. People are typically much more comfortable expressing explicit dislike of outgroup partisans than, say, people of different races, religions, or cultures.

Othering, Aversion, and Moralization

A new way of measuring affective polarization was recently introduced, and it taps into three key domains. Othering, which the researchers define as viewing political outgroup members as fundamentally different; Moralization, or viewing one’s own party as embodying superior moral values; and Aversion, i.e. actively disliking or avoiding out‑party members. I decided to investigate these three dimensions in a recent poll. Here’s what I found.

Change Research conducted a poll of registered voters nationwide earlier this month, and I assessed each of the three dimensions of affective polarization with one question. Here are the highlights:

• Othering: 80% of Republicans and 73% of Democrats believe that opposing partisans “live in different worlds.”

  

• Moralization: 82% of Republicans and 72% of Democrats also believe that their political identity is “connected to my core moral beliefs.”

So, on both the othering and moralization dimensions, voters from both parties are highly polarized, but the phenomenon is particularly pronounced among Republican voters, whose agreement is 7 to 10 points higher on each question.

But the aversion dimension tells a different story.

I asked voters to indicate their agreement or disagreement with this item: “If I found out a friend of mine was a [DEMOCRAT]/[REPUBLICAN], I would want to stop spending time with them.” On this measure, it’s actually Democrats who express the most political aversion: 34% agreed with this statement, compared to only 10% of Republicans.

I want to stipulate a few limitations of this finding, before diving into it further. First, this lopsided answer pattern may not be shelf-stable. It could absolutely be a function of who is in power. If Harris had won the election, it’s conceivable that Democrats might be less inclined to distance themselves from their Republican friends, while Republicans might be stewing in political and cultural defeat and more likely to distance themselves from the Democrats in their lives. We’d need to evaluate this repeatedly with time series data that includes a period of time where power changes hands in order to to answer that. There are also some hypotheticals tied up in this question that I don’t have answers for. How politically mixed are the friend groups of the Democrats who say they’d give up Republican friends, for example? Is this mostly a hypothetical, or do they actually have something to lose? It’s not very hard to abandon imaginary friends.

All of that said, this finding is meaningful. The narrative that voters bemoan this era where they are rejected by friends and acquaintances due to their political views is not entirely accurate. One in three Democratic voters report wanting to end those friendships. And it seems to have a great deal to do with those “core moral beliefs.”

Bigotry/ Prejudice Is The Dividing Line

I looked at Democratic voters high in aversion, defined as those who agree with the statement, “If I found out a friend of mine was a Republican, I would want to stop spending time with them,” and low in aversion (disagree), and compared their answers on this question: “Which of the following issues are most important to you politically?”

The issue where there’s the greatest divergence between Democrats high vs. low on aversion is “Threats against the LGBTQ community.” 36% of high-aversion Democrats list this as a top issue, making it their second highest issue overall (tied with “high cost of healthcare and prescription drugs” and second to “protecting abortions”). By contrast, this issue falls somewhere in the middle among low-aversion Democrats (15% selected). What those folks rate highest, and where they diverge significantly from high-aversion Democrats, is “inflation and the high cost of goods” (40% selected, tied with “government corruption” and “high cost of healthcare and prescription drugs” for top issue overall). In other words, the Democrats who would break up with a friend for being a Republican are also the ones most attuned to what’s arguably the most high-profile civil rights issue of this particular moment.

Voters were also asked an open-ended question in this poll: “What frustrates you most about the Republican Party and would make you not want to vote for them?” I looked at these answers to see if high-aversion Democrats and low-aversion Democrats brought up different themes. I found that approximately 37% of high-aversion Democrats brought up bigotry and prejudice in their answers. Here are a few sample quotes:

“A lot of their core beliefs are rooted in homophobia and racial injustice.”

“Their lack of empathy and respect for marginalized people.”

“They are evil and only want to do harm to others in the name of upholding white supremacy.”

“They hate everyone and everything that is different. Their social stances are pure evil.”

By contrast, among the Democrats who either disagreed with the aversion item or punted on it (“neither agree nor disagree”), that figure is about 12%.

These high-aversion Democrats are, demonstrably, morally at odds with Republican elites and their policies. But when it comes to their willingness to break up with Republican friends, they may be making a generalizing error by extrapolating that they are also morally at odds with anyone who votes for Republicans. Plenty of people vote without deep thought or consideration for every policy stance, and many voters are indifferent or unaware, rather than impassioned, about key issues. The consequences of that generalizing error are obvious: it stokes more division, encourages negative stereotyping, and likely hinders our ability to persuade people, if we’ve given up on them before we start. The researchers who introduced this measure of polarization write in their paper:

“When partisans believe their party identity is inextricably linked to their deepest moral convictions, negotiation and compromise become equivalent to dereliction of moral duty, and partisan intolerance and abandonment of democratic processes may be seen as more justifiable.”

To be clear, I’m not passing any judgment on these high-aversion Democrats. We evaluate people based on the company they keep in many other contexts, after all. Aesop even wrote a fable about it. And politics is personal when you have something to lose. It’s hard to get past someone’s political views if, to you, those views are a commentary on your humanity, or the humanity of others.

So what?

So, do voters actually want less political division in their personal lives? The answer is complicated. But I think we’d do well to remember that people often express support for a principle but then are not necessarily willing to change their own behavior in order to achieve it. When people express a desire for less political division, they’re not necessarily expressing willingness to lay down their proverbial weapons and suspend their differences with people on the other side. I suspect this desire for unity actually has more to do with how they’d like the other side to behave.

Affective polarization could have perilous consequences if it goes unchecked, and one of the best checks we have is to remember that voters are not the elites of their party. Most voters are partisans, not ideologues. Their political opinions often don’t line up neatly under one ideological banner. Many of them are not paying close attention to politics at all. Voters contain (confusing) multitudes. That might be a frustrating reality in general, but in this context, I hope it’s a useful reminder.

This newsletter shares my personal views and lens on public opinion data.

Mind the Gap does not reflect any stances or positions of Change Research.

I blinked and realized I’ve taken a hiatus from this newsletter. It was unintentional. Truthfully, the state of the country has been so bleak and overwhelming that I’ve dismissed every idea that floated into my head for being comparatively inconsequential. Trump weaponizes the military against civilians and I’m going to write about how it polls? That still matters, but I’m struggling to execute.

These last few months, but particularly these last few days, I’ve been pondering authoritarianism. Coverage of this topic has not been lacking, but it has largely centered on Donald Trump himself and his lawless, fascistic impulses. I want to talk more about authoritarianism in the mass public: what it means to subscribe to authoritarianism, how symbolic status threat links to voters’ self-interests, and what our discourse gets right, and wrong, about how these interconnect.

The bicycle metaphor

Social psychologists who pioneered the study of authoritarianism in the mid-20th century coined “the bicycle metaphor” to describe how these attitudes function. Picture a person on a bicycle, hunched forward while pedaling, simultaneously bowing to those above and kicking down at those below. People who subscribe to authoritarian beliefs display both tendencies: submission to (perceived) legitimate authorities or strong leaders (i.e., bowing toward power), and aggression toward groups that violate social norms, challenge hierarchy, or are seen as weak, deviant, inferior, or outsiders (i.e., kicking down).

This metaphor captures the central paradox of authoritarianism: people who subscribe to these beliefs don’t just endorse punishing or harming those they deem as "below" or "undeserving;” they’re also often willing to submit to harsh authority themselves. In this way, authoritarianism serves to maintain a social hierarchy in which they are not at the top but they still derive value from its existence because it keeps others in their rightful place: below.

Politically, this often manifests as voters of lower socioeconomic status expressing opposition to redistributive economic policies or equality-oriented movements. These policies and movements would benefit them, but they perceive that marginalized groups would benefit even more, thereby elevating those groups in the status hierarchy and threatening their own place within it. Research has found, for example, that white working class voters will oppose expansions of welfare programs that they stand to benefit from if they believe the program expansion would be even more beneficial to racial minorities or immigrants than to themselves.

