Old and new

 I'll start with the new.  The SAVE Act requires proof of citizenship in order to register to vote.  If it were implemented, which party would it help?  The most convenient form of proof is a passport--of course, people who don't have a passport could assemble the necessary documentation, but it's safe to say that many of them would not get around to doing it.   There aren't many surveys that include questions about both passports and politics, but Pew had one in February 2016.  52.5% of Democrats and 46% of Republicans said they had a passport; independents were in between at 48%.  The survey didn't have any questions about anticipated vote in November, but it did ask who they wanted to get their party's nomination.  Among Republicans who had a passport, John Kasich led with 33%, followed by Ted Cruz with 23% and Donald Trump with 20% (the rest were undecided or scattered among other candidates).  Among Republicans without a passport, Trump led with 31%, then Cruz with 25%, and Kasich third with 20%.  The difference by passport status was smaller but still apparent after controlling for education.   That is, if this pattern held today, it's not just Republicans that would be more affected, but especially Trump's base.  I think the pattern would hold, because distrust of foreign countries is a central part of Trump's worldview, and people who distrust foreign countries are less likely to be interested in getting a passport.  

And now, following up on two older posts:

1.  In Munich, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that high levels of inequality were to blame for the growing strength of authoritarian movements.  In December, I had a post about a paper by Eli Rau and Susan Stokes which found that income inequality was associated with a higher risk of "democratic erosion."  I found that this was still the case after controlling for another potential influence, presidential vs. parliamentary system.  Rau and Stokes noted that "democratic erosion" was becoming more common, and suggested that inequality could explain this trend:  they spoke of "the suspicion that rising inequality is playing a role in the wave of cases of democratic erosion."  However, they didn't directly look at changes in inequality.  This is the average of their measure of inequality by year (adjusting for changes in the nations in the sample):

It peaked around 2005, and in 2020 was lower than it had been in 1995.  Although nations with higher inequality seem to have higher risk of democratic erosion, inequality is not behind the rise in democratic erosion.

2.  My most recent post was about the difference between two presidential ratings:  one by political scientists, the other by a collection of conservative journalists, activists, and academics.  I compared ratings by the conservative (PragerU) sample to Republicans in the political science (APSA) sample and concluded that the differences weren't entirely due to ideology.  It occurred to me that I could improve the analysis by considering party differences in the APSA sample.  That is, maybe rankings depend on ideology and the PragerU sample was farther to the right than the APSA Republicans were.  You can estimate a model where the rating of each president by each group is the product of scores for the president and the sample.  If you do this, the difference between PragerU and the APSA Republicans is about 1.5 times as large as the difference between APSA Republicans and Democrats.  If you fit this model, the largest residuals (by absolute value) are for McKinley, Kennedy, GW Bush, Polk, Taft, and Madison.  McKinley, Bush, Taft and Madison get relatively better ratings from APSA Republicans, and Kennedy and Madison get relatively better ratings from PragerU.  For most presidents, the APSA Republican ratings are in between the APSA Democrats and PragerU; for these six, the PragerU ratings are in between the two APSA groups.  For example, LBJ got 74 from APSA Democrats, 55 from APSA Republicans, and 35 from PragerU; JFK got 66, 50, and 57.

In a general way, my conclusion that there was something beyond politics holds up, but my focus on Wilson and Coolidge was misplaced.  Basically, there's a big ideological/partisan difference in the rating of these presidents, which shows up within the APSA sample and between the APSA Republicans and PragerU.  As far as what that "something" is, I would say it reflects differences in knowledge.  For example, I gather that most experts regard Polk as an effective president, although there's disagreement about the merits of his policies (Republicans tend to be more favorable).  APSA Republicans would know that, while for many in the PragerU sample, he would just be another one of the nondescript run of presidents who came in between Jackson and Lincoln.   In my last post, I also said that the PragerU sample gave higher ratings to pre-1900 presidents; there's still some evidence for that, although it's weaker than in my previous analysis.

