Interruption

My last two posts were on polls of college student voting from the 1940s-70s.  I intended my next post to be on polls of faculty voting, but I found more information than I expected, so it will take some time to put it together, so this post will fill the gap.

Earlier this year, David Shor posted the following figure on Twitter and wrote "Explicit antisemitic attitudes are now much more common among young voters" 

This was surprising to me, so I looked for similar questions to see if they showed the same pattern.  In 2022, a Pew survey asked if your opinion of Jews was very favorable, somewhat favorable, neither favorable nor unfavorable, somewhat unfavorable, or very unfavorable.  It asked parallel questions about six other groups:  Evangelical Christians, Catholics, Mormons, Muslims, mainline Protestants, and atheists.  The data set didn't include exact age, but classified people into four groups:  18-29; 30-49;50-64; and 65 and up.  

The means by age group, with 5=very favorable, 4=somewhat favorable.....1=very unfavorable.

Although Jews got lower ratings from younger people, they were still the highest-rated group, as they were among all age groups.  Moreover, Catholics, Evangelical Christians, "mainline Protestants (such as United Methodists, Episcopalians, etc.," and Mormons also got lower ratings among younger people, and the slopes were as large or larger than the slopes for the rating of Jews.  

In the oldest group, 51.2% said they had a favorable view of Jews and 5.2 said unfavorable; in the youngest, it was 39.7% and 7.5%.  The Blue Rose question didn't include a "neither favorable nor unfavorable option," and if you allocate that in proportion that gives about 8% unfavorable in the oldest and 16% unfavorable in the youngest.  That's a smaller difference than the Blue Rose data, but still substantial.  However, the comparison with the other religions suggests that the favorable/unfavorable question is not a particularly useful measure of antisemitism.  Other surveys have tried to measure antisemitism by asking people if they agree with various stereotypes about Jews, and this seems like a more promising approach in principle, but those questions are less common.

How should the differences among age groups in favorability ratings be interpreted?  I would say it's a mix of two things:  younger age groups have less favorable views of religion in general, and more favorable about the two groups that groups that are outside the bounds of traditional American religious beliefs.**  If you just extrapolate, it seems that atheists and Muslims will soon be the highest-rated groups among younger people.  However, I don't think that will happen--instead, the ratings of atheists and Muslims will level off, and there will be a tendency for ratings of different groups to cluster around 3.0:  i.e., more people treating religion or lack of religion as a private choice, not for them to judge either way.

*I learned about it from a recent Substack post by Matthew Yglesias.

**"Traditional" in terms of the memory of people who are alive today.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

College electors, part 2

 My last post said that there were large moves towards the Democrats at several elite universities between 1960 and 1964.  According to the polls, in 1960 the Republican vote share was higher at Yale, Princeton, and Stanford than it was in the general public; in 1964, it was lower.  What about other universities?  The Daily Illini led an effort to poll students at Big Ten universities in 1960 and 1964.  The results  (I just show Republican share, since they reported the two-party vote--they don't mention any significant write-ins).  

                       1960      1964
Illinois            52%        36%
Indiana           63%           
Iowa               58%          42%
Michigan        54%         
Michigan St.                   30%
Minnesota                       45%
Northwestern  65%         48%
Ohio St.           64%         39%
Wisconsin        56%

I found results for the University of North Carolina to represent the South.  In 1960, a poll found 52% for Kennedy and 42% for Nixon, with the rest undecided.  In 1964, it was 57% Johnson, 37% Goldwater, 5% write-ins, and 1% undecided.   Those were close to the overall results for the state in those elections (52% for Kennedy in 1960 and 56% for Johnson in 1964).  The swings at Ohio State, Iowa, and Illinois were similar to the swings in their states and considerably smaller than the swings at the elite colleges.  

 One of the stories on the 1964 Stanford poll breaks it down by class:  support for Goldwater was 37% among freshmen, 31% among sophomores, and 22% among juniors and seniors.  It also had information on parents' political preferences:  51% said both parents were Republican, 20% that both were Democrats, the the rest that the parents were independents or had different political preferences.  Taken together, these points suggest that political preferences changed while at college.  

I also ran across a few surveys of faculty, which I'll talk about in my next post.  

College electors

In a review of a biography of William F. Buckley, Louis Menand wrote: "In 1948, eighty-eight per cent [of Yale students] supported Thomas E. Dewey for President; four per cent backed Harry Truman."  Although the New Yorker has a reputation for thorough fact-checking, that seemed unlikely to me--you rarely find a margin that large in any group.   I looked in the archives of the Yale Daily News and found they reported a survey of Yale students which found 68% for Dewey, 21% for Truman, 7.5% for Norman Thomas (Socialist), 2.5% for Henry Wallace, and 1% for Strom Thurmond.*  The story said that graduate students were evenly divided--34% for Dewey and 34% for Truman--but there's no mix of 34-34 and 88-4 that produces 68-21 for the total.  By itself, this is just a piece of trivia, but the changing relationship between college education and vote is an important issue, so I while I was at it I looked for data on subsequent elections.  Procedures were not uniform, so there's some extra margin of error, but here they are:   

                R         D
1948      68%      21%   7.4% Thomas  2.5% Wallace 1% Thurmond
1952      67%      33%
1956      71%      29%
1960      64%      33%
1964      30%      70%
1968      27%      45%    11% neither   9% undecided
1972      12%      76%

I've written about similar surveys at Harvard before.  Harvard students were more favorable to the Democrats, but showed the same general pattern:  mostly Republican in the 1930s and 1940s and heavily Democratic since the 1960s.  

At Princeton:  

                 R          D
1948       72%        8%       8% Thomas   1.5% Wallace  10%  Thurmond
1952       73%      27%     
1956       73%      27%
1960       71%      29%
1964       27%      66%
1968       28%      40%      11%  Gregory   4% Wallace    4% Paulsen
1972      (35%      65%)

Princeton traditionally had a lot of students from the South, which explains Thurmond's strength in 1948.  In 1968, comedian Dick Gregory was on the ballot as candidate of the Peace and Freedom party, getting 0.1% of the national vote.  Pat Paulsen was another comedian who was not on the ballot but was running a joke campaign.  In 1972, there was a story about a poll, but it didn't give the totals, so I combined the numbers they gave to get an estimate.  Democratic support was consistently lower at Princeton than at Harvard or Yale, but it had a similar swing in the 1960s.  