It also manifests in voters supporting leaders who “punch down” by targeting marginalized groups, even if supporting those leaders requires tolerating policies that might not benefit them materially. We’re arguably witnessing that in real time, as MAGA devotees maintain fealty to Trump, despite his tariff policy driving up consumer prices, and despite his legislative agenda, which features tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy and deep cuts to essential social programs, including $600 billion in cuts to Medicaid and $230 billion in cuts to SNAP. Why? Perhaps because his fascistic, aggressive targeting of immigrant communities restores and safeguards their own place in the social order.

These examples have a common core: many people will accept their own disadvantage as long as outgroups are disproportionately punished and the social hierarchy remains intact. This is the central conceit behind the “voting against your own self-interests” accusation: the idea that voting for Republicans, who enact policies that don’t make those voters any safer, healthier, or wealthier, runs counter to what’s in the best interest of those voters. There are a few reasons why this accusation is off-base, but the one I’m focused on here is that voters’ judgment about what’s in their best interest doesn’t only revolve around material gains. Symbolic self-interest (dominance, relevance, cultural prototypicality and power) can outweigh those material considerations.

There is no shortage of (excellent) studies demonstrating that when we compare economic anxiety against cultural resentments as independent predictive factors of vote choice, the latter is a far more powerful predictor of Trump support. Many of us (myself included) have made the full-throated argument that it’s racism, rather than economic anxiety, that most powerfully predicts voting for Trump over Clinton, Biden, or Harris, when we put the two at odds with each other and assess which holds more explanatory power. But our focus on this dynamic — “which one is it?” — masks a broader reality that I think we also need to contend with.

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Symbolic self-interest intersects with perceptions of material costs and benefits.

There’s considerable interplay between perceptions of economic well-being (whether your financial interests are being threatened) and symbolic beliefs (attitudes towards immigrants, racial minorities, and other minority groups). In my October poll last year with Change Research, for example, I found that white voters higher in racial resentment expressed more negative appraisals of their personal financial situation than white voters low in racial resentment. But a finding like this isn’t hugely informative on its own, since racial resentment correlates so strongly with partisanship, and partisanship is another symbolic predisposition that can filter voters’ perceptions of economic reality.

If you’re like me, you’re asking some “chicken or egg” questions at this point. Does experiencing real-world economic stress give rise to more racism and xenophobia as voters perceive more intergroup competition and/or go looking for scapegoats for their problems? Or can heightened cultural threat (my position in the social hierarchy is being jeopardized) give rise to distorted perceptions of one’s own personal economic wellbeing? Firstly, I don’t think this is actually an either/or; I think it can be both/and, depending on the circumstances. There’s (some) evidence for the first pathway under certain conditions. I’m not sure how deeply the second pathway has been explored, but I think it’s conceivable.

Stay tuned.

So what?

Symbolic self-interest can be just as potent as material self-interest, and the two are not always easily separated. I’d argue we should stop pitting one against the other when trying to understand why voters behave as they do. We can’t just credulously accept when people say the economy is their biggest concern without considering whether they are drawing on cultural threat to form conclusions about how the economy is doing writ large and why they, personally, aren’t doing better. It’s similarly unhelpful to dismiss all Trump voters as avowed white supremacist authoritarians who have no real economic problems. I’m hoping to explore the link between symbolic and material interests further with some new data in the near future; more to come.

In the meantime, I’ve been meaning to implement some feedback mechanism for this newsletter. What do you want to know? What topics are you hoping to hear about? What would be useful, at this moment in time?

This newsletter shares my personal views and lens on public opinion data.

Mind the Gap does not reflect any stances or positions of Change Research.

While many high-profile Democrats are preparing to fight the Trump administration’s lawless and barbaric treatment of immigrants (good on them), not everyone in the party is unified behind this approach. This week, Axios reported:

In fairness, I think some of this sentiment can be boiled down to “right idea, wrong application.” Democrats are routinely criticized for waging fights on the opposition’s turf: over-explaining, playing defense, validating their opponents’ moral compass and arguing that they simply disagree about the implementation. I’d also argue this notion that Democrats shouldn’t fight Trump on immigration stems from an ongoing misinterpretation of the 2024 election outcome: that Trump’s 1-point, sub-50% margin indicates that Democrats are completely out of step with voters. In reality, Trump mainly garnered majority support when it came to the abstracts of his immigration policy (securing the border, putting Americans first). Now that he’s in power, governing in plain sight, the public has more information, and they don’t like what they see. This is a fight worth having. Here are two reasons why.

Public opinion is thermostatic. Just because Democrats lost on immigration in 2024 doesn’t mean they’re losing in 2025.

There’s a concept in political science called “thermostatic politics,” which suggests that public opinion operates like a thermostat, toggling between left and right, balancing whoever is in power to ensure some equilibrium. A powerfully liberal national mood in the early 1960s ushered in LBJ’s Great Society and profound social change, but in reaction, the electorate shifted right, giving rise to a Republican-dominated era of “law and order.” For this reason, I’d argue it’s a major mistake to interpret public opinion on immigration as either static or stable. The fact that most voters who prioritized immigration chose Trump in 2024 does not mean Democrats are perpetually doomed to be on the losing side of the issue.

Consider how Trump combined the economy and immigration to form a compelling narrative while running for reelection. When he first vowed to enact a 25% tariff on all products imported from Mexico and Canada via Executive Order, he noted the tariffs would “remain in effect until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country!” He offered a narrative through-line that connected the economy with immigration and cultural resentment by telling people, “you are struggling because your government is prioritizing immigrants instead of you, and I will fix that so that you, and America, always come first.” That was persuasive to voters, in the abstract.

But today, we are living in a completely different reality. The narrative link that Trump established between immigration and the economy is weakening. Tariff chaos set markets plunging, and prices are still high; meanwhile, immigrants who have committed no crimes are being disappeared off the streets by plainclothes thugs, sent to ICE facilities out of state or worse, to a gulag in El Salvador, where MAGA warriors are creating propaganda by using them as props. None of this is popular, and none of this puts money in voters’ pockets. The theme that now ties these two issues together is Trump’s feckless antagonism. He’s crashing the economy for no reason, alienating trade partners and allies based on nonsensical mathematical equations—all so that American consumers can pay more for imported goods—and he’s disappearing innocent people off the streets, ruining lives and upending our judicial system in the process.

Consider data from two recent polls, both of which show the tide is turning against Trump on immigration:

• YouGov recently put out a poll showing that a mere 26% of Americans support “deporting immigrants without criminal convictions to El Salvador to be imprisoned, without letting them challenge the deportation in court.”

• Change Research recently surveyed voters to ask if they have any regrets about their 2024 vote. Of the 6% of Trump voters who responded that they have regrets about supporting him, the third most common reason selected was “the President’s handling of domestic issues (such as healthcare, education, or immigration).” By comparison, “the President’s policies are hurting the economy” ranked seventh on the list.

Punting on this immigration fight is arguably a prime example of what voters hate about politics and politicians.

I conducted dozens of interviews with voters last year. I asked them what bothers them most about politics these days, and what they want from their leaders that they’re not getting. Across race, place, age, and partisanship, I hear the same themes, over and over.

What voters repeatedly tell me frustrates them about politics and politicians:

• Too many are devoted to the status quo over delivering real change.

• Too many are inauthentic, self-interested people who say one thing and then do another, consistently overpromising when they seek office and underdelivering once they get there.

What voters repeatedly tell me they want from politics and politicians:

• Someone who’ll fight hard for us and put us first, above greedy corporations and ultra-wealthy donors, above their own political ambition, and above partisan agendas and bickering.

• Someone who walks the walk, and follows through on promises.

Change Research recently polled on this question of what voters want from their representatives, honing in specifically on would-be Democratic primary voters, and my colleague Ben Greenfield wrote a great piece on the implications of those findings. Specifically, the poll asks Democrats, and Dem-leaning Independents, to choose a candidate in two hypothetical primary contests: a “moderate who will fight the Trump administration vigorously” versus a “progressive who will mostly lay low,” and a “moderate who will mostly lay low” vs. a “progressive who will fight the Trump administration vigorously.” In both contests, voters—across age, race, and strength of partisan attachment—overwhelmingly choose the fighter, regardless of whether we describe that candidate as ideologically moderate (90% selected) or progressive (95% selected). “The central axis on which likely Democratic primary voters are assessing candidates is not ideological,” Greenfield concludes, “it’s whether they’ll fight.”