[Some data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

More than politics

 A New York Times story yesterday said that the conservative organization PragerU had just released ratings of the American presidents, and that their top scores went to Washington, Lincoln, Reagan, and Calvin Coolidge.  In contrast, a survey of members of the Presidents and Executive Politics section of the American Political Science Association in 2017-8 placed Lincoln, Washington, FDR, and Teddy Roosevelt at the top.  PragerU suggested that the differences reflected politics:   "most presidential rankings have come from a narrow, left-leaning perspective."  However, although the APSA sample was mostly Democrats, 13% were Republicans and 30% were independents or other parties.  It's possible to calculate the scores for respondents of each party from the information in this paper by Brandon Rottinghaus, George Eady, and Justin Vaughn.  The figure shows the mean rating for each president among Democrats and Republicans in the APSA sample.

There is some tendency to rate presidents of one's own party more favorably, but there's a lot of consensus:  among Republicans, the top four is Washington, Lincoln, FDR, and Teddy Roosevelt; among Democrats, it's Lincoln, FDR, Washington, and Teddy Roosevelt.  Considering all presidents, the correlation between APSA Republicans and Democrats is .899, while the correlation between APSA Republicans and PragerU respondents is .765.*

The next difference shows the difference between the PragerU and APSA Republican ratings by president in chronological order.**

The PragerU respondents gave higher ratings to almost all of the 18th and 19th century presidents:  18 of the first 21 presidents were rated higher in the PragerU surveys.  Starting with McKinley (elected in 1896), there's more variation.  Coolidge is rated 24.9 points higher in the Prager survey, by far the largest positive difference (Harding is second with 15.1).  Reagan is also rated higher, but it's not an especially big gap--only the 10th largest positive difference.  On the other side, Wilson, FDR, Johnson, and Obama are rated far lower by the Prager respondents.

What accounts for these differences between two samples of Republicans?  One factor is that the the Prager respondents are probably more conservative than the APSA Republicans.  The other is that although Prager says that "we reached out to scholars and experts," many of their respondents are journalists, political activists, or talk show hosts, and most of the academics don't seem to focus on the presidency.   Rather than "experts", I'd call them "intellectuals" in Hayek's sense of "second-hand dealers in ideas." An idea that has become popular on the right is that early in the 20th century, progressives set aside the Constitution and established the "administrative state."  Wilson is the leading villain in this story, but T. Roosevelt and Taft are also implicated, and the Prager respondents rate them lower than APSA Republicans do.   On the other side, Coolidge gets credit for fighting a last-ditch effort to protect the Constitution.   This account hasn't trickled down from leading conservative scholars--it's developed within the movement.  I think the case illustrates a more general point.  A passage from Keynes is often quoted:  "The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. . . .  Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back."  He's right about the power of ideas, but often (usually?) those ideas don't come from economists and political philosophers, but from journalists, popular historians, and freelancers.  In fact, sometimes academics (not so much economists, but other social scientists) find themselves following the same influences.   

* Prager didn't ask about Trump and the APSA survey took place before Biden became president, so they are excluded.  Prager also omitted Garfield and William Henry Harrison, who only served briefly.  

**Prager ratings were on a 0-10 scale and the APSA ratings were 0-100.  For this comparison, I converted the Prager ratings to 0-100. 

The (roughly) three percent

At one time, it was often said that almost all Americans thought of themselves as part of the middle class, regardless of their actual economic circumstances.  It turned out that when asked if they belonged to the "middle class" or "working class," about half chose middle class and half chose working class--this is still true, despite the social and economic changes since the question was first asked more than 80 years ago.  But this post isn't primarily about either the middle class or working class:  it's about the people who say they are "upper class" if that option is offered.  They are a very small minority--usually less than 5%--so they are generally ignored or lumped in with the middle class.  But one of the surveys that includes the upper class option is the General Social Survey, and over the years they have accumulated a fairly large number of them (about 2,500).*

The figure shows party identification (proportion Republican minus proportion Democratic) by class in the GSS data.  For the lower, middle, and working class, the changes are pretty much parallel--more exactly, they have the same shape but slightly different slopes, so they have converged.  In the 20th century, Democratic identification was highest in the lower class and lowest in the middle class, with the working class in the middle, but now it's almost the same in all three.  The upper class has followed a different path--unlike the other classes, it's been moving towards the Democrats in the 21st century.  Because of small numbers in the individual samples, it's not possible to say much about the exact timing--the smoothed line shows it starting around 2000, but you could argue that it was a more sudden change that started later, somewhere around 2010.  But there's definitely been a change--in 2021, 2022, and 2024 samples Democratic identification has been highest in the upper class.  

