When after all it was you, not me

 Since the murder of Charlie Kirk, people have been reposting one of his tweets from earlier this year, in which he said "assassination culture is spreading on the left.  Forty-eight percent of liberals say it would be at least somewhat justified to murder Elon Musk.  Fifty-five percent said the same about Donald Trump."  The source of these numbers is a report from the Network Contagion Research Institute published in April.  He didn't mention another figure from the report that I find even more remarkable--20% of conservatives said that it would be at least somewhat justified to murder Donald Trump.  Who were the people answering these questions?  A footnote says "using Prime Panels, we collected 2651 respondents.  Based on attention checks and those who took the survey in an unreasonable amount of time, we cleaned the dataset down to a final dataset of 1264 responses."  It's standard practice for online surveys to discard some cases (e. g., those that pick the first answer for every question), but more than half?  I didn't know anything about Prime Panels, but it's described here.  The key point is that it's a collection of "opt-in" panels--that is, people who sign up to do surveys in return for compensation.  That is, there's no effort to get a representative sample in the first place, and the extremely high rate of discarded answers suggests that respondents are not taking the survey very seriously (I wonder if some of the responses were generated by AI).  So we can continue the cleaning process by dropping the remaining 1264 cases and moving on.  

JD Vance also cited some survey data when he hosted the Charlie Kirk show.  He said that 24% of people who call themselves very liberal say it is acceptable to be happy at the death of  a political opponent, against only 3% of people who call themselves very conservative.  Also, 26%  of young liberals and only 7% of young conservatives say that political violence is sometimes justified.  These data  are from a legitimate survey organization, YouGov.  However, they are from surveys taken on September 10 and 11th, so they represent some combination of feelings about general principles and the particular case of violence that had just happened.  As far as I can tell, the question about whether it is acceptable to feel happy has never been asked before; there are a few general questions about whether political violence is ever justified, but they are all at least 20 years old.  There's also a problem of interpretation.  It's easy to think of examples of "violence in order to achieve political goals" that most people would regard as justified and even admirable--e. g., the American Revolution.  So I don't think that we can learn much from questions of this kind--questions about reactions to particular assassinations or assassination attempts would be more informative, but fortunately we haven't had many cases to ask about.    Moreover, there have been only few questions about those cases and they aren't comparable.

So far, my conclusions have all been negative, but there is one interesting additional piece of information in the YouGov report.  After the attack on Paul Pelosi in October 2022, they asked " How big of a problem do you think political violence is in the U.S. today?"  They repeated the question after the two attempts on Donald Trump, the attempt on Josh Shapiro, and the assassinations of Melissa Hortman and Charlie Kirk.  The figure shows the percent saying "a very big problem" broken down by party:  

Among Democrats. the level doesn't change much; among Republicans, it's substantially higher when the victim is a Republican.  Of course, with just five cases you can't draw strong conclusions, but I've found a similar pattern before--Republican views about the future of the next generation are more affected by the party of the president than Democratic views.  I think this has happened because Republican leaders have taken a catastrophist approach--saying that the Democrats, the universities, the media, etc.  are dominated by the radical Left, which is evil, vicious, and even demonic (all words used by Trump or Vance).  

The data I needed

 A new paper by Craig Volden, Jonathan Wai, and Alan E. Wiseman looks at the educational background of members of Congress over a 50-year period (1973-2021).  Their major conclusion is given in the title:  "On the Decline of Elite-Educated Republicans in Congress."  Over the years, Congressional Republicans have become less likely to have degrees from elite universities, while Democrats have become a little more likely.  As a result, a "diploma divide" has appeared, with Democrats more likely to have elite degrees.  The figure shows the percent of Democratic and Republican members of the House of Representatives who have elite degrees (see this Washington Post story for more figures).

  

Volden, Wai, and Wiseman also report that members with elite degrees have more liberal voting records than those without them.  The difference is larger for Republicans, suggesting that the declining representation of elite universities is related to the rightward move of Congressional Republicans over the period.

Taking both parties together, representation of elite degrees in the House has declined (it's been roughly constant in the Senate).  

I had done similar research on a smaller scale, comparing two Congresses (1953-5 and 2017-9).  I had expected to find a substantial increase in the percent with elite degrees, but that wasn't the case.  By my definition of elite, it only went from 17% to 18%.  I noticed that the share of elite degrees  declined among Republicans and increased among Democrats.  

Considering both studies together, it seems that the share from elite universities is about the same in recent years as it was in the early 1950s, but lower that in the 