Democrats campaigned in 2024 on a core premise: that Donald Trump would govern as a dangerous dictator, with contempt for the rule of law and in raw pursuit of his own power. That is now happening, out in the open, and voters have the opportunity to evaluate, for themselves, whether their elected officials can meet the moment. Are you actually going to fight back, or were you only saying he’s dangerous because you were asking for my vote? Are you going to do something to stop him?

I’d argue that’s the lens through which gettable voters are evaluating their leaders right now.

Ezra Klein interviewed David Shor this week for his podcast The Ezra Klein Show, and one particular aspect of their conversation caught my attention first. Klein posed a question to Shor about the Democratic Party’s losses in 2024 among Black, Hispanic, and Asian voters, and asked Shor’s thoughts on what’s causing that trend. Here’s Shor’s reply:

“There’s this story in American politics: If you want to understand 20th-century American politics, then the big story is that there was this giant Southern realignment in 1964…driven by the Civil Rights Act. And that carried forward. It took a really long time for that to work its way down the ballot. So it was tempting for American political scientists and many more detail-oriented Americans, political consultants and pundits to see everything…through this transformation. The most important political trend of the last 30 to 40 years, both here and in every other country in the world — at least in Western countries with elections — has been this story of education polarization. Basically, we’ve seen highly educated people move to the left, while working-class people have moved to the right.”

A quick refresher on racial realignment, cribbed from one of my own prior pieces:

Until the 1960s, the two political parties were virtually indistinguishable on matters of race. That changed mid-decade when the Democratic Johnson Administration passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in 1964 and 1965, respectively. Suddenly, voters could distinguish the two parties’ stances on racism and segregation, and this set off a racial realignment of the party coalitions. White segregationists in the South began to migrate away from the Democratic Party, while Black Americans and racially liberal white voters migrated toward it.

Post-Civil Rights era, the two parties found themselves embroiled in what scholars call the “electoral temptation of race.” In order to win national elections, each needed need to appeal to uncommitted white voters — the ones who were not racial liberals but were not segregationists, either — without incurring political costs. For Republicans, the challenge was to court these voters with messages that subtly appealed to their racial biases without being so overtly racist as to violate new social norms about equality. For Democrats, the challenge was to balance a core component of their new voting base—Black voters—against the need for a broader coalition that included white voters who would be alienated by outright racial liberalism. Their mandate was to do just enough for Black voters to keep them in the coalition, but not enough to threaten the white voters needed to amass a majority.

Essentially, Shor’s argument is that racial realignment is not the all-important explanation for America’s political landscape that we make it out to be, and that education polarization is the more meaningful trend. One important thing to note, before I go further, is that the racial demographics of the two party coalitions are not necessarily the best reflection of the continued impact of racial realignment. I’d argue racial attitudes are far more influential. Racial depolarization in the 2024 election outcome does not mean that racial attitudes are becoming less influential in our politics.

Fundamentally, I disagree with Shor’s argument, for a fairly simple reason: education polarization is largely a proxy for those racial attitudes and other symbolic values.

Racial Attitudes Are Doing The Heavy Lifting

I’m not the first, or the only, public opinion researcher to make this argument. Ezra Klein interviewed political scientists John Sides and Lynn Vavreck in 2022 and posed similar questions to them about the significance of the diploma divide. Sides restated the argument he, Vavreck, and Michael Tesler made in their 2016 book Identity Crisis: among white voters, education level is “proxying values and beliefs related to minority racial and ethnic groups.” To his point, in virtually every survey where I ask questions about racial attitudes, I observe a divide in the answers by education level among white voters. In a Change Research poll of likely voters conducted in October of last year, I asked voters to indicate how much they agree or disagree with this statement: “I am tired of hearing so much about racial issues in the United States.” 63% of white voters without college degrees agreed with that statement; 59% of white voters with college degrees disagreed.

Even when we widen the aperture and focus on all voters, not simply white voters, Sides notes that yes, educational divides may absolutely be linked to policy preferences, but he rightly notes that “policy issues sometimes are not policy issues. Policy issues are statements about groups and who you like or dislike.” The bottom line: political preferences differ meaningfully based on voters’ cultural/racial attitudes, and the education divide reflects those differences, it doesn’t refute them.

Here are three off-the-cuff analyses I ran to illustrate that argument, looking at relationships between education, cultural/racial attitudes, and vote choice.

First, some simple correlation analyses using that same October 2024 polling data conducted by Change Research.

• Education Level & Vote Choice: Among white voters, the correlation between education level and voting for Trump in 2024, as of early October of last year, was -0.24, which is what we’d consider a medium strength correlation. Higher educational attainment correlates with less likelihood of voting for Trump.

• Education Level & Racial Resentment: The correlation between education level and racial resentment is -0.23, a comparably strong correlation. Higher educational attainment correlates with lower racial resentment.

• Racial Resentment & Vote Choice: The correlation between racial resentment and voting for Trump, among the same voters, is 0.77. Higher racial resentment correlates extremely strongly with higher likelihood of voting for Trump, and the relationship between these two variables is much stronger than the relationship between education and vote choice.

This graph below shows the predicted probability of voting for Trump as a function of education level, controlling for age, gender, region, partisanship, and racial resentment. As you can see, the line is almost flat. There’s no meaningful change in likelihood of choosing Trump over Harris as a function of education, when we control for racial attitudes and partisanship.

The same is plainly not true for racial attitudes. The likelihood of voting for Trump, controlling for demographics (including education level) and partisanship, differs drastically as a function of racial resentment.

Lastly, let’s look at all voters, not just white voters, and consider immigration-related attitudes. I used Change Research poll data from February of 2024 to create this graph, which shows the predicted probability of voting for Trump as a function of education level, controlling for age, gender, region, race, partisanship, and anti-immigrant sentiment, which I measured by asking people to rate their agreement/disagreement with these three statements:

• We will lose valuable parts of American culture and heritage if we let in too many immigrants from foreign countries.

• Immigration is a good thing for the country these days.

• Immigrants take job opportunities from people who were born here.

Voters are modestly less likely to choose Trump over Harris as a function of higher educational attainment, controlling for anti-immigrant attitudes and partisanship.

When I replicate the same analysis, but hold educational attainment constant and look at the relationship between anti-immigrant sentiment and vote choice, the effect is far more profound. Simply put, racial/cultural attitudes exert much more statistical influence over vote choice than education level does, when we account for both in the analysis.

What does this mean?

Political attitudes are heavily shaped by voters’ cultural/racial attitudes, and education exerts very little influence over vote choice once we account for those attitudes in the model. I’d argue this is evidence of racial realignment’s lasting legacy, not proof of its diminishing impact. That being said, the diploma divide is a meaningful trend in public opinion these days, in and of itself. We absolutely should conduct more research on the topic in order to understand these trends better, because while we know that education level relates to sociopolitical attitudes, we don’t actually know what it is about having a college degree that influences people’s beliefs. Klein himself mused about the opacity of education as an explanatory variable for vote choice in that 2022 interview with Sides and Vavreck:

“I always think it’s very unclear what education is standing in for here, what it is getting at as a variable you’re tracking, because I don’t think what’s happening is simply stuff you learned in school. I don’t think that’s what’s driving the divide.”

I share Klein’s skepticism. That argument sounds like the conservative theory of the case, that radical leftist professors are indoctrinating impressionable young minds the moment they step on campus. We know that’s false, but we don’t have a clear answer as to what the mechanism actually is. What is it about a college degree that produces, or correlates with, more liberal political beliefs throughout the lifespan? Stay tuned; I hope to explore it further with some upcoming data.

As is probably self-evident by now, a pet grievance of mine, which motivated me to launch this newsletter, is the fact that our political discourse hinges on some misguided notions about what is, and isn’t, popular with voters, and why. Broadly speaking, these narratives make two crucial mistakes. First, there’s a misperception that voters are ideological, with coherent and organized beliefs. In reality, most voters are partisans, but not ideologues. They play for a political team, but their views across specific issues are often inconsistent, malleable, and even contradictory. For this reason, what is and isn’t “popular” is highly dependent on framing and context. Second, public opinion is not a one-way street from voters’ hearts to elected officials’ ears. It’s a conversation between elites and the mass public that often flows in the opposite direction. What’s “popular” is hugely dependent on whether, and how, political leaders choose to own and frame an issue.