I can think of two possible explanations.  One is that the images of the parties have changed:  Republicans are seen as less sympathetic to the upper class and/or Democrats are seen as more sympathetic, so people who regard themselves as part of the upper class are less likely to see the Republicans as the party that will serve their interests.  The other possibility is that the way that people who say they are part of the upper class see themselves has changed:  they're more likely to see their position as partly a matter of "privilege" or luck, and therefore more likely to think that the public interest is different from their class interest.  

Who are these people who think of themselves as part of the upper class?  When the GSS began, income, education, and occupational prestige were about equally important.  Over the time since then, income has become more important relative to the other two factors--about 4 or 5 times as important in recent years.  That is, the (self-identified) upper class used to be people with high incomes, high levels of education, and professional jobs; now it's closer to being just people with high incomes.  I think this makes the first potential explanation less plausible:  Republican criticism of "elites" is directed at educated people and people in professional occupations, but not at people with high incomes.  Morever, the extent to which the Republican party serves the immediate interests of high-income people has increased:  in the 1970s and 1980s, they sometimes accepted higher taxes on high-incomes as an unfortunate necessity; since then, support for tax cuts on high incomes has become an absolute.   That leaves the second possibility, which is consistent with these data and has support from other data.  

*It also includes "lower class" as an option--it's chosen by about 6%.

Misdiagnosis

 Last week, the New York Times published the transcript of an interview with the the heading "Jay Bhattacharya, the N. I. H. Director, says authorities broke the public’s trust in the Covid era. Now it’s up to outsiders to restore it."  In the course of the interview, Bhattacharya said "a Pew poll in 2024 that said 25 percent of Americans don’t believe that scientists have the best interest of the public at heart. One in four. And then people will come back to me — scientists — and say, 'Well, look, 75 percent trust us.'  That’s too low a bar, Ross [the interviewer was Ross Douthat]. It needs to be 100 percent. . . . If only 75 percent of the public thinks that the work that the N.I.H. does benefits them, it’s an utter failure."  

His memory was accurate:  the survey asked "How much confidence, if any, do you have in each of the following to act in the best interests of the public? A great deal, a fair amount, not too much, no confidence at all"  For "scientists," it was 26%, 51%, 19% ,4%; for "medical scientists" it was 30%, 48%, 18%, and 4%.  How does that compare to other groups?  To make the comparison easier, I'll combine the first two categories:

The military                       78%
Medical scientists              78%
Scientists                           77%
Police officers                    73%
Public school principals    72%
Religious leaders               55%
Journalists                          45%
Business leaders                40%
Elected officials                 33%

2024 wasn't the only time that the question was asked--it was also asked a number of times beginning in 2016 and again in 2025.  The figure shows the average for four groups with relatively high confidence:  medical scientists, military, police, and principals.*

All of them followed a similar course, with a drop from 2020 to 2021, and stability since then.  You could say that trust in medical science declined "in the Covid era," but it didn't happen until vaccines were available and things were opening up (the 2020 survey was in November and the 2021 survey was in December).  That is, the "lockdowns"** and closures than Bhattacharya criticizes didn't damage public confidence in medical science:  it was higher in November 2020 than it had been in January 2019.  

The Pew report on the 2025 survey gives a breakdown of confidence in medical scientists by partisanship.  Among Democrats, it's stayed about the same; among Republicans, it dropped between 2020 and 2021 and has not recovered--not even in 2025.  Later in the interview, Bhattacharya unwittingly explains why Republican confidence didn't increase once Trump was back in office.  Douthat says that RFK Jr is "comfortable saying something positive about some vaccines, but he’s not a salesman for vaccines."  Bhattacharya replies "I think we’ve had enough of salesmen. . . .  if I had the choice between someone like the former head of H.H.S., who was not a doctor either and was much more in this politician salesman mode, or Bobby, I think Bobby will ultimately be better for American public health."  Republican confidence in medical scientists has fallen because leading Republican politicians, especially Trump, have been "salesmen" for suspicion of vaccines and medical authorities in general.  If they now turned and said that the vaccines recommended by their team of experts was really essential, Republican confidence might rebound.  But if it's just Dr Bhattacharya saying that "world public health agrees with this,"  he's appealing to the same sentiment (trust in medical experts) that Republican leaders have undermined.  

