The wisdom of the people

 A few years ago, I had a post on questions on "how much trust and confidence do you have in the wisdom of the American people" from 1964 to 2016.  It's been asked a few times since then (as recently as last month), so I'll give the updated figures:

There's clearly been a decline since the 1960s, or even the early 21st century.  My original post just considered the means, but this one will look at educational differences in the 1964 survey and the two latest surveys for which individual-level data are available, August 2015 and March 2016 (all of them asked about "the wisdom of the American people when it comes to making political decisions."  I excluded blacks because I thought that their opinions might follow a different pattern, although it didn't turn out to make much difference.  The means, on a scale of 1-4 with higher numbers indicating more trust and confidence:

                         Not college grad            College Grad

9/1964                       2.93                           2.74

8/2015                       2.29                           2.33

3/2016                       2.29                           2.23

In 1964, people with a college degree had less trust and confidence in the wisdom of the people.  In 2015 and 2016, the differences by education were small and not statistically significant.  The t-value for the drop among college graduates between 2015 and 2016 was about 2.5, so there's some sign that their confidence declined during that time--the obvious reason would be the success of Donald Trump in the Republican primaries (by March 2016 he was the clear favorite to get the nomination).  Still, the major point is that there was a clear educational difference in 1964, but not in 2015-6.  

As it happened, there were some important parallels between 1964 and 2016--the Republicans had nominated (or were about to nominate) someone who was opposed by the party establishment and was thought to have some extreme ideas.  Journalistic accounts of Goldwater and Trump supporters were similar--they suggested that they were fanatical, new to politics, and of relatively low social standing.  So maybe the 1964 difference reflected an elite* reaction against Goldwater?  Apparently not:  support for Goldwater was higher among college graduates (45% vs. 27% among non-graduates).  There were also questions about how much you agreed with what the candidates stood for, and college graduates were more likely to say that they agreed with Goldwater.  Finally, there was a question about why you intended to vote for a candidate--you were enthusiastic, you were not enthusiastic but OK with him, or you didn't like the other candidate.  College graduates who supported Goldwater were more enthusiastic than non-graduates who did (and more enthusiastic than college graduates who supported Johnson).  So while Goldwater was unpopular, he wasn't especially unpopular with college graduates.  That is, if there was any loss of confidence because of the nomination of Goldwater it should have applied at least as strongly to people without a college degree. 

Why did the gap between college graduates and other people diminish or disappear?  I'll go back to a point I've made before:  despite what is often said, people of higher social standing have become more sensitive about seeming elitist, and less willing to say that they know better than other people.  Of course, the question I've talked about here isn't definitive, but all the evidence I've seen points that way. 

*And in 1964, only about 10% of American adults had graduated from college, so it was a more elite status than it is today.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

What could happen here?

 This is a post I've been meaning to write for a while.  The impetus was a column by Ross Douthat on October 5 called "The Once and Future Threat of Trump," which argued that he had been basically right in a column from 2020 called "There Will be No Trump Coup":  that even if Trump had been more organized and competent, he didn't have the institutional support he would need to pull off a coup.  Douthat said that this continued to be true, so Trump's "threat to constitutional norms is one of many percolating dangers in the United States today, not a singular danger that should organize all other political choices and suspend all other disagreements."   I think he is right in saying that the probability of a coup was, and continues to be, very low.  The reasons are a strong military tradition of political neutrality and an independent judiciary that operates on the basis of a large accumulation of legal precedent.  

Douthat also said that Trump didn't get much support from Republican elected officials:  "No statehouse leader proposed setting aside the popular vote, no state legislature put such a measure on the floor, no Republican governor threatened to block certification."   But he doesn't mention that Texas filed suit which asked (to quote Wikipedia):  "to temporarily withhold the certified vote count from these four states [Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Georgia]  prior to the Electoral College vote on December 14."  Seventeen other state attorneys general signed on to a brief supporting the suit, and a majority of the Republican members of the House of Representative (about 125) signed on to another one.  After the Supreme Court denied the suit and the Electoral College cast its votes, most Republican representatives, and several Senators, voted against "certifying" them on January 6.  So some Republican officials didn't go along with Trump, but others did.

The American electoral system (especially for Presidents) is very complex and provides many opportunities for grandstanding--making a statement that you can be pretty sure won't make a difference.  For example, the attorneys general undoubtedly knew that the Supreme Court would reject the suit, and the Republican representatives knew that the Democrats had enough votes to get the certification approved.   