Moving outside the Ivy League, here are figures for Stanford:

                R          D
1948       68%      10%       4% Thomas   8% Wallace  
1952       68%      28%     
1956       No data
1960       57%      36%      5% Pauling
1964       30%      70%
1968       24%      33%      18%  McCarthy 2.5% Wallace
1972       23%      67%

"Pauling" is the chemist Linus Pauling, who was not a candidate but was included on the student ballot.   He was an opponent of nuclear testing and supporter of nuclear disarmament, so he could be regarded as a leftist option.  Stanford shows the same pattern as the others.  

The long-term movement from Republicans to Democrats is no surprise, but the timing is interesting.  Rather than a gradual shift, there was a sudden swing between 1960 and 1964.  In 1968, there were a lot of protest or "none of the above" votes, but the 1972 distribution was similar to what it had been in 1964.  That is, in less than a decade, the campuses went from solidly Republican to solidly Democratic.  Presumably the change in 1964 was a reaction against Goldwater and/or his supporters, not a positive attraction to Johnson.  That raises a couple of questions.  First, how much difference did the candidates make?  If the Republicans had nominated different candidates (say William Scranton in 1964 and George Romney in 1968), would the eventual change have been smaller or would it just have been more spread out?  Second, why didn't Republicans make more effort to win back the universities, especially the "elite" ones?  Political analysis wasn't as data-driven back in the 1970s, but this change was big enough to be visible without high-quality data or elaborate analysis.  College graduates were a minority, but still a substantial group, and one that was clearly going to grow.  Moreover, college graduates, and particularly graduates of elite colleges, have extra political weight--they are more likely to vote, donate money, appear in the media, and run for office.  But I don't have the impression that Republicans ever made much effort to reverse or even contain the shift.  

*I've said this before, but I'll say it again:  It's remarkable that online editions of newspapers and magazines haven't developed reasonable conventions about including links to sources.  The New Yorker didn't have any link for the 88-4 numbers, but it did have a link for "Harry Truman"--another New Yorker story about his general impact. 

Transformed by Trump?

 The New York Times recently had an analysis of changes in county-level voting between 2012 and 2024.  As they summarized it, Trump's victory in 2024 was "the culmination of continuous gains by Republicans in much of the country each time he has run for president, a sea of red that amounts to a flashing warning sign for [the] Democratic Party."  Although there were a lot of interesting things in the story, I think there was a basic problem with their analysis.  They looked at what they called "triple-trending" counties:  that is, counties that had moved in the same direction politically in 2016, 2020, and 2024.  There were about 1,500 counties that moved towards Trump in all three elections, and only 57 that moved towards the Democrats in all three.  Of course, most of the Trump-trending counties had small populations, but some were large, and they had a combined population of over 40 million, compared to 8 million for the Democratic-trending counties.  

The problem is the focus on the "trend."  In 2012, Obama got 51% of the vote and Romney got 47.2%, for a Democratic lead of 3.8%.  The Democratic lead was 2.1% in 2016, 4.5% in 2020, and -1.5% (48.2% to 49.7%) in 2024.  So in the nation as a whole, the changes from one election to the next were -1.7,+2.4, and -6.0, and the change from 2012 to 2024 was -5.3.  Suppose you had a county that was tied in 2012, then was -1.5 in 2016, -3.0 in 2020, and -4.5 in 2024 and another county which at zero in 2012, -20 in 2016, -17.5 in 2020, and -23.5 in 2024.   The first one would qualify as triple-trending and the second would not, but the second is clearly the one that was more affected by Trump.  

Those are just hypothetical examples--what about real counties?  The article didn't include a list of triple-trending counties, but I identified a few.  One (Pike County, Ohio) was on a list of counties that have moved most strongly Republican over 2012-24.  I haphazardly chose five (Hudson, NJ; Cuyahoga, OH; Palm Beach, FL; Clark, NV; and Grant, WI) to represent different parts of the country.  A few days later, another Times story mentioned the small town of Kennett, MO and said  it was a strongly pro-Trump area, so looked up its county (Dunklin) and found it qualified.  The figures show the Democratic margins in presidential elections since 1972:

Dunklin, Grant, and Pike Counties all moved strongly towards the Republicans in 2016.  They continued moving Republican in 2020 and 2024, but if you were to pick the election that stood out it would be 2016--the first one that Trump was on the ballot.  Trump clearly did change voting patterns in these counties.  

    

Hudson, Clark, Cuyahoga, and Palm Beach are different.  None of them had particularly large changes in 2016.  Palm Beach, Clark, and especially Hudson had large shifts towards the Republicans in 2024, but if you want to explain that, the natural place to look is at something unique to 2024.

Another way to look at it is to plot the margin in a county against the margin in the national vote.  For Pike:

The three Trump elections clearly stand out.  For Hudson:

The Trump elections don't stand out.  I won't repeat the figures, just say that the Trump elections also stand out for Dunklin and (less strongly) Grant, but not for the others.

I'm not just making the obvious point that "triple-trending" Republican counties aren't all the same--I'm saying that they don't represent a Trump effect, even in a rough sense.  If a county moved strongly towards the Republicans the first time Trump was on the ballot and stayed there the next two times he was on the ballot, then it's reasonable to think that he had an effect, even if it followed the national trend and moved back a little in 2020.  But there are lots of things that could produce a trend over those elections (especially in fast-growing counties, where newcomers may have different political inclinations).  Trump's presence on the ballot was a constant in 2016, 2020, and 2024, so it's not clear why it should produce a trend.  You could say that he was something of an unknown quantity in 2016, so he had more effect as people got to know him better.  But that wouldn't produce a difference between 2020 and 2024.  