*Confidence in "scientists" was very similar to confidence in "medical scientists," so I omit it to make the figure more readable.

**The measures in the United States didn't meet the dictionary definition of  "lockdown," but that's the word he uses.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Words, words, words

 A few days ago, Megan McArdle had a column objecting to descriptions of Trump as a fascist, not necessarily because they are wrong, but because "when ordinary people hear 'Trump is a fascist,' they aren’t primed for an academic debate over when right-wing populism shades over into fascism; they hear you saying that Trump is either an adherent of the political ideology known as fascism or a dictator whose practices are fascist."  That is, calling Trump a fascist will reduce your credibility because even people who have negative feelings about him will regard the charge as overstated.  Shortly before the 2024 election, an ABC News survey asked a question which was introduced with "A fascist often is defined as a political extremist who seeks to act as a dictator, disregards individual rights and threatens or uses force against their opponents," and then asked if Kamala Harris was a fascist, Trump was a fascist, both were, or neither were.  16% said only Harris was, 42% only Trump, 6% both, and 33% neither.  Putting it together, 48% of those surveyed thought that Trump was a fascist and 22% thought that Harris was.  

The ABC survey gave people a definition of fascism; in May 1945 a Gallup poll asked people to give their own.  They classified the answers into groups--they didn't give them labels, but illustrated them with examples of things that people had said.  The biggest group, at 37%, included "nothing," "not interested," and "can't explain."  Second, at 28%, included "dictatorship," "totalitarianism," and "one man rule."  Third, at 11%, included "Nazism," "Hitler," and "Mussolini."  Fourth, at 8%, included "hoodlum regime," "against everything," and "evil."  The second group can be regarded as correct answers.  The third is ambiguous:  they apply the term correctly, but don't demonstrate any understanding of the principle behind it.  The fourth is just a negative characterization.  My overall classification is:

                             All              College grads       

Correct                 32%                 65%
Vague                   23%                 18%
Wrong                   4%                    3%
Don't Know         37%                  10%
Miscellaneous      4%                      2%

Correct answers include the second group and some smaller ones; vague is the third and fourth plus some smaller ones; don't know is the first group, and "Socialism and Communism; a red" is counted as wrong.     The survey also asked "Are there any individuals, organizations, parties or other groups in this country which seem to you to be at least partly fascist in their aims or interests?" 29% said yes, 29% no, and 43% didn't know.  Of course, people in 1945 had less formal education than they do today, but they also had more direct experience with fascism. 

Taken together, the surveys suggest that most people understand "fascist" term in only a vague sense:  that someone is really bad or wants to be a dictator.   It's only educated elites like McArdle (BA, Penn; MBA, Chicago) and me who worry about the precise definition.   McArdle does touch on a valid point:  that people often act as if words have a magical power.   I remember that in 2016 some people seemed to think that if the media would just say "racist" or "lies" then Trump's support would disappear; now "fascist" is supposed to do the trick.  If you want to influence public opinion, talking about specific things that Trump has done will have more impact than calling him a fascist.   But then there's the question of whether the public will be allowed to express its opinion:  I think it's unlikely that the November 2026 election will be cancelled or delayed, but there's a good chance that there will be attempts to interfere with the casting or counting of votes.  That's the real importance of the debate over whether Trump is a fascist.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

What could happen here, part 4

In my last post, I gave some evidence that many people aren't attached to core principles of democracy (see also this post).*   However, people are strongly attached to some of the particular features of American democracy.  In 2004, a survey asked:   "If there were a terrorist attack in the United States near the November election, should we postpone the election because that would not be a good time to be deciding who should lead the country? Or, should we go ahead with the election because postponing would be a victory for the terrorists?" Only 10% said that we should postpone the election, while 86% said we should go ahead.  And in April 2020:  "If the coronavirus outbreak persists through November, would you support postponing the election, moving to all-mail balloting, or proceeding as normal?"  18% favored postponing, 53% all-mail balloting, and 26% proceeding as normal.  That is, few people supported postponing elections even in an emergency.  

