A tale of two columns, part 1

 In his final column for the New York Times, Paul Krugman talks about a change from when he started writing it in January 2000:    "What strikes me, looking back, is how optimistic many people . . .  were back then and the extent to which that optimism has been replaced by anger and resentment."  He observes that this isn't just dissatisfaction with politics:  "It’s astonishing to look back and see how much more favorably banks were viewed before the financial crisis."  This statement includes a link to Gallup data on confidence in institutions; I've written about them before, but time has passed and more data have accumulated, so this seems like a good occasion to revisit them.

Has there been a general decline in confidence over the 21st century?  The figure shows the average adjusted for changes in the list of institutions they asked about*:

Opinions in 2000 were more favorable than opinions today, but less positive than they'd been in the 1970s.  On the other hand, they were more favorable than they'd been in the early 1990s, so someone looking back in 2000 might have said that there had been a decline, but we've turned things around and are on the way up.  Now it looks like the increase in the 1990s was a temporary interruption in a long decline.  

What could account for the changes?  One possibility is changes in general outlook:  people may have become less "deferential"--less likely to give institutions the benefit of the doubt and assume that their leaders are competent and well-meaning.   You would expect this to be a gradual change depending mostly on generational replacement:  it couldn't account for the upward movement in the 1990s or the rapid decline in the last few years.  What relevant factors might change over a shorter time period?  One possibility is the performance of institutions:  for example, in a column  that appeared a few days after Krugman's, Bret Stephens said "So many things in American life feel broken. Our public schools, which keep getting more money even as they produce worse outcomes."   Another is partisan politics:  political figures influence public opinion because they get a lot of media coverage and because people know whether they are generally aligned with their point of view.  So if prominent politicians criticize an institution, opinion will become more negative.  In principle, there could be equal and opposite effects:  if Republican politicians say negative things about an institution, Republicans will become more negative but Democrats will become more positive.  However, I think the negative effects will generally be stronger:  people who aren't that interested in politics (that is, most people) will just notice that there's a lot of criticism and figure that where there's smoke, there's fire.  

Of course, all of these factors are hard to measure, so it's hard to judge their relative influence, but a look at confidence in particular institutions may provide some hints.  Here is confidence in "big business."  

I'd regard partisan division as pretty much a constant for big business:  Democrats are always more critical and Republicans more favorable, and it's consistently a leading issue.  So the trend can be taken to represent the gradual shift in general outlook.  The ups and downs seem to correspond pretty well to economic conditions (or at least to perceived economic conditions).  

Next, confidence in the public schools and higher education.  For the public schools, there's steady decline, with little short-term variation.  Also, it's a stronger downward trend than for big business (-.011 vs. -.006).  Is that because the performance of schools has been declining steadily?  National Assessment of Education Progress scores improved from the 1970s to 2012--they've declined since then (Stephens links to a report of decline between 2019 and 2023), but are still above the 1970s level.  What about partisan politics?  Although I don't have a measure, I think that partisan divisions have increased.  Schools used to be financed and run primarily at the local level, and both parties were generally favorable to public education.  Over time, Republicans have become more favorable to school choice, local controversies over curricula and libraries have gotten national attention, and the role of federal funding (and regulation) has increased.  So I would attribute the larger decline for schools, compared to big business, to an increased role for partisan politics.  There are only a few years of data for higher education, but the rate of decline is even larger than for the public schools.  Universities are very slow-moving institutions, so it's safe to say that their performance didn't change much between 2015 and 2024.  But I think that partisan controversy over universities has definitely increased.

Gallup asks about a lot of institutions, so I won't consider them all individually.  But there are some exceptions to the general pattern of decline--I'll turn to them in my next post.  

*That is, the year effects from a model in which confidence in a particular institution in a particular year is the sum of a year effect and an institution effect.

Mood indigo

It's now pretty widely agreed that schools were too slow to return to in-person instruction during the Covid epidemic: "remote learning" usually meant less learning and students suffered from the loss of normal social interaction.   So why didn't the schools go back faster? Some observers hold that cautious  policies were imposed by what Nate Silver calls the "Indigo Blob":  "the merger between formerly nonpartisan institutions like the media, academia and public health . . . and instruments of the Democratic party and progressive advocacy groups."  

There are a couple of problems with this analysis.  One is that general public opinion was not in favor of faster reopening.  In April 2021 an NBC News poll asked people who had children in school "do you believe that your child's school system has been too slow in re-opening, too fast in re-opening, or struck the right balance?"  14% said too slow, 14% too fast, and 70% struck the right balance.   That's an impressively high level of public agreement with policy, which may be because policies responded to local opinion or because people generally have a positive view of their local schools and trusted them to do the right thing.  The second is that opinions on the issue were not closely related to education.  In January 2022, a Fox News survey asked "thinking about the winter school term, do you think your local public schools should reopen fully in-person as usual, open in-person with social distancing and masks, combine in-person and remote learning, or be fully remote":  Compared to white college graduates, white people who didn't have a college degree were more likely to favor full in-person reopening (38% vs. 24%), but also more likely to favor fully remote education (12% to 10%).   So education was a factor, but the differences weren't large compared to race (32% of whites favored fully reopening,  11% favored fully remote; only 6% of blacks favored fully reopening in-person and 30% favored fully remote, and Hispanics were about midway in between).  Age also made a substantial difference:  among people under 35, 18% favored reopening as usual and 21% favored going completely online; among people over 65, 34% favored reopening as usual and only 6% completely online.  Two factors that might have been expected to make a difference but didn't were parent/non-parent status and gender.  