One such issue is abortion. In late January, anti-abortion activists held their annual demonstration in Washington, D.C. Vice President JD Vance attended and declared in his address to the crowd that “America is fundamentally a pro-baby, a pro-family and a pro-life country.” It’s not, of course, and any casual observer might already know that, simply because we often hear that abortion is a “politicized” or “polarizing” topic, and that language suggests that voters in America are narrowly and bitterly divided on this issue. The thing is: that’s off-base, too. I delved into voters’ abortion attitudes in a national poll of 1,759 registered voters that we conducted at Change Research in January of this year. Here’s what I found.

The vast majority of Americans are pro-choice. They just would not describe themselves that way.

Per a 2024 Gallup poll, 54% of Americans identify as “pro-choice,” while 41% identify as “pro-life” (5% have no opinion). These binary labels do paint a picture of a divided public that’s narrowly in favor of abortion rights. But if you go deeper, the story changes.

One of the most common questions used in surveys to assess abortion attitudes asks people which of the following statements best represents their views:

• Abortion should be legal in all cases

• Abortion should be legal in most cases

• Abortion should be illegal in most cases

• Abortion should be illegal in all cases

In our January poll, a combined 61% of voters nationwide believe abortion should be legal in most or all cases. A combined 33% say it should be illegal in most/all cases; 6% are unsure. For folks who follow public opinion on this issue, those numbers are probably very familiar; they are incredibly stable over time. And while it’s hard to achieve 61% consensus on most anything today, even that number is somewhat misleading; the consensus is actually higher. In addition to asking the legal/illegal question, we also asked people to sort themselves into one of these three categories:

• I personally support a woman’s right to an abortion and believe it should be legal and available

• I am personally against abortion but I do not believe government should prevent a woman from making that decision for herself

• I personally believe having an abortion is wrong and should be illegal

47% of voters nationwide are personally pro-abortion rights, falling into that category that most of us associate with the term “pro-choice.” But another 33% say that while they’re personally against abortion, they do not believe the government should make it illegal to obtain one, and that’s also a pro-choice position. Only 20% of voters believe—in the abstract—that abortion should be illegal.

(Incidentally, if you’re curious about how people who voted for Trump answered this question: a combined 59% are either personally in favor of abortion or personally against it but don’t believe government should outlaw it.)

Most Americans support legal abortion in almost all circumstances in which someone might elect to have one or medically require one.

The only circumstance in which a majority of voters do not support legal abortion is an elective abortion after fetal viability when there is no medical emergency or fatal fetal abnormality. That type of abortion constitutes less than 1% of all abortions nationwide, according to the CDC.

Even most people who indicate in the abstract that abortion “should be illegal in most/all cases” are in favor of making abortion legal in most circumstances.

I took a look at those exact same questions, but focusing only on the people who say, in the abstract, that abortion should be illegal in most or all cases. These voters only withhold support for legal abortions when we frame the circumstances in terms of how far into pregnancy they occur, rather than as medically necessary or as a response to a criminal act. When abortion is presented without contextual cues (medical necessity, life-long consequences for personal freedom and agency), it’s much less popular, but when that context is provided, support is far higher. To put it plainly: even the people who say they believe abortion should be illegal in most cases actually support abortion in the majority of cases we tested.

Voters know very little about when abortions take place.

So much of the discourse, and the divide, about abortion access has to do with how far into a pregnancy someone is when they obtain one. According to CDC estimates, roughly 94% of abortions in the U.S. take place in the first 13 weeks of pregnancy. Only 15% of voters can correctly identify that statistic.

• The majority of voters — men and women, across party lines — believe less than 60% of abortions in the U.S. happen in the first 13 weeks of pregnancy.

• The plurality of voters — men and women, across party lines — believe less than half of all abortions in the U.S. happen in the first 13 weeks of pregnancy.

Why is this the case? There’s certainly not one cause or explanation, but I will note that because the majority of voters support the right to a legal abortion, anti-choice activists tend to play in a particular lane: ginning up anger about abortions that happen near or after fetal viability while creating a misleading impression of how commonly those happen. The only concrete mention of abortion in the 2024 GOP platform was a commitment to “oppose Late Term Abortion,” a term that has absolutely no medical meaning. The truth is, abortions after fetal viability are exceptionally rare, only legal in six states and the District of Columbia, and primarily occur because of a fatal fetal abnormality or severe medical danger for the mother – circumstances in which even a majority of voters who say abortions should be mostly/completely illegal support the right to a legal abortion.

What does all this mean?

The problem with labels like “pro-choice” and “pro-life” is they allow people to self-sort based on their own abstract associations around abortion, as well as plenty of misinformation about when and why they happen. Most Americans believe abortions should be legal in most circumstances, full stop. Even people who say they believe the opposite, when asked about specific circumstances, approve of legal abortion in most cases. And this illustrates perhaps the most frustrating aspect of public opinion research: as much as conservatives like to crow that “facts don’t care about your feelings,” the reality is, our feelings often don’t care about the facts. Values-infused narratives take hold and crystallize, and they endure even when people are confronted with evidence to the contrary. Our best approach, then, is not to defensively quote the CDC website to voters when they attack us for “late term abortions,” nor is it to credulously concede that Americans are as divided on the issue as they believe themselves to be. We have to tell a compelling story, proactively, relentlessly, and confidently.

Post-election critiques of Democrats have largely hinged on the perception that they prioritized social issues at the expense of economic ones, and that their stances on social issues were alienating largely due to the terminology they employed, terms which, these critics argue, signify cultural elitism rather than relatability. “Some Democrats are finally waking up and realizing that woke is broke,” Maureen Dowd declared on November 9th:

“Democratic candidates have often been avatars of elitism — Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and second-term Barack Obama. The party embraced a worldview of hyper-political correctness, condescension and cancellation, and it supported diversity statements for job applicants and faculty lounge terminology like “Latinx,” and “BIPOC” (Black, Indigenous, People of Color).”

A month later, Rahm Emanuel published his assessment in The Washington Post:

“With inflation stinging, school absenteeism skyrocketing and students’ academic scores plummeting, Democrats consumed themselves in debates over pronouns, bathroom access and renaming schools and adopted terms such as “care economy” and “Latinx” to win over voters. It was a hermetically sealed conversation with ourselves, and we appeared much as we sounded: distant and detached.”

But in her recent piece for New York Magazine, Rebecca Traister thoughtfully posited a rebuttal to this argument: that it’s the elite pundits, writers, and consultants who author these pieces that are aggrieved by those terms and the culture that they represent, and that they’ve projected their grievances onto the voters they claim to interpret.

“I believe that it’s we elites, who do not enjoy getting dogpiled on social media or having college students yell at us about settler colonialism, who are the most put off by the hyperwokeness of our era, while the vast majority of Americans don’t love but also don’t think that much about the use of “Latinx” or pronouns, and remain far more affected by the material wins — around racial and gender pay equity, hiring- and housing-discrimination protections, access to health care and education — that have been enabled by movements for both economic equality and identity-based protections.”

This week, I decided test her theory by asking voters about these terms. How frequently do they encounter them, and how much does it bother them, when they do?

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In a Change Research national poll of registered voters that fielded earlier this week, I asked voters to indicate how frequently they hear elected politicians use “Latinx” and “BIPOC.” The vast majority — across the aisle — report hearing these terms pretty infrequently. A combined 68% say they hear elected politicians use the term Latinx “not too often” or “almost never.” A combined 74% say they hear elected politicians use the term BIPOC “not too often” or “almost never.” By contrast, 95% report hearing elected politicians say “MAGA” “very often” or “somewhat often.” 89% say the same of the term “illegal immigrant.” When it comes to blue-coded terms versus red-coded ones, voters hear politicians using Republicans’ language en masse. The same isn’t true of progressive-coded terms like Latinx and BIPOC.

I also asked voters to indicate which term bothers them more, Latinx or “retard.” The latter is a term that has (appropriately) fallen out of favor in the last two decades and is generally regarded as a slur in the disability community, but Elon Musk and his DOGE apologists have recently brought it back into rotation since Donald Trump was elected. A recent report found that use of the term has tripled on X since Musk used it on January 6th. I found that 62% of voters are more bothered by the use of the term “retard” than by the use of the term Latinx. 28% report not being bothered by either. A mere 10% report being more bothered by the term Latinx.