My explanation of the difference in the number of Democratic and Republican "triple-trending" counties is that it's a combination of two things:  increasing association between population and Democratic share of the vote in 2016 and 2020 (it stayed about the same from 2020 to 2024) and a larger overall vote shift between 2020 and 2024 than between 2016 and 2024.  The first means that a lot of small counties moved Republican in 2016 and 2020; the second means that fewer counties (of all sizes) bucked the national trend in 2024 than in 2020.  If you look closely at the geographical distribution of recent shifts, there are probably some implications for the electoral college, although it's not clear which party they would favor.  But they don't have any significant implications for the popular vote.

Mood Indigo, part 2

In December, I had a post criticizing the idea that school closures during the Covid years were imposed by "elites." I observed that the public was divided on the issue, and that most people were satisfied with the way their local schools were handling it.  A few days ago, Andrew Gelman discussed that post on his blog, so this one is some additional thoughts suggested by the comments.  

Here's some more information on public opinion.  On several occasions, a Fox News poll asked what the local public schools should do in the upcoming term:  "open fully in-person as usual"; "open in-person with social distancing and masks," "combine in-person and remote learning," or "be fully remote."

                     usual       distancing    combined    remote

July 2020       15%         21%             31%             25%
May 2021*     51%        27%             19%                1%
Aug  2021*    36%         33%             21%               7%
Jan    2022      28%         27%             30%             14%

The two marked with an asterisk just offered the first three options--"fully remote" was a volunteered response.  Data on actual practices in the 100 largest school districts can be found here.  I haven't looked at them closely, but it appears that in January 2022, only about 5 of the largest 100 school districts were fully remote, and about 15 required masks.  

The inspiration for my original post was a column by Nate Silver called "The expert class is failing, and so is Biden’s presidency."  He began by saying that "the expert class" was responsible for "the response to September 11 — the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars . . . the financial crisis and the bank bailouts. . . . Then the pandemic: what was supposed to be a triumph of management for a technocratic elite instead wound up as a worst-of-all-worlds scenario . . .  massive inflation, which was supposed to be a thing of the past."  But decisions on how to respond September 11, the financial crisis, and Covid were made by elected officials, not by an "expert class."  The decisions may have been influenced by experts, but the defining feature of expertise is that it's specialized, so that experts on the Middle East and experts on macroeconomics don't form a class with a common outlook.  Moreover, extent of expert influence differed from one case to another:  on the financial crisis, the Bush administration followed expert advice, but on the response to September 11, it seemed to decide what to do and then assemble expert opinion in support of the decision.  On Covid, I don't think expert opinion had that much effect either way:  from an early point, the basic Republican position was that the threat wasn't all that serious, and partly in response, the basic Democratic position was that it was very serious.  Here I can appeal to some data:  a CNN survey conducted May 7-10, 2020 asked "Which comes closer to your view about where the U.S. stands in the coronavirus outbreak:  the worst is behind us or the worst is yet to come?"   Republicans favored "the worst is behind us" by 68%-28%; Democrats favored "the worst is yet to come" by 73%-24.  As a result, on policy it came down to Republicans being in favor of doing less and Democrats in favor of doing more.   So overall, I think Silver's analysis made the mistake of ignoring the biggest factor--partisanship--in order to focus on something that was at most a secondary factor.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Separate ways, part 2

 A few weeks ago, I had a post about liberal and conservative confidence in medicine, science, and education.  There was a gradual divergence starting in the 1990s, which accelerated in the last few year.  This post will look at confidence in other institutions.  The figures will show the gap between confidence among self-rated liberals and conservatives:  positive values mean conservatives have more confidence than liberals, negative mean that liberals have more confidence than conservatives.  First, "the executive branch of the federal government."

This operates like a measure of presidential approval:  liberals have more confidence when a Democrat is president, conservatives have more when a Republican is president, and the swings have increased pretty steadily.

Next, the institutions I talked about in my previous post:

I show smoothed estimates in order to give a general sense of the trends (although for some reason the lines don't show up well).  

Next, major companies, banks and financial institutions, and organized labor.

The gaps generally declined from the 1970s to 1990s and have grown since them.  For business, the gap is now about as large as it was in the 1970s; for finance and labor, the gaps are somewhat bigger.  

For the press and TV, the gaps grew gradually until recently, when they started to grow more rapidly, with a big jump in the Trump/Biden years.  

For organized religion, the gap has grown steadily since the 1970s.  For the military, it declined from the 1970s to 1980s and has grown since then.  It's now a little larger than it was in the 1970s. (I put these two together simply to reduce the number of separate figures, not because I think they have anything in common).

 

Finally, two other parts of the federal government:  Congress and the Supreme Court.  

There is one big outlier:  the Supreme Court in 2022, when liberal confidence dropped sharply, presumably because of the abortion decision (I think the shift from 2021 to 2022 is the largest year-to-year change in the data).  Before then, there was a gradual shift from liberals generally being more confident to conservatives being more confident, which makes sense given the ideological drift of the court.  For Congress, there's not much trend, but the year to year changes seem reasonable given what was happening.  

What's the overall picture?  Historically, many people didn't understand the terms "liberal" and "conservative," or interpreted them in idiosyncratic ways.  Understanding has grown over the years, so the match between the labels and people's views on specific issues has grown:  for example, people who like organized labor and distrust business are more likely to call themselves liberals.  This development would mean that the gaps would tend to gradually increase, so I'll focus on the departures from the general trends.  First, there have been some sharp increases in the last decade or so--this is important, but not surprising.  Second, between the 1970s and about 1990, the gaps in confidence for business, finance, labor, and the military all declined--that is, there are some cases of "depolarization."  This happened despite the apparent shift of the Republican party to the right under Reagan.  Why?  In a previous post, I suggested that the Democrats became less critical of the military.  Although I'm less sure, you can also make a case that the Democrats became less critical of business and less closely aligned with organized labor.  The way the story is told now, this didn't happen until Bill Clinton came along, but Clinton was just the most successful example of a type that had been around for a while.

and why is there so much HATE?