Attachment to tradition can be an barrier to reforms like direct election of the president or multi-member districts for Congress.  But it can also be a barrier to things that would be harmful to a democratic system, as in this case.**

This leads to a question that I've touched on, but not addressed directly:  is the Trump movement fascist?  I would say no, for two reasons.  First, Fascism was clear about rejecting both democracy and tradition:  it was about the future.  Second, Fascism took the military as a model:  according to The Doctrine of Fascism (attributed to Mussolini although partly written by Giovanni Gentile), "the individual in the Fascist state is . . . multiplied, just in the same way that a soldier in a regiment is not diminished but rather increased by the number of his comrades... [the individual] is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential..."  Trump  hasn't made any attempt to organize his supporters along military lines--all he asks is that people praise him and buy his merchandise.  With January 6, there doesn't seem to have been any central organization--it was just a matter of gathering a mob and (as Trump likes to say) "we'll see what happens."  Trump also doesn't openly reject democracy or the American political tradition, but claims to be defending them.  So the movement continues to get support from people who see it as basically traditional American conservatism, just with a different style. 

A practical implication is that there is a chance to get some Republicans to break with Trump on specific issues--for example, Indiana Republicans rejected his demands to redistrict.  It wasn't just a few either:  21 of the 40 Republicans in the state Senate voted no.  I haven't seen anything on why Indiana Republicans acted differently than Republicans in other states, but there have to be some lessons there.  

*Also this question from 2002: "When it comes to protecting the country from terrorism, some people say it's more important to ensure people's constitutional rights, even if it means that some suspected terrorists are never found. Others say it's more important to find every potential terrorist, even if some innocent people are seriously hurt. Which is closer to your view?"  Opinion was almost evenly divided, with 44% saying it was more important to protect constitutional rights and 47% saying it was more important to to find every potential terrorist.  

**Elections have been postponed with no lasting harm, as in Britain during the Second World War. But doing it creates the possibility of a slippery slope.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

What could happen here, part 3

 A few days ago, Bret Stephens wrote that American democracy will survive "because most Americans, including most Republicans, remain faithfully wedded to a democratic system. "  It's true that an overwhelming majority of Americans are committed to a democratic system in the sense of believing that governments should be selected by voters choosing from competing parties.  But as I've observed before, people aren't necessarily committed to the things that are needed to make a democratic system work.  For example, in the 1950s several surveys asked whether it was "more important to find out all the Communists in this country, even if some innocent people are accused--or is it more important to protect people who might be innocent, even if some Communists are not found out?"  Solid majorities said it was more important to find out all the Communists (e. g. 64% in January 1956).  There were also questions about whether the Socialist Party, which was fully committed to electoral democracy, should be allowed to publish newspapers.  Opinion was pretty evenly divided--the last time it was asked, 43% said yes, 5% gave a qualified yes, 39% said no, and 13% didn't know.   So maybe people were wedded to a democratic system, but many of them weren't all that faithful.  But political elites generally didn't try to appeal to the potential anti-democratic sentiments.  This was partly because of the Constitution and the legal system--it was pointless to advocate banning Socialist newspapers when that was going to be rejected by the courts--but partly because elites of both parties were more consistent than the general public in their commitment to democratic principles.  This is still true to some extent--for example, if Trump said we should cancel or delay the 2026 elections, he might get substantial support among Republican voters, but I'm confident (OK, pretty confident) that almost all Republicans in Congress would still oppose it.  However, there are many ways in which the system can be altered in ways that make it harder for those who disagree with the administration to operate, and here is where there's been a change.  Republican political elites accept or even defend things that were once considered off-limits, like mid-decade redrawing of Congressional districts, or selective denial of funds to disfavored states or organizations.*  If the process continues, the result will be an increasingly unbalanced system, where we still have regular elections offering a choice between parties, but it becomes harder for the Democrats to win and to implement their policies when they do have office.    

*See this article on Trump's actions against Colorado.  A revealing passage:  "Some Colorado Republicans blame the state’s Democratic leaders for provoking Mr. Trump’s wrath."

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]