The complexity of the system also means that there's no definite stopping point--if they put their minds to it, people can think of new ways to grandstand and pass things along to someone else (usually the courts).  So last time no state legislature tried to set aside the popular vote, but if the Democrats win narrowly in 2024, I'd be willing to bet that one will.  And after seeing how much heat Doug Ducey and Brian Kemp have taken, some Republican governor may decline to certify a Democratic win.  In either case, they could say (and maybe believe) that they're not really trying to overrule the vote, they're just raising questions.  The courts would probably reject these efforts, but at some point you might an unpredictable decision (especially in the state courts), so things might remain unsettled until almost the day of inauguration, or even after.  So elections could start becoming like votes to raise the debt ceiling, where we've gotten used to crises that are averted at the last minute.  I'm surprised that Douthat doesn't anticipate something like this, since it fits with his idea of decadence--a political system that is increasingly unable to do even basic things. 

Afterthoughts

 
Following up on a couple of points from recent posts:

1.  I noted that confidence in newspapers held steady or rose during the Trump years.  Confidence in TV news rose from 2016 to 2017, and then declined, but it's been declining pretty steadily since the 1990s.  Overall, nothing particularly unusual happened to confidence in the media during the Trump years, although " many observers (especially but not exclusively on the right) claim that people lost confidence in the media during the Trump years as many journalists moved away from their traditional efforts to appear neutral."  A few days ago, Ross Douthat had a column making exactly that claim:  "from his shocking November victory onward, much of the press adopted exactly the self-understanding that its critics are still urging as the Only Way to Stop Trump . . . the public’s trust in the national press declined during the Trump era."  My post used data from Gallup, and he links to data from Pew.  Do they point in different directions?  The Pew question is "how much, if at all, do you trust the information that comes from each of the following?"--answers are a lot, some, not too much, and not at all.  The Gallup questions are asked once a year, in May or June, and the Pew questions are asked at irregular intervals starting in 2016.  The Pew survey asks about national and local "news organizations"--here is a graph of the averages (higher numbers mean more trust):

No change from February 2016 to July 2019, and then a drop between July and November 2019.  The next survey was in June 2021, and it showed a drop from November 2019.  The timing doesn't fit Douthat's argument, which implies that there should have been an immediate drop starting when Trump took office (the second survey was in March 2017).  Also, Douthat specified the "national press," but trust in national and local news organizations also followed a very similar pattern (a correlation of .95).  That suggests that variations reflected a general trust factor (either real temporal variation or sampling variation), not a reaction to changes in national news coverage.  

2.  In recent years, the national Democratic party has united against any restrictions on abortion.  In my last post, I observed that this position is not very popular among the public:  in a recent survey, 15% said it should be legal in all cases during the second trimester and 35% said that it should be illegal in all; in the third trimester, the figures were 8% and 54%.  But when asked to choose between the Democrats and Republicans on abortion, more people favor the Democrats.  A 2019 poll by Marist College asked "Do you think the Democratic Party or the Republican Party would do a better job of dealing with the issue of abortion?":  46% said the Democrats and 33% the Republicans (the rest said they would be the same or that they were unsure).  Why?  Some of it may be the focus on Roe v. Wade:  many people seem to be under the impression that overturning it would mean a national ban on abortion.  The Marist poll had a question about general view of abortion, with the options of available any time (17%), only in the first six months (11%), only the first three months (22%), only rape, incest, or to save the life of the woman (28%), only to save the life (9%), or never (9%).  They also had a question about a candidate who "would appoint justices to the Supreme court to limit or overturn Roe vs. Wade":  options were would vote for, would vote for but with reservations, and would definitely not vote for.  A cross tabulation:

                         Would     With Reservations        Definitely not    Not sure

Always                8%                   7%                          79%                   6%

Six months          3%                 10%                          84%                   3%

Three months      5%                 18%                          63%                  13%

Rape, Incest       24%                 26%                          36%                  14%

Life only            47%                 14%                         19%                   20%

Never                 65%                   7%                         19%                     9%

Roe vs. Wade basically found that abortions should be allowed in the first six months, but most of the people who say that they should be limited to the first three months, and 36% of those who say they should be allowed only in the cases of rape, incest, or to save the life say that they would definitely not vote for a candidate who would appoint justices to overturn the decision.  But this raises the question of why so many people have a mistaken impression about a long-standing issue. 

