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]