A negative view of universities, especially "elite" universities, has been part of Republican politics for a long time, but has intensified in the last few years.  Is this in line with public opinion?  A couple of weeks ago, a Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos Poll asked people about their views of various policies and actions of the Trump administration, including their dispute with Harvard.  The figure shows the percent approving of different policies among college graduates and non-graduates (restricting it to non-Hispanic whites." 

 

The diagonal line represents equal approval among graduates and non-graduates.  Most of the points are above the line, meaning that they have more support among non-graduates.  However, the pattern of relative approval is similar in both groups--the policies that are more popular among college graduates are the same ones that are popular among non-graduates.  The question about Harvard is "The Trump administration is trying to take a greater role in Harvard University’s hiring of faculty, admission of students, and operation of its academic programs. Harvard says this intrudes on its freedom as a private university. Whose side do you take on this issue, the Trump administration’s or Harvard’s?"  42% of non-graduates and 32% of graduates said that that they took the Trump administration's side, making it one of the less popular polices.  You could object that the question was slanted because it summarized Harvard's objections but not the administration's rationale, but another question asked about "increasing the federal government’s role in how private universities operate."  Support for that was even lower, at 34% and 24%, ranking above only "reducing federal funding for medical research."    

Turning to the relatively popular policies, three of them involved immigration:  general handling of the issue, efforts to deport undocumented immigrants, and sending suspected gang members to a prison in El Salvador.  The other was "trying to end efforts to increase diversity in the government and private workplaces."  The educational gaps were relatively large for all of these--that is, they were particularly popular among non-graduates.  

Two of the questions are notable for having a small educational gap.  One was shutting down the department of Education, which actually got less support among non-graduates.  The other was "cutting back environmental regulations on oil and gas drilling," which got 44% approval among non-graduates and 41% among graduates.  

Many observers say that working-class resentment of educated "elites" has been a major factor in Trump's success.  I think that the reality is that most people don't pay much attention to elite universities, and to the extent that they do, they are more positive than negative.  The attacks on universities are a matter of Republican elites following their own inclinations rather than public opinion.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Getting the wrong idea

 In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Mitch Daniels said that higher education "has failed to deliver value: Its prices rocketed upward even as its rigor, quality and the marketplace value of its degrees eroded."  Rigor and quality are matters of judgment, but the marketplace value of college degrees can be measured, and over the last 50 years it has increased substantially.  But Daniels was president of Purdue University from 2013 to 2022, so you might expect him to be informed about the latest trends--maybe it has declined in recent years?  I looked up the median earnings of wage and salary earners with a high school diploma and no college and wage and salary earners with a bachelor's degree and computed the ratio:

It increased rapidly from 1979 (the first year for which data was available) until the early 1990s and more slowly since then.  Looking more closely, it's been roughly constant since about 2010.  But there's no period in which it has "eroded."  

The bachelor's degree group includes people with advanced degrees.  So maybe there's been "degree inflation"--people discover that their BA isn't worth much, so they go on to get a master's or professional degree?  Since 2000, there is data for people with a BA only--the next figure compares the ratios for BA only to BA and above to high school only.  

Almost the same:  the payoff to a college degree has not declined.  

What do people think about the value of a college degree?  In late 2023, a Pew survey asked "Thinking about the cost of getting a four-year college degree today, would you say it is worth it, even if someone has to take out loans in order to attend, worth it, but only if someone doesn't have to take out loans in order to attend, or not worth it?"  Among Republicans 19% said worth it, 41% worth it only if without loans, and 38% not worth it; among Democrats, it was 26%. 54% and 19%.  That question was only asked once, but in 1997 a survey asked "A college education can now cost on average from $7,000 to $18,000 a year. Do you think a person gets enough out of a college education to justify what they might pay for it?"  The difference by party was small (Democrats 52-36%, Republicans 49-39% and not statistically significant.  In 2015, there a survey of parents of children under 18 asked "how important is it to you that your child earns/children earn a college degree--extremely important, very important, somewhat important, or not too important?"  Among Democrats, it was 49%, 31%, 16%, and 3%; among Republicans, 36%, 31%, 22%, and 8%.  There was another question on how important it was for the child to be financially independent, and there was no partisan difference on that, suggesting that Republican parents had less confidence that a college degree would help to achieve that.  

So it seems that the gap between Republicans and Democrats on the value of a college education opened up before Trump and the years of "peak wokeness" in the late 2010s and early 2020s (also see this post).As far as why, I don't have any definite evidence, but think it was driven by Republican elites (like Mitch Daniels, who was governor of Indiana before he became president of Purdue).  I offered a possible reason for their increasingly negative views of higher education in a post from 2013.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Separate ways

 A few days ago, Andrew Gelman observed that views on scientific authority have become more politically polarized in over the last few decades.  This post will take a closer look at the timing.  The General Social Survey has a series of questions of the form "as far as the people running these institutions are concerned, would you say you have a great deal of confidence, only some confidence, or very little confidence at all in them."  One of the institutions they ask about is "the scientific community."  The average among self-rated liberals and conservatives (I leave moderates out in order to make the figure easier to read), with higher numbers indicating more confidence:  

The next figure shows the size of the gap (liberal minus conservative).  

There was no consistent difference in the 1970s and 1980s, but a gap emerged in the 1990s and grew gradually for several decades (see this paper by Gordon Gauchat for a detailed account), before growing dramatically in the last few years (the four most recent surveys are 2016, 2018, 2021, and 2022). 

The GSS also asked about "medicine."  The liberal and conservative means:  

No consistent difference until the last few surveys, when a substantial gap has emerged.  

The GSS also asks about confidence in education.  The liberal and conservative means:

The pattern is similar to "the scientific community":  a difference emerging in the 1990s and then growing gradually before increasing dramatically in the last few years.  

This pattern is not universal:  for example, the gap in confidence in business has been pretty constant since the 1970s, and the gap in confidence in organized labor has grown gradually.  The obvious explanation for the recent growth with science, medicine, and education is the response to Covid.  Will it persist or will things shift back to where they were previously?  There was another round of the GSS in 2024; the data will be released soon, which will at least provide the beginnings of an answer.  