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

More on abortion

 I've had several posts looking at opinions on abortion, as measured by questions on whether it should be legal in particular circumstances.  But there's another factor that may be important to people--how far advanced the pregnancy is.  Survey questions on abortion at different stages of pregnancy are less common than questions on circumstances, but I found some.  In 1975, Gallup asked "Do you think abortions should be legal under any circumstances, legal only under certain circumstances, or illegal in all circumstances?"  21% said legal under any circumstances, 53% under certain circumstances, and 23% illegal in all circumstances (the other 3% said they didn't know).  People who said that abortion should be legal under some or any circumstances were then asked parallel questions about abortion in the first three months, the second three months, and the final three months.  That question was never asked again, but in 2021 an Associated Press survey asked "I'd like to ask you about abortions during the three trimesters of pregnancy. Do you think abortion should be legal in all cases, legal in most cases, illegal in most cases, or illegal in all cases during...the first trimester, that is, the first three months of pregnancy?" with parallel questions about the second and third trimester.  If you put the two Gallup questions together and combine the two middle categories on the AP question, you can classify opinions into three categories:

First trimester          Legal       Sometimes     Illegal

1975                          24%              46%           25%

2021                          38%              45%           16%

Second                     Legal        Sometimes    Illegal

1975                          10%              36%            47%

2021                          15%              49%            35%

 

Third                        Legal       Sometimes     Illegal

1975                          6%               27%             63%

2021                          8%               37%             54%

This comparison shows increased support for legal abortion.  I think that the way that the question was asked in 1975 may account for some of the difference, but not all of it.  That is, most people answering the first question probably didn't spend time thinking about every possible contingency, so someone who said "illegal in all" with a general question might have been willing to make an exception if you asked directly about some condition.  But while this would be relevant to abortion in the first trimester, it seems less relevant to the second and certainly not to the third--that is, there are people who would allow abortions only if they are sufficiently early in the pregnancy, but nobody is in favor of abortions only if they are late in the pregnancy.  Despite the rise in support for legal abortion, even in 2021 a majority said that abortion should be completely illegal in the last trimester (and another 26% who said it should be "illegal in most cases").

Gallup also had a question asking "do you think abortion should be generally legal or generally illegal during the following stages of pregnancy" that was asked in 1996, 2003, and 2012:

 First               Legal        Illegal

1996                 64%         30%

2003                 66%         29%

2012                 61%         31%

Second          Legal         Illegal

1996                26%           65%

 2003               25%           68%

2012                 27%          64%

Third             Legal        Illegal  

1996                 13%         82%

  2003               10%         84%

  2012               14%          80%

No sign of a change.  Although I haven't looked systematically, I think the increase in support suggested by the first comparison probably happened in the 1970s and 1980s. 

 

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Keeping up the tradition

 I had a post on state differences in Covid rates around the beginning of September, another one around the beginning of October, and another around the beginning of November.  I wasn't planning on having another one, but then I read Bret Stephen's column this morning.  He said "Over the summer, as Covid cases started rising from their midyear lows, it became popular to blame Republicans for fueling the pandemic. The argument was that Covid had become a red-state scourge because of lower rates of mask-wearing and vaccination — along with high doses of vaccine misinformation — in places that went heavily for Donald Trump.  . . . It even seemed true for a while . . . But the virus has had a way of making fools of us all."  He didn't say the relation to partisan leanings had disappeared, but gave a few examples that seemed to point in that direction and said "let's end the partisan blame games.   They're pointless, divisive, and dumb."  

The correlations between Biden's share of the 2020 vote and Covid hospitalization rates at the end of the month:

Aug      -.42

Sept      -.63

Oct       -.51

Nov      -.25

The latest data:

As I've mentioned before, state rankings change quickly.  Current hospitalization rates are positively correlated with hospitalization rates one month ago (.56) but have no correlation with rates in late September and a negative correlation with rates in late August (-.39).  What if we take the sum of rates at the four times?

That's a correlation of -.71, stronger than the correlations at any one time.  Of course, it's not directly due to partisanship, but to differences in vaccination rates.  But state levels of vaccination have consistently been related to state differences in partisanship. Stephens suggests that the relationship between partisanship and vaccination is a matter of individual differences:  "people have needs and ideas that differ from ours," but they are at least partly (I would say "mostly") the result of the leadership from party elites.   And blaming political elites for policy failures is an important part of democracy.