Incidentally - what does bother large majorities of voters when it comes to language and speech? There are two standouts:

• “People using slurs or hate speech” (87%).

• “People using terms like ‘retard’ to refer to people” (71%).

These data poke a hole in the ongoing argument about progressive language. Pundits are telling one story, but when I asked voters directly, they told a different one. In their view, right-wing terminology is in high circulation among political leaders. Progressive-speak, by comparison, is far less widespread, and most voters don’t report being bothered by it, when they do encounter it. Ultimately, if pundits are going to continue dissecting how the parties’ use of language impacts voters, they ought to evaluate the assumptions their argument is built upon. It’s Musk and his army who are alienating voters with terminology, not Democrats.

On Tuesday, Trump proposed forcibly relocating the Palestinian population of Gaza and having the United States take over and develop the region. Today, a New York Times piece described Trump’s approach as unusual and far-fetched, but noted that he still deserves some credit for addressing an important problem.

“President Trump took the world aback with his declaration that the United States was going to ‘own’ Gaza and move out the Palestinians there to build ‘the Riviera of the Middle East.’ As unrealistic and bizarre as it may seem, Mr. Trump was pointing to a serious challenge: the future of Gaza as a secure, peaceful, even prosperous place.”

Translation: Trump proposes ethnic-cleansing-for-profit as the solution to the devastation in Gaza and we’re supposed to hand it to him for accurately observing that Gaza has been obliterated. The author goes on to quote an emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London who notes that “Trump picks up on a real problem, about how to reconstruct Gaza. The important thing with Trump is to pick out the real issues and deflect the stupid ones.”

I disagree. I’d argue what’s essential when dealing with wannabe autocrats who disregard the law and the rights of human beings is not to sanewash their fascistic solutions simply because they are framed as a response to real problems. Ethnically cleansing Palestinians from Gaza is not a legitimate way to secure peace in the region. Ransacking USAID and illegally freezing funds already approved by Congress is not a legitimate way to limit government spending and inefficiency. Focusing on the “real” problems, rather than the fact that the proposed solutions range from morally reprehensible to completely illegal, is dangerous. I also don’t think it’ll win us any elections.

Too many consultants and strategists in the Democratic Party have spent the past three months recommending that electeds not steer into the skid. Stay laser-focused on voters’ “top issues,” treat everything else as mere distractions. Several Democrats have publicly expressed willingness to collaborate with Trump on those top issues where possible. My argument as a pollster is to do the opposite. Stop legitimizing the stated goals and start resisting the tactics, especially because the stated goals are a farce. He and his cronies don’t want to reform, they want to break things.

Cooperating is an especially ill-conceived tactic when the argument is rooted in polling and what is or isn’t popular with voters. Poll numbers aren’t shelf-stable, they capture moments in time. When the numbers do move, it’s not in a vacuum. Media coverage drives salience, and political elites work to make things popular or unpopular. The vast majority of voters are not ideologues with coherent belief systems, they’re moveable based on framing. All of this means we should use polling strategically; none of this means we should act like hostages. We’re also way too quick to assume that because Trump won the election, most of his stances must be popular. It’s just not true. I dug into voters’ perceptions of his agenda in a recent poll fielded at the end of January among registered voters nationwide. Only 38% voters support banning transgender people from serving in the military. Only 37% support ending birthright citizenship. Only 32% want to make it illegal to send or obtain mifepristone, the abortion pill, through the mail. These ideas are popular with the MAGA base, and no one else.

When I conduct polls, I commonly ask voters to choose from a list what they think are the top problems with politics these days, and what solutions they think we need most. The two solutions that consistently rise to the top?

• Leaders who are not just playing for their political team, who can move past labels like Democrat or Republican to deliver real results for American families

• Leaders who will truly prioritize regular Americans over corporate profits

Trump violates both of these core values, but Democrats and media alike would do well not to misunderstand the first one. Making concessions to Trump and offering to partner in good faith with a fundamentally bad faith actor will not convince the voters we need to win over that we are putting them first. It’ll further entrench their cynicism that all politicians are the same and that all of our warnings about Trump were hyperbolic and disingenuous. It’ll also mean we’re failing to give voters a reason to choose us instead. A better place to start? Stop sanewashing him.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made waves earlier this month for his appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, in which he discussed his decision to end diversity, equity and inclusion efforts at Meta and lamented a perceived dearth of masculine energy in the corporate sector. “I think a lot of the corporate world is pretty culturally neutered,” Zuckerberg observed. “Masculine energy is good, and obviously, society has plenty of that, but I think corporate culture was really trying to get away from it.” Veteran politico James Carville had similarly choice remarks to make about women’s influence in the Democratic Party and the extent to which they contributed to Harris’s defeat. In a NYT interview with Maureen Dowd late last year, Carville theorized that there are “too many preachy females [in the Democratic Party]… ‘Don’t drink beer, don’t watch football, don’t eat hamburgers, this is not good for you’... The message is too feminine: ‘Everything you’re doing is destroying the planet. You’ve got to eat your peas.'”

These remarks stem from a common underlying idea: women’s influence, women’s power, has somehow gone too far, to the detriment of men and masculinity, and at the expense of our success as a collective, whether that’s a company, a culture, or a political party. Trump’s first term helped catapult #MeToo into the spotlight and brought women’s experiences of discrimination, harassment, and violence into the mainstream conversation, but the subsequent four years sent the pendulum swinging back. Grievance abounded. #MeToo went too far, the movement victimizes men, elevates women’s vendettas over men’s right to the presumption of innocence, and generally contributes to a culture of punishing men for existing and demanding that they stay quiet. Men are turning rightward because they’re marginalized by the left. Childless cat ladies are destroying America! How widespread is this notion that:

(1) women have advanced

(2) at men’s expense?

Gender Discrimination Is Zero Sum, Too

I decided to replicate a study I shared in a prior piece that demonstrates white Americans are prone to zero-sum perceptions of racial progress, but I applied it to gender attitudes. A month before the election, I asked voters to rate the average level of discrimination they think men and women have faced in each decade from the 1950s through the 2020s. Here’s what I found.

True to my expectation, much as white people perceive racial progress is a zero-sum game that Black Americans are winning, men perceive gender discrimination as a zero-sum game that they are now losing. Not only do they perceive that anti-men discrimination is on the rise and anti-women discrimination is in decline, they believe there is currently more anti-men discrimination than anti-women discrimination in society writ large. Women, on average, also perceive the same decline in anti-women discrimination and corresponding rise in anti-men discrimination since the 1950s, but they do not think that men have it worse, in absolute terms, than they do themselves.

I’m guessing your next question is: which men? I will answer that, but I want to plant a second question: which women?

It’s not Democrats. Democratic men (and women) perceive a very mild increase in anti-men discrimination since the 1950s, and a modest decrease in anti-women discrimination, but neither perceive that men now have it worse than women as a consequence of these shifts.

Now, for the Republicans.

There are a few noteworthy findings in this data. First and foremost, it’s Republican men and women that are driving this trend. Both perceive anti-women discrimination is plummeting and anti-men discrimination is soaring, and both perceive men have it worse than women—by a long shot—when it comes to discrimination these days.

The second noteworthy finding is that men and women seem to place these shifts in different decades. Republican men, on average, place the inflection point in the 1990s; Republican women place it in the 2010s. I think it’s noteworthy that both of these decades brought very high-profile Supreme Court nominations in which the nominee, both times a man chosen by a Republican president, was accused of sexual misconduct on the national stage. I don’t claim that either of these events are the only, or even the primary, reasons for this pattern of data, but I do suspect they were critical moments in the national conversation that may have produced sustained attitude change. Consider that support for Kavanaugh among Republican women rose from 49% to 69% after he and Christine Blasey Ford testified publicly before Congress in 2018.

The third thing to note about this data is that Republican men perceive anti-men discrimination to be exceptionally high, averaging around an 8 on a 1-10 scale. Let me put that into sharper context. The degree of discrimination that Republican men believe they are experiencing today is roughly equal to the amount of discrimination that white people believe Black Americans experienced in the 1960s.

Aside from the disturbing and obvious, one thing I want readers to take away from this data is that gender does not transcend partisanship when it comes to politics. Simply being a woman does not produce gender solidarity when partisanship is a source of cross-pressure.