Postscript

 In my last post, I forgot to mention that in 2004 they asked whether American trade policy towards other countries was fair or unfair.  People consistently rated American policy towards them as more fair than their policy towards us, but there were some differences in the judgments regarding different countries:  

The more fair people saw a country's policy towards the US, the more fair they saw our policy towards it.  As I mentioned in my previous post, most people have no experience they can draw on to make these judgments, so I think it's just general feeling about whether we are in a cooperative or antagonistic relationship with them.  

The survey also asked about American trade policy towards "poor countries":  51% said it was fair, 36% unfair.  That is considerably less fair than perceived policy towards the other countries:  it is equal to the lowest value on the y-axis.  They didn't ask about poor countries' policies to the United States.  If you extrapolated from the numbers here, you would say their policies must be seen as highly unfair to the United States.  But I don't think they would follow that pattern:  rather, to some extent people figure that rich and powerful countries will mistreat poor countries.  There's some evidence of that in the figure: of the countries included, Mexico would be seen as the weakest economically (China's per-capita GDP was smaller, but it was already seen as an economic power because of the combination of a large population and rapid growth).   And Mexico is below the line, meaning that American trade policy towards it was seen as less fair than would be expected given their perceived policy towards us. 

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Totally unfair

Sometimes Donald Trump has said that tariffs are good in themselves and other times he has said that they're just a bargaining chip to get other countries to reduce their trade barriers--that he's working towards free trade.  The one constant is that he believes that other countries have treated us unfairly.  Between 1987 and 2018, there have been a number of survey questions asking if various countries have "fair or unfair trade policies toward the United States."  The list of countries differs, but Canada, Europe*, Japan, Mexico, China, and South Korea have been included pretty frequently.  The figure shows the log of the ratio of "fair" to "unfair" responses (positive numbers on the y-axis mean more people see them as fair; negative mean that more see them as unfair):

Canada is seen most favorably, then Europe, then Mexico and Korea (and India, which was asked about a couple of times), with China at the bottom.  Views of Japan's policy have become substantially more favorable--from 25% fair and 65% unfair in 1987 to 55% fair and 33% unfair in 2018.  South Korea and Europe also seem to have moved upward, while Mexico and China may have moved downward.

The next figure shows the average perceived fairness, adjusted for the nations included in each round (ie, the year effects from a year+nation model). 

It has been higher in the 21st century than in the 1980s and 1990s, although it dropped substantially in 2018.  Unfortunately, the questions weren't asked between 2012 and 2017, so we don't know what people thought during the rise of Trump, and haven't been asked since 2018.  However, the fact that perceived unfairness has been lower in the 21st century--despite the "China shock," the post-2008 recession, and Trump's rhetoric--is important.

On the national differences, most people don't have any direct personal experience on which to base a judgment, so how do they decide?**  In some cases, like Japan in the 1990s and China more recently, there is substantial media coverage.  But the trade policies of Europe, Canada, and South Korea don't generally get much media attention.  An obvious possible influence is general cultural affinity.  Another one is suggested by the upward trends for South Korea and Japan:  people view low prices with suspicion--they figure that someone must be doing something unfair in order to offer them.  So countries that are seen as competing on the basis of quality are viewed more favorably than those that are seen as competing on the basis of price.   

*Under different names:  "Western Europe," then "the Common Market," and more recently "the European Union"

**Don't know answers averaged 13%.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Motes and beams

Starting in May 2020, the Fox News poll asked "do you plan to get a vaccine shot against coronavirus when a vaccine becomes available, or not?"  Once a vaccine became available, they asked people if they had received it; if not, they asked if they intended to.  The figure shows the responses broken down by party.  Before the vaccine became available, it's the log of the ratio of intend/don't intend (ie, omitting don't knows); after, it's the log of the ratio of have/don't intend to (ie, omitting haven't but intend to and haven't and not sure).  

Before the vaccine was available, the only substantial variation among Democrats was that intention was lower in September 2020--the ratio in December 2020 was just a little larger than it had been in May (68%-17% in May and 75%-16% in December).  For Republicans, there was a drop between May and August, and it stayed pretty much constant after that point.  The ratio was somewhat lower in December than it had been in May (54%-29% in May and 49%-39% in December).  Once the vaccine was available, the ratio increased for both--that is, more people got the vaccine than had said they would--but it increased more for Democrats.  In the last survey (August 2021) 84% of Democrats said they had gotten the vaccine and 4% said they they didn't intend to; among Republicans it 56% said they had and 29% that they didn't intend to.  So there was a gap from the beginning, but it grew during 2020 and grew even more after the vaccine became available.  Of course, there's no way to be sure why it grew, but it's reasonable to think that it was because many leading Republican politicians played along with anti-vaccine sentiment.  

The partisan difference in vaccination rates was widely noticed at the time, but hasn't gotten much attention in the five-year retrospectives on Covid.  For example, this  interview with Stephen Macedo, Professor of Politics at Princeton and co-author of a new book on the response to Covid, spends time on school closures, "lockdowns," and dismissal of the lab leak hypothesis, criticizes Democratic governors for following blindly following "elite institutions" and the "laptop class", and praises Ron DeSantis as an example of political leadership: "he got himself informed, and I think he made a sound decision. I don’t know of others who did the same in such a high-profile way."  What about vaccinations?  Macedo acknowledges that "Morbidity from COVID trended upward in Republican states as compared with Democratic states only after vaccines became widely available."  But this point is made in passing and there's no discussion of whether anyone has any responsibility for the trend.  The language is also oddly abstract:  "morbidity trended upward" rather than "more people died" (the language in the rest of the interview was generally clear and straightforward).  

At the moment, it seems like liberals are inclined to think about what their side has done wrong, while conservatives are inclined to think about what the other side (ie liberals) has done wrong.  I don't think this tendency is universal, but the result of a combination of historical circumstances, the most recent being Trump's re-election.  But whatever the source, it has led to a strange blind spot in histories of Covid.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Which way is up?