Returning to the question of why schools didn't go back to in-person instruction more quickly, I'd say that it was because decision-makers were generally aligned with public opinion--the idea that children need special protection has a lot of intuitive appeal, so in the presence of uncertainty they were inclined to play it safe.  Of course, there were also large partisan differences (see this post), but I don't think that these appeared because Democrats followed the "Indigo Blob"--it was because they reacted against Trump.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Now what's the matter with Kansas?

 A few weeks ago, I had a post on the geographical pattern of party support in the 2020 and 2024 elections at the state level.  By historical standards, it was very similar:  that is, the Republicans gained by about the same amount in all states.  But it wasn't exactly the same, and there have been some reports of large shifts at the county level, so in this post I'll take a closer look.*  In 2020, Joe Biden got 51.3% of the vote and Donald Trump got 46.8%, for a Democratic lead of 4.5; in 2024, Kamala Harris got 48.2% and Trump got 49.8%, for a "lead" of -1.6.  That means that the difference in leads is 4.5+1.6=6.1. (You could also call that a swing of 3.05%, but I'll talk about the difference in leads).  At the county level, the mean Republican gain was 3.5.  Since that is smaller than the Republican gain in total votes, that means that Republicans gained more in larger counties.  The twenty counties with the largest Republican gains included three with populations over 1,000,000 (Miami-Dade, The Bronx, and Queens).  In contrast, only one of the twenty counties with the largest Democratic gains had a population of over 250,000, and three of them were under 1,000 (one of them was Loving County, Texas, where the Democratic vote surged from 4 out of 66 in 2020 to 10 out of 97 in 2024).  In a regression of Republican gain on the log of population, the estimated coefficient is .27 with a standard error of .039.  

When controls for share of the population that is Latin, Black, and Asian are added, the estimate for log population drops to .02 with a standard error of .04.  The estimates for shares of Latin and Black population are positive, with t-ratios of over 10; the estimate for Asian share is also positive, with a t-ratio of about 2.5.  Finally, if you add indicator variables for the states, the estimate for log of population is -.2 with a standard error of .04; the estimates for share of Latin, Black, and Asian all remain positive, although the t-ratio for the share of Asian drops to 1.8.  

The figure shows the average county-level Republican gain by state without controls on the horizontal axis, and with the controls on the vertical axis (the zero point is Alabama, just because it's alphabetically the first state):

There does seem to be a a pattern in the relative shifts:  Massachusetts and New Jersey had two of the largest pro-Republican shifts, and New York and Rhode Island were also pretty large (the data aren't quite complete, and Connecticut is missing).  On the other side, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma all had relatively small pro-Republican shifts. I'm not sure whether there's anything those states have in common apart from being in the same general part of the country, but it's worth thinking about.  I wonder if some of it is a reversal of the 2012-16 shifts:  that is, a return to the pre-Trump pattern?

*Data are from   https://github.com/tonmcg/US_County_Level_Election_Results_08-24

The three I's

In my view, the 2024 election was primarily a judgment on the Biden administration's record.  There always is a retrospective element in elections, and it was particularly strong this time since Kamala Harris didn't have much time to establish a distinct identity.  The biggest negatives included inflation, international affairs, and immigration.  The impact of inflation is often exaggerated--for example, some observers claim that people were upset because prices hadn't returned to pre-inflation levels--but it was certainly a factor (see this post for an estimate).  On international affairs, it wasn't primarily disagreement with administration policy, but just the fact that the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts were happening under Biden and nothing comparable had happened under Trump.  On immigration, I have some data:  survey questions asking which party will do a better job dealing with immigration.  There are some variations in question wording--for example, some explicitly offer a "no difference" option--but they don't seem to have much affect on the results.  The figure shows the percent saying the Democrats are better minus the percent saying the Republicans are better.  

A few of the questions asked about "illegal immigration"--they are the red dots.  Republicans generally do better on the illegal immigration questions, but there aren't enough to say much about the trend.  For the general immigration question, Republicans had a big advantage the first two times it was asked (1996 and early 2002), but the Democrats generally had an advantage from 2005 on.  Their average was +3 under Bush, +1 under Obama, and +8 under Trump.  The general immigration question was asked twelve times during the Trump administration, and the Democrats led every time.  That changed under Biden:  Republicans led all four times  the question was asked, and in 2022 and 2023 the Republican lead was about as big as it had been in 1996 and 2002.  Back in 2017, I said that a majority was in favor of letting unauthorized immigrants who were currently here stay and possibly obtain citizenship, but also in favor of stronger efforts to prevent further illegal immigration.  That may help to explain the change under Biden:  a "path to citizenship" had been a major issue under Obama and Bush, but disappeared under Biden since it was clear that Republicans wouldn't cooperate.  That meant that attention was focused on the border, where the Republicans had the advantage.  But that's not the whole story:  in 2022 and 2023, the Democratic disadvantage on "immigration" was bigger than their disadvantage of "illegal immigration" had been ten years earlier.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]