The other, less obvious takeaway I want to impart is that all is not lost, because voters contradict themselves. Republican women, on average, view discrimination against men as more prevalent than discrimination against women, but per a Change Research poll conducted only six months earlier, 40% say that in American society today, women are valued less than men. 30% also believe abortion should be legal in most or all cases.

I’d argue this is more evidence for my overarching argument that pivoting away from hard topics because we sense a cultural headwind is rarely, if ever, the right approach. Most voters are not ideologically consistent because most don’t really subscribe to governing political ideologies; being a partisan and being an ideologue are not the same thing, and while the former is common, the latter is rare.

I won’t presume to tell anyone that this reality isn’t sometimes frustrating, or that the state of public opinion when it comes to gender discrimination isn’t extremely grim. Nor do I want to sanewash the broader threats to egalitarianism and democracy that Trump and Trumpism pose by saying “buck up and poll/message your way through it, this is business as usual.” But I’d argue strongly that this data I’ve shared doesn’t have to be cause for despair, either. In this era of polarization, virtually everything is won or lost on the margins. That means we can, and should, see voters’ ideological inconsistencies as opportunities.

The backlash that’s been germinating for four years has arrived.

After Biden’s victory in 2020, I gave a presentation about how racial attitudes factored into the outcome, and where I thought we were headed as a consequence. My parting message: with progress comes backlash. I closed with an excerpt from Tom Nichol’s piece in the Atlantic, published on November 4th, 2020, titled, “A Large Portion of the Electorate Chose the Sociopath:”

“My greatest fear, aside from an eventual Trump victory over the coming days, is that no matter the outcome, both parties will rush to draw the wrong lesson from this close election. The Republicans will conclude that just a bit more overt racism (but less tweeting about it) will carry the day next time. They will see the exit polls that called for a “strong national leader” and they will replace the childish and whiny Trump with someone who projects even more authoritarian determination. They will latch on to the charge that democracy is a rigged game, and they will openly despise its rules even more than Trump has.”

His prediction was, unfortunately, very prescient, apart from the assumption that the GOP would need to break with Trump to accomplish it. This week, I revisited some of the data trends I relied on for that presentation, to see whether the 2024 numbers fit the existing pattern or whether shifts were taking place. I found that the picture has changed.

What is “Racial Resentment?”

The term racial resentment is broadly used by pundits and politicos to describe any form of racially-motivated grievance, but in political psychology, it has a more specific meaning and measurement. In the decades following the Civil Rights Movement, Americans increasingly viewed explicit racism as bad behavior and racial discrimination as unfair. But as those explicit forms of racism fell out of favor in the second half of the twentieth century, anti-Black sentiment did not disappear. It found new forms of expression that were compatible with changing social norms.

Rather than expressing white superiority on the basis of biological factors—what we call “old fashioned racism”—racial resentment is characterized by four key themes: (1) the belief that Black Americans no longer face much discrimination, (2) that the disadvantages they face in society are due to their poor work ethic, (3) that they are demanding too much social change too fast, and (4) that they have gotten more than they deserve. Racial resentment, then, effectively repackages anti-Black racism as respect for American values by contextualizing the difficulties Black Americans face as a function of their failure to live up to American ideals of hard work, self-reliance, and rugged individualism. It’s most commonly measured by asking people to rate their agreement with these four statements, which have been used in public opinion surveys since the 1990s, and then scaling the answers into one measure:

• “Irish, Italians, Jewish and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Black people should do the same without any special favors.”

• “Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for Black people to work their way out of the lower class.”

• “Over the past few years, Black people have gotten less than they deserve.”

• “It's really a matter of some people not trying hard enough. If Black people would only try harder, they could be just as well off as white people.”

For the last several years, I’ve been tracking average racial resentment among white voters by party in my research. I compiled data from each presidential cycle going back to 2000, to assess how the prevalence of these attitudes has changed over time. Back in 2000, on average, white Democrats were marginally less racially resentful than Independents or Republicans, but the difference wasn’t all that wide. The average racial resentment level among white Republicans in 2000 (on a 0-1 scale, where higher scores = more racial resentment) was 0.68; for white Democrats, it was 0.57. During the ‘08 Obama campaign and the first half of his presidency, average racial resentment among white Republicans increased, and largely plateaued among white Democrats and Independents. The great divergence really begins in the 2012-2016 interval.

If I were to ask you to guess which group changed most during this period of time, would you theorize that it’s white Republicans? That would be a logical guess: that the aggrieved white voters grew even more racially resentful, thanks to their party leader giving newfound cover to express those views more publicly? Here’s what actually happened.

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This is the period that brought both the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, which called greater attention to police brutality and violence against Black people, and the descent of a bombastic future felon down a golden escalator and into the political spotlight. His political launch was marked by racism and xenophobia, and most Americans who take surveys were generally inclined to condemn and distance themselves from his most offensive rhetoric, either out of reticence to admit their true beliefs (the “shy Trump voters” plagued by social desirability bias) or out of genuine distaste for his views. Between 2012 and 2016, racial resentment dipped moderately (but significantly) among white Republicans and white Independents, and began to drop precipitously among white Democrats.

The next interval that produces considerable divergence is 2016-2020. The culmination of that four year period — an era defined by a Muslim ban, family separations, remarks about “shithole countries,” among other choice acts and remarks — was the summer of 2020. George Floyd’s murder sparked a series of nationwide protests and stimulated broader mainstream discussion and acknowledgment of police brutality, white supremacy, and antiracism. Between 2016 and 2020, the average level of racial resentment declined among all groups of white voters; most precipitously, again, for white Democrats. In 2012, the average level of racial resentment among this group (on that 0-1 scale) was 0.55. By 2020, it had fallen to 0.26.

And then what? The so-called “racial reckoning” of 2020 did not materialize; we did not achieve tectonic shifts in policy that would dismantle systemic racism. By and large, the opposite happened. Backlash ensued, against mythical critical race theory education programs in secondary schools, against “cancel culture,” against DEI efforts, and against “wokeness,” essentially a catch-all term to describe progressive values. Trump waged a grievance-fueled 2024 campaign that vowed, among other things, to end “wokeness” and dismantle DEI programs. The 2020-2024 interval is the first time since Trump arrived on the political scene in which I’ve seen average levels of racial resentment among white Republicans rise (marginally, and rebounding to near-2012 levels but not exceeding them). White Independents plateaued, and white Democrats continue to trend downwards, but very mildly.

What does this all mean?

When it comes to white Democrats, the most obvious answer is that significant attitude change took place over this period of time. I think this is certainly part of the story, but I’d also argue that the first Trump era ushered in new party norms for white Democrats when it comes to racism. I suspect that during this period, these voters internalized the expectation that they give structural attributions for racial disparities, not individual or moral ones. We are all somewhat governed by a desire for positive self-image. It stands to reason that white Democratic voters would want to see themselves in a positive light with respect to their own racial attitudes at a time when those attitudes were so moralized and so politicized.

For white Republicans, one important takeaway is that their average levels of racial resentment haven’t changed all that much since 2000. They were high then, and they’re high now (in the aggregate). When I do 1:1 interviews with white Republican voters, they often tell me with a mix of bewilderment and annoyance that they don’t understand why the views they’ve held for 20 years are now grounds for criticism. My own opinions on that notwithstanding, I must admit they have a point: they’re not the group that changed. Until recently. But the change is small, and it constitutes a return to 2012 levels, not an unprecedented high. 2028 may well bring another decline among white Republicans, if our polarized climate produces another pendulum swing in four years.

But my educated speculation is that we’re in somewhat uncharted territory with Trump 2.0. In 2016, horrified white liberals could content ourselves with the belief that his victory was an accident: of the Electoral College overriding the will of the majority, of voters who mistakenly took him “seriously but not literally,” of low turnout in key swing states. Trump is a known quantity this time, and a (slim) majority of voters chose him anyway. I’m not sure we’ll see another massive resistance movement this time around. As it stands, white partisans have somewhat staked out the two poles of the spectrum on racial resentment; there’s not a ton of room for either group to get much further apart on this measure. Those large shifts among white Democrats in the above graph are also atypical; historically, levels of racial resentment tended to be more stable. So, are we stuck here, or could the landscape change again? Time will tell, but I’ll be watching closely.