 A few days ago, the New York Times printed a discussion among David Brooks, Ross Douthat, David French and Bret Stephens.  The moderator, Patrick Healy, started off by saying "more registered voters think America is on the right track than at any point since 2004, according to a new NBC News poll."  It's not actually the highest since 2004 (I think NBC News was just counting their own polls), but it's definitely above average.  In the latest NBC News poll, 44% said the country was going in the right direction and 54% said it was on the wrong track.  I have  recorded results from about 100 surveys that asked that question between 1971 and 2022 and the median was about 35% right direction and 59% wrong track.  The figure below shows results from 2024-2025:

Blue dots are before the election, red dots are after the election but before Trump's inauguration, and green dots are after the inauguration.  There was little or no trend before the election and not much change after the election, but since January 11 the "right direction" numbers have been high--what's more, they seem to be rising.  Trump's approval ratings, in contrast, have been declining.  

How to you reconcile these different patterns?  The New York Times columnists didn't really try--they seemed to assume that "right direction" was equivalent to strong approval and went on to talk about why Trump has a lot of dedicated supporters.  But if you look at the whole period since 1971, the correlation between presidential approval and "right direction" isn't very strong:  for example, Obama had higher approval ratings than Trump, a lot of enthusiastic supporters, but averaged  only 36%-58% in the right direction/wrong track question.   I can think of two possibilities.  One is that "right direction" is a combination of presidential approval and beliefs about social and economic conditions, and that Republican beliefs about social and economic conditions are more influenced by partisanship than Democratic beliefs are (as Paul Krugman has claimed).  That is, the plus factor of Republicans turning around and thinking conditions are good is bigger than the minus factor of Democrats turning and thinking conditions are bad.  The other is that there's a third factor, which is the extent to which a president is able to implement his agenda.  That is, if the president is meeting a lot of opposition, someone who approves of the president might say that the country is on the wrong track.  This account might help to explain why the "right track" is not just relatively high but rising--Trump has been able to get things done.   That is, almost everyone who approves of Trump will be happy with the direction of the country.  In contrast, under Obama or Trump I, there were more people who approved of the president but were frustrated because he wasn't getting his way.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Where the ducks are?

Since the 2024 election, a lot of people have said that the way for the Democrats to win is to move towards the center.   A few days ago, Thomas Edsall had a column in which said it would be hard to do that, and they might not gain many votes even if they did.   I think he made a strong case on the first point, but not on the second.  Edsall started by observing that in the 1990s, 55% of Democrats had not attended college and 21% were college graduates, and now the numbers have reversed:  25% no college and 45% college graduates.  He then said "These widely recognized changes in levels of educational attainment have coincided with an ideological shift."  In 1994, 25% of Democrats said they were conservative, 48% said they were moderate, and 25% said they were liberal; in 2024, it was 9%, 34%, and 55%.  

It's true that the educational shift "coincided" with an ideological shift, but the way he puts it suggests that the educational shift caused the ideological shift.  Here is the correlation between party (strong Democrat.... Strong Republican), and ideology (extremely liberal....extremely conservative) in the GSS:

It's consistently higher among college graduates, so the change in educational composition has made some difference.  But it's increased in all educational groups:  the correlation among people with no college today is about as large as the correlation among college graduates was in the 1970s.  But this just involves what people call themselves:  what if we look at opinions?  The GSS also has a question that starts "Some people think that the government in Washington is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and private businesses. Others disagree and think that the government should do even more to solve our country's problems" and asks people to put themselves on a five-point scale.  This is a pretty good measure of conservative vs. liberal principles.  

It/s also increased for all educational groups, but the increase is generally slower than the party/ideology correlation.

Finally, here's the correlation between self-rated ideology and views on the scope of government:

Again, an upward trend for all educational groups, but even smaller (especially for people without college degrees).  

So it seems that some of the "ideological shift" is just a matter of people learning the correct ideological label for their party.  The rising association between ideology and party also has implications for Republicans and independents as well as Democrats.  According to the GSS, in the 1970s 20% of Republicans described themselves as liberals, 35% moderates, and 46% conservatives; in the Trump era (2018-22) it was 5%, 27%, and 68%.  But as Democrats became more liberal and Republicans became more conservative, independents became more moderate:  they went from 28/45/27 in the 1970s to 16/64/20 in the Trump era.  Another way to look at it is that moderate independents went from 6% of the population in the 1970s to 10% in the Obama era (2008-16) to 14% in the Trump era.  This suggests that the gains to moderation might actually be larger than before--there are more people who are completely up for grabs.  

Dictatorship of The Donald?

 A few weeks ago, I had a post on the relationship between people's main source of news and their opinions on three questions--whether Trump's victory in 2024 was legitimate, whether Biden's victory in 2020 was legitimate, and whether there was fraud in the 2024 election.  I reduced those three variables to two--% thinking Trump's victory was legitimate minus  % thinking Biden's was; and % thinking Trump's victory was legitimate plus % thinking Biden's was + % thinking that there was not widespread fraud in 2024.  The first can be thought of as Democratic vs. Republican orientation and the second as general confidence in or cynicism about the political process.  There was no consistent difference between consumers of new and traditional media in Democratic vs. Republican orientation, but consumers of all the new media sources were high in cynicism.  

The survey also contained the following question: "A dictator is a leader who has total power over a country, with no checks and balances. Do you think (Donald) Trump will try to rule as a dictator or not?"  Overall, 40% said he would, 41% that he wouldn't, and 19% weren't sure.  Breaking that down by reported source of news:

The x-axis shows the average confidence/cynicism score for audiences of the different sources; new media outlets are in blue and the traditional ones are in red.  People who got their news from new media sources didn't think it was very likely that he would try to become a dictator.  Of course, views are also related to Democratic/Republican orientation.  I adjusted for this got the following figure:

The audiences that were more cynical (Trump not legitimate plus Biden not plus fraud in 2024) were less likely to think that Trump would try to rule as a dictator.  Another way to say this is that if you regress percent thinking that Trump would try to rule as a dictator on Democratic/Republican and confident/cynical orientation, both had strong and about equal effects, but confidence rather than cynicism goes with belief that Trump would try to rule as a dictator, which is the opposite of what I would have predicted.  Why do we have this relationship?  I would say that cynicism is associated with a sense that this is all "just politics":  people said that about Biden, Obama, Bush.... so there's no reason to be especially worried now.  