I wrote this (long) piece to offer my perspective on this debate, as informed by my research and experience. This is not a “what really mattered to voters” rebuttal. All year, my research has shown that a great many voters believe Democrats care about certain groups and issues at the expense of caring about people like them. This piece is a reflection on why voters feel that way, our legacy of blaming identity politics for our electoral misfortunes, and how we chart a better way forward.

We Have Been Having This Conversation For Six Decades

A quick historical level-set. Until the 1960s, the two political parties were virtually indistinguishable on matters of race. That changed mid-decade when the Democratic Johnson Administration passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in 1964 and 1965, respectively. Suddenly, voters could distinguish the two parties’ stances on racism and segregation, and this set off a racial realignment of the party coalitions. White segregationists in the South began to migrate away from the Democratic Party, while Black Americans and racially liberal white voters migrated toward it.

Post-Civil Rights era, the two parties found themselves embroiled in what scholars call the “electoral temptation of race.” In order to win national elections, each needed need to appeal to uncommitted white voters — the ones who were not racial liberals but were not segregationists, either — without incurring political costs. For Republicans, the challenge was to court these voters with messages that subtly appealed to their racial biases without being so overtly racist as to violate new social norms about equality. For Democrats, the challenge was to balance a core component of their new voting base—Black voters—against the need for a broader coalition that included white voters who would be alienated by outright racial liberalism. Their mandate was to do just enough for Black voters to keep them in the coalition, but not enough to threaten the white voters needed to amass a majority.

The argument that Democrats should lean away from social issues and concentrate on economics dates to this same moment in time. In their book The Real Majority, published in 1970, Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg argued that most voters are economically liberal and socially conservative, and consequently, that the Democratic Party has an advantage on economic issues, the Republican Party on social issues. They suggested that elections would generally be won by whichever party played to its strengths and exploited the opposition’s weakness, which meant that Republicans would try to win votes on the basis of “the Social Issue” by branding Democrats as excessively liberal (including but not limited to matters of race) and therefore out of touch with voters. This tactic has been a feature of the Republican playbook ever since.

Why Is Identity Politics Unpopular?

Political parties are made up of groups, many (I’d argue most) of which are identity-based. Evangelical Christians, farmers, gun owners, union workers; these are all examples of identity-based coalitions that inspire specific outreach strategies from campaigns and exert considerable influence in our politics but against whom the accusation of identity politics is not leveraged. The groups that practice identity politics and are criticized for it tend to be minority groups and/or historically marginalized demographic groups (mostly Black people, but also women, LGBTQ+ people, etc). Why this double standard? Three theories.

The first has to do with the American mythology around equal opportunity. The idea that a trait one is born with could have any deterministic power over their advancement in America is antithetical to our national sense of self. It violates the belief that we live in an equal-opportunity meritocracy that rewards people exclusively based on talent and effort, not on connections, wealth, status, or power, benefits that historically have a great deal to do with things like gender and race. Scholars have explored how beliefs in meritocracy and colorblindness motivate resistance to movements perceived to prioritize race or other demographic traits (e.g. Bonilla-Silva’s Racism Without Racists). Under this framework, the chosen identities that we gravitate towards and build our lives around (e.g. religious groups, work-based groups, parenthood) are legitimate reasons to form political coalitions and make demands on the group’s behalf. Demographic traits are not, because they violate the normative belief that these things shouldn’t matter in America.

The second is that many voters perceive these political coalitions are competing for zero-sum resources, and therefore, that the advancement of one demographic group comes at the expense of others. Importantly, those resources can be tangible (housing, government aid) but they can also be symbolic (cultural dominance, membership to the majority). People who bemoan the use of “happy holidays” often view the expression as a “war on Christmas.” People who are bothered by feminism tend to view it as hostility towards men, not advocacy for women’s equality with men. A 2011 paper by Norton and Sommers showed that on average, white Americans believe that as discrimination against Black people has declined, discrimination against white Americans has correspondingly increased and, in fact, exceeds the average amount of discrimination Black people face. In other words, “Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing.” Through this lens, if identity politics is a tool for the in-group’s advancement, then for members of the corresponding out-group, identity politics is a threat.

Critics of identity politics often invoke this zero-sum framework. They will argue that antiracism means creating a permission structure to discriminate against white people, that saying “Black Lives Matter” implies white lives don’t, that advocacy for certain groups is tantamount to giving them special rights that other groups don’t get, all of which violates our unifying belief in equal rights for all groups. I’d argue that’s a mischaracterization of identity politics at best, and a deliberate distortion at worst.

The third is what’s called The Availability Heuristic, which refers to our tendency to overestimate the frequency of a phenomenon based on how easily examples come to mind. Because vivid/memorable events are easier for our minds to access, we tend to overestimate how frequently they happen. This is what leads people to overestimate rates of violent crime (high media coverage makes these events easy to recall, even if they’re rare) or the likelihood of shark attacks (thank you, Jaws). If identity politics bothers you, as a voter, you’re perhaps likelier to recall examples of it, leading to an overestimation of how much parties and candidates are focusing on it. After the election, researchers conducted a study and found that voters across the political spectrum correctly identified that inflation/the economy was among Republican’s top three priorities but they widely misperceived Democrats’ prioritization of “LGBT/transgender policy”:

“Although this was not a major priority for Democratic voters in reality—it ranked 14th—our survey respondents listed it as Democrats’ second-highest priority. This effect was especially dramatic among Republicans—56 percent listed the issue among Democrats’ top three priorities, compared with just 8 percent who listed inflation—but nearly every major demographic group made a version of the same mistake.”

I suspect this cognitive bias may help fuel the perception that Democrats focus disproportionately on social issues affecting marginalized groups at the expense of issues like the economy and costs. The Trump campaign certainly worked hard to reinforce that perception. Per a PBS report, between October 7th and October 20th, Trump’s campaign and Trump-aligned groups spent an estimated $95 million on ads. More than 41% of those ads were anti-trans.

Hearing Out The Critics

In order to operate in good faith, I also want to give critics of identity politics—the ones from “inside the house,” so to speak, not the ones who would like to see Democrats lose — a fair treatment and do my best to take their perspective.

They (rightly) note that at the end of the day, we all must subscribe to some superordinate identity that binds us together over and above what makes us different from one another if we want to win elections as a party and unite as a country. This is true, and how best to articulate that shared identity is an ongoing challenge. Critics also worry that identity politics leads to infighting and division, rather than coalition-building and compromise. If we are all chiefly concerned with our own subgroup’s advancement and not committed to some broader, mutually beneficial outcome for the greater group, we’ll fracture into sectarianism instead of coming together. This is a fair concern to have about any big tent party that makes room for diversity and heterogeneity.

But I’d argue these critics tend to over-index on fears that identity politics threaten or fracture the collective and disregard all the movements/laws/legal precedents that identity politics has won for us by reinforcing the collective. Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Obergefell v. Hodges decision; these are all victories that we owe to identity politics and that brought us closer to living our fundamental values as Americans. Do any of these hard-won civil rights protections undermine the civil rights of white people, able-bodied people, or straight people? Or do they inspire us to feel pride and attachment to our superordinate identity as Americans for making profound social progress?

To that, critics might say: victories secured through identity politics had their time and place in the past. Those social movements were justified and palatable, whereas today’s social movements are fringe and alienating. The truth is, identity politics as practiced by minority groups is usually unpopular in its own time. During the height of the Civil Rights movement, a 1966 Gallup survey found that just 33% of white respondents viewed Martin Luther King Jr. favorably. A Harris poll from the same year found that 50% of white respondents believed King was "hurting the Negro cause of civil rights" and only 36% felt he was helping. In 1968, the American National Election Survey asked, "Some people say that the Negroes who are trying to integrate schools, restaurants, and other public places are moving too fast; others say they are not moving fast enough. How about you: do you think Negroes are moving too fast, not fast enough, or about the right speed?" 60% of white voters answered, “too fast.” (Today, decades after he was assassinated, 94% of white Americans have a favorable view of King.)

None of this means that everything Democrats or progressives do and say is right. We will make tactical errors. We shouldn’t be in the business of deliberately alienating people. And we aren’t. That’s the opposition’s framing, and that’s a perception rooted in zero-sum thinking. Recognizing that is an important step in figuring out how we regroup and go forward without sacrificing people or values along the way.

So, What?

Many folks will still argue that we should focus on what’s popular and discard the rest. That the purpose of polls is to inform campaigns about what voters like so that leaders can champion those policies, make voters happy, and win more elections. They’ll argue that because various aspects of “identity politics/wokeness” are unpopular, that we should de-emphasize social issues like trans rights and focus on what voters “actually” care about, like the economy, to regain political relevance. It’s an age-old argument.

I don’t disagree that a healthy democracy requires leaders to respond to the public’s demands and preferences, and that determining what’s popular so that leaders can respond to it is a core purpose of polling. But we also have an imperative to champion smart, pro-social policies, and if the public doesn’t embrace them, pollsters can be enlisted to help shift voters’ minds. Republicans will keep branding us as excessively liberal on social issues regardless of how we actually conduct ourselves. That means candidates have to own what they stand for and not live in fear of how the opposition will portray it. This is not an argument to double down on every language choice, message, or policy out of defiance or activist pressure. I’m arguing for thoughtful decision-making about what Democrats stand for, what we won’t concede out of fear, what we will compromise on in order to make progress, and how best to communicate that message to voters in a way that makes them feel included and inspired.

The “Bad Vibes” Economy

The so-called “bad vibes economy” captured our attention in 2024. Many were puzzled by how macroeconomic improvements in post-pandemic America, such as strong job creation and record low unemployment, didn’t translate to voters giving the Biden/Harris administration credit for a strong economy. My research this year sheds light on an important factor that I think we’ve overlooked. Voters across the political spectrum perceive our economy unfairly benefits some over others; many would even say the economy is rigged. But voters fundamentally disagree about what is rigged, and who benefits. That’s the argument we lost.

First Things First: It’s Not All Vibes

My company, Change Research, polls regularly about issues facing Americans in their everyday lives, and the data made clear all year that Americans are struggling. In addition to lamenting inflation and higher prices, they’ve talked about the crisis of affordable housing, student loan debt that they struggle to repay, and high costs of healthcare and childcare. Young people, in particular, report deep pessimism about their economic futures. In our 2023 polling with 18-34 year olds, we learned that a majority of these voters doubt whether they’ll ever be able to retire, own a home, have as many kids as they hope for, or escape living paycheck to paycheck. It’s not just that they are struggling financially; it’s somewhat par for the course that young people are not yet as financially stable or comfortable as older people more established in their careers. What’s concerning to me is that they are so disillusioned. They doubt that they’ll ever achieve the prosperity, or even the stability, that prior generations enjoyed.

Not only do most voters report profound pain points when it comes to supporting themselves and their families, most also perceive that someone, or something, is benefiting at their expense. They just don’t agree on who is to blame. Back in February of this year, I conducted a deep-dive poll about the economy and explored what voters believe are our greatest economic problems, priorities, and solutions.

Diagnosing A Rigged System

Left-leaning voters diagnosed the main problem plaguing our economy to be systemic inequality, with wealth concentrated at the very top. In this poll, I asked voters to choose from a list what they think are the biggest problems with our economy today. 76% of Democratic voters chose “wealth inequality between the 1% and everyone else.” These voters watch millionaires, billionaires, and corporations rig the rules in their favor and rake in the profits, all while regular people struggle more and more: to afford childcare, to buy a home, to pay back student loans. For these voters, perceiving that the whole system is rigged for corporations and the ultra-wealthy may simply outweigh any macroeconomic indicators of recovery. Just because things are “getting better” doesn’t mean they perceive the system is getting any fairer. While they’re trying not to spend their whole paycheck on groceries, they’re watching the ultra-rich dine out in extravagance. The reaction to the recent high-profile killing of a healthcare C.E.O. laid bare just how frustrated Americans are with a health insurance system that rejects their coverage claims and threatens to bankrupt them over medical bills while rewarding the C-suite executives to the tune of $10 million a year.

Right-leaning voters diagnosed a different systemic problem. When asked what they considered to be the biggest problems with our economy today, 65% of Republicans said “funding overseas wars instead of domestic priorities,” and 57% said “too many people getting government handouts.” I provided a list of demographic groups and asked voters to indicate which ones make the most use of government services. 48% of registered voters, including 82% of Republicans and 48% of Independents, chose “illegal immigrants,” the most common response overall (among Democrats, this figure was 12%). Throughout my research in 2024, in polling and 1:1 interviews, I’ve repeatedly heard voters express this belief, and a great deal of resentment along with it. They perceive that immigrants are receiving large amounts of American aid and thereby being elevated above American citizens in both wealth and importance. For these voters, macroeconomic improvements may have been overshadowed by record numbers of migrants at our southern border last year, and hefty U.S. aid packages to Ukraine and Israel. As they’re waiting to checkout at the grocery store using hard-earned money, they feel they’re being cut in line by undeserving shoppers with full carts who are then getting comped at the register.

So, What Do We Do?

The discourse is rife with “hot takes” about what went wrong for Democrats in this election and how best to fix it going forward, and one of the common arguments is that we should deemphasize so-called social issues and focus exclusively on an economically populist agenda. Not only would I dispute the two assumptions embedded in that argument – that Democrats are the party disproportionately focused on social issues, and that social issues are unrelated to people’s economic freedom and wellbeing – but I’d also argue that’s not a strategically viable solution because that’s not how voters think. They don’t assess these issues in isolation.

That’s also not what our opponent was offering. Trump didn’t exactly run a laser-focused campaign that focused narrowly on people’s economic woes and sidestepped the culture wars. Ultimately, the majority of voters chose the candidate who spoke to cultural resentments or anxieties and who made scapegoating immigrants a centerpiece not only of his campaign writ large, but his economic message. Last month, Trump vowed to enact a 25% tariff on all products imported from Mexico and Canada via Executive Order on January 20th, and noted the tariffs would “remain in effect until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country!”

I’d argue that simply leaning into an economic agenda and turning away from so-called social issues is a poor strategy because that’s not what led voters to Trump; what he offers is a narrative through-line that connects both. You are struggling financially because your government is not putting Americans like you first. Your government is giving other people–immigrants, foreign governments, international alliances–a blank check and leaving you out to dry. I will change all that.

This was a very hard message to counter. Not only is it compelling on its surface, but a rebuttal of “that’s xenophobic” or “the economy is doing really well, actually” is profoundly alienating. I don’t have neat and tidy solutions to the hole Democrats find ourselves in. In general, I’m wary of anyone peddling an easy solution, particularly before we even have final data from every state that helps us complete our assessment of what actually happened. But I believe our effort has to begin with an assessment of the story voters think we are telling them, and bring it closer in line with the story we want to tell them; about what’s wrong with America, what’s right with America, and how we are going to make their lives better.

Public opinion is, in a word, complex. Surface-level questions & analysis can give the illusion that voters have informed opinions and strongly held, coherent belief systems. But more often than not, public opinion is a vast web of loosely held and seemingly conflicted preferences. Voters’ minds have many gaps:

• Between their expressed principles (e.g. racial equality is good and important) and their willingness to endorse policies that would live up to those principles (e.g. affirmative action)

• Between one expressed preference (e.g. support for mass deportations) and another (e.g. but not for law-abiding people)

• Between what they believe about themselves (e.g. I am a careful, rational decision-maker) and what is true about human nature (we take many shortcuts based on heuristics, symbols, and yes, biases)

This is a newsletter geared towards demystifying what I often call “the why behind the what.” When public opinion data doesn’t push beyond a voter’s expressed preference (the “what”) to probe the deeper psychological motivations or attitudes beneath it (the “why”), they risk fundamentally misrepresenting the public’s views. As a political psychologist and pollster, excavating “the why behind the what” is the guiding framework in my work. While I am a pollster for Change Research, this newsletter consists solely of my personal views and interpretations.

Mind the Gap is meant to be a medium for exploring public opinion data, trends, and headlines through the lens of social psychology. What do people actually mean when they say “the economy” is in bad shape? Why do people embrace Social Security and Medicare, but not SNAP or unemployment? Why do people express support for a value but not the policies that would help us live those values?

If these types of questions pique your interest, you can subscribe to follow along. Welcome to Mind The Gap!

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