Going back to the issue of new versus traditional media, I think this is the main problem with the new media:  not that it has a bias towards the right, but that it leads to a sense of confusion and doubt.  Or putting it another way, whatever their faults, the traditional media provide a structure for interpreting the news and have some kind of agreement about more and less reliable sources.  

Note: this is all about the average views of groups defined by reported source of news, since I don't have the individual-level data.  Of course, this isn't necessarily the same as the individual-level relationship, but I think it's still meaningful in this case.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Getting tired of winning

There have been a lot of news stories about Donald Trump since he took office, but I don't recall seeing many about his approval ratings.  I looked up surveys in the Roper Center's iPoll database and calculated net approval (approve-disapprove):

I was primarily interested in questions about "the way he is handling his job as president," but before his inauguration there were a few about how he was handling the transition and about his first term, so I show them too.  Those were all positive, and his ratings for the second term started out positive, but there seems to have been a steady decline, and all of the surveys in February found more disapproval than approval.  

A more comprehensive collection is maintained by 538:  it includes about 60 polls with the approval question, while the Roper Center has only 10.  Again, there is a downward trend.  

.

I did some regressions of the net approval rating on time in days*:

                 estimate   se
iPoll         -.35         (.095)
538          -.32          (.071)
538w       -.30          (.071)
538r         -.24          (.049)

The 538 collection rates the quality of different survey organizations, so I did a regression with the  cases weighted by quality (538w).  I also did one adding dummy variables for each survey organization, which amounts to basing the estimates differences among surveys taken by the same organization (538r).   All agreed in showing a downward trend.  The 538r estimate means that his net approval rating has declined by 1 about every four days, and even the lower end of the 95% confidence interval means by 1 every 6 or 7 days.  This is a pretty strong trend, so why hasn't it received more attention?  One reason is we're a long way from the next election--polls get more attention as elections get closer.  Another is competition from all of the other things that have been happening.  But I think that there's another factor--the degree to which journalists have adopted the "vibe shift" story.  Trump has gained support from some influential people, and in the election did relatively well with some groups of voters that are regarded as important or interesting, but he has never been very popular with the public.  

*Most of the surveys were taken over several days; I use the final day for time.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research and 538]

Vibe shift?, part 4

 I wasn't planning to write another post on this topic, but then I ran across some questions on immigration policy, which was a major issue in the election.  In February 2017, I wrote about three questions on immigration.  One was about "illegal immigrants who are currently working in the United States":  whether you "favor deporting as many as possible or do you favor setting up a system for them to become legal residents?" The graph shows percent choosing "set up a system" minus percent choosing "deporting as many as possible":

Opinion was pretty evenly divided in 2007-10, but in those years the introduction just said "illegal immigrants" rather than "illegal immigrants who are working."  More recently, large majorities have favored "setting up a system for them to become legal residents."  Unfortunately, the last time the question was asked was in August 2020, so there's no way to know whether opinions changed during Biden's time in office.  

Another question on deportation is "do you favor or oppose...deporting [all] illegal immigrants* back to their home countries?"   The graph shows percent opposed minus percent favor, so as with the first graph, higher numbers represent the "softer" view.  

The red dots are questions that include "all."  This seems to make a difference--opinions are evenly divided or mostly opposed to "deporting all illegal immigrants" but mostly in favor of "deporting illegal immigrants."  

Unlike the first question, this one has been asked a number of times in the last year or so, making it useful for assessing the idea of a "vibe shift."  The figure shows opinions in 2024-25.  During that period, it had options for "strongly" and "somewhat" favor or oppose, so I count strongly as 2 and somewhat as 1.  There was also a variant that was new in 2024, which added "even if they have lived here for a number of years, have jobs and no criminal record?"  The two versions were asked to randomly selected halves of the sample.

For the basic version, most people favored deportation, and the level of support didn't vary much.  For the "even if" version, most people opposed deportation, and it seems like there was a shift towards greater opposition between the second and third times it was asked (August and October 2024).  There was no change after the election (the last two were in December 2024 and February 2025).  

Finally, there is this question:  "Which comes closest to your view about illegal immigrants who are currently working in the U.S.? 1. They should be allowed to stay in their jobs and to eventually apply for U.S. citizenship, or 2. They should be allowed to stay in their jobs only as guest workers, but not to apply for U.S. citizenship, or 3. They should be required to leave their jobs and leave the U.S."  The figure shows the average counting the first option as +1, the second as zero, and the third as -1.

Opinions are consistently on the "allowed to stay" side.  There is no trend over the whole period, but opinions moved towards "allowed to stay" after the 2024 election.  In the most recent survey, 51% said allowed to stay and eventually apply for citizenship, 19% said allowed to stay as guest workers, and 30% said required to leave.  

Putting these together, if there has been a recent "vibe shift," it's away from support for deportation. Over the long term, there's no clear trend.   

*or sometimes "immigrants who are living in the United States illegally"

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

News and views

 There has been a lot of speculation about the effect of "new media" on politics, but we don't have much information.  This isn't just because of the difficulty of establishing causation--most surveys don't ask people where they get their news, so we don't even know that much about the association between news source and political views.  A Washington Post/Univ. of Maryland survey from December asked about main sources of news--it gave a list of possibilities and asked people to choose all that applied--and also asked if they thought Trump's election in 2024 was legitimate, if Biden's election in 2020 was legitimate, and if there was "solid evidence that there was widespread voter fraud in the 2024 election."  The voter fraud question is particularly interesting because it doesn't have an obvious connection to partisanship:  Trump talked about the likelihood of fraud before the election but treated the results as accurate after he won, while the Democrats expressed more confidence before but had reason to be unhappy with the results.  

Overall, 79% said Trump's election was legitimate, 63% said Biden's election had been legitimate, and 16% thought that there was solid evidence of fraud in 2024.  I took the percentages who held these views for each news source and constructed two variables--Trump's election was legitimate minus Biden's election was legitimate, and Trump's election was not legitimate plus Biden's election was not plus there was widespread fraud in 2024.*  The first variable can be taken as left/right orientation and the second as cynicism about the political process.  The figure shows the relationship between these two variables:

The blue dots are new media and the red ones are traditional media.**  The audiences of the new media are higher in cynicism, but scattered across the right/left spectrum.  The audiences of the traditional media cover a wide range in both dimensions, but there is a strong pattern--audiences that are farther to the right are also more cynical.  To make it more concrete, among people who said they got news from "The New York Times or another national newspaper" 86% said Trump's victory was legitimate, 90% that Biden's was, and 4% that there was widespread fraud; among those who got news from Fox, 81% said Trump's victory was legitimate, 41% that Biden's was, and 23% that there was widespread fraud.  That is, the Fox audience was more likely to choose the cynical answer on every question, even Trump's victory.  There was no such pattern with the new media.

So this evidence suggests that the main effect of the new media is not to move people to the left or right, but to reduce confidence in the political process.  Of course, some of this is selection, but probably not all of it--people choose sources that are in line with their views, but then those sources reinforce those views.   

 *I standardized the underlying variables first so they would have equal influence.

**Note that I don't say "legacy media."  Use of that term is a pretty reliable sign that someone doesn't know what he/she is talking about.  

Late and unlamented

 There are a number of things I want to write about, but this post involves something I didn't.  In September, I was informed that I was listed as the editor-in-chief of a journal that I had never heard of:  the " EON International Journal of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences."  I sent an e-mail to the journal telling them to remove my name, but got no response, so I sent a letter to the mailing address listed.  That letter was returned marked "Return to sender/Attempted--Not known/Unable to forward."  I couldn't think of anything else to do, and more or less forgot about it until I got an e-mail from someone who had a paper accepted by the journal (the acceptance letter was sent under my name) and was told that it would be published online by November 15, but when she went to see she found their website was no longer operating.  She wrote to the publisher's e-mail and got no response, so she was asking me if I knew what was going on.  

The author sent a copy of the acceptance letter.  It had two reviews, one marked "internal reviewer" and one "external reviewer."  I'm not sure that there actually were any reviewers:  both of the reports were generic and didn't mention anything specific about the content of the paper.  There was also an "editor's scorecard," which had 0-10 ratings on qualities including "use of commas, semicolons."  And then the important thing:  payment instructions.  The fee was $200, payable by credit card or by wiring the money to someone in Bangladesh.  There was also this note "The payment is to be sent to Bangladesh as we are currently working on donation of a project related to an Autism NGO situated in Bangladesh.  The journal is solely published from Editorial office of Wilmington, Delaware, USA."

So it seems that everything about this journal was fake, except that presumably they really did take the authors' money.  Unfortunately, there's nothing to prevent them from starting again under a new name.  

Vibe shift?, part 3

 I've written several times about a question on "How much discrimination do you think there is against blacks/black people/African Americans in our society today--a lot, some, only a little, or none at all?"  There was either no trend or a decline between 2000 and 2014, but then a clear shift towards seeing more discrimination starting in 2015.  The last time I wrote about this question was in 2019, and a survey in March 2019 had found a new high in perceived discrimination.  What has happened since then?

Perceptions of discrimination against black people have stayed high.  The two highest values were in May/June 2020, just after the killing of George Floyd.  There were three surveys during the Biden administration--the one in February 2022 found a lower value, but even that was above those found in 2009-14, and the value in February 2024 was back at 2019 levels.*

Combining the evidence from the last three posts, views of Trump are more favorable than they were in the 2016 campaign, but that's not because public opinion has become more conservative.  Of course, I've just looked at two aspects of opinion, but they are important ones, and ones that many observers have claimed were keys to Trump's victory.  I think the change in views of Trump has two major sources:  one is the experience of his first term, when there were no economic or foreign policy disasters, and the other is that Republican elected officials stuck with him, despite some wavering after 1/6/21.  Although he had serious opponents for the nomination,  Trump soon established a big lead in endorsements from  Republican elected officials.  So for the average voter, he's increasingly become a normal representative of the Republican party.   His gains over 2020 were not because voters became more conservative, but because of "retrospective voting"--things weren't going well under the Democrats, so why not give the Republicans a chance?   

*Since I collected the data, I also show perceived discrimination against whites, which has stayed about the same except for a drop in May/June 2020.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Vibe shift?, part 2

 My last post looked at opinions on how Donald Trump was likely to do (or had done) as president.  This one is about general ideological inclinations, as measured by answers to "some people think the government is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses. Others think that government should do more to solve our country’s problems. Which comes closer to your view?"  This question has been asked by a number of survey organizations:  in 1974 and 1975, and pretty frequently starting in 1983.  I show the logarithm of the odds ratio of "do more to solve" versus "too many things":  that is, higher values represent more liberal views.  

There is a lot of variation between surveys taken at approximately the same time, which I think is because answers are influenced by context.  People like some things that government does and dislike others, so if the question follows questions about health or education, it's likely to get more "do more" responses than if it follows questions about taxes or whether the government wastes a lot of money.  However, there is clearly some longer term variation, so I also show a smoothed estimate. 

The last two times the question was asked were April and September 2024.  In April, opinions were quite liberal--16th highest out of 164 observations.  In September, they were more conservative--95th highest, and the most conservative since 2014.  So you could argue that there really was a vibe shift in 2024.  Given sampling error and unexplained short-term variation, I wouldn't put much confidence in that, but it is consistent with the data.  

Taking a somewhat longer view, here are the means by Presidential administration*:

There is a "thermostatic" pattern in which opinions are more liberal during Republican administrations.  That suggests that the vibes may shift again soon, especially if Trump continues to give Elon Musk free rein.**

*"Nixon" includes one from the Nixon and one from the Ford administrations.  The others have between nine and 48 observations.  

**Although I predict that within six months Trump will fire Musk, invent a dumb nickname for him, and take some sort of punitive action against his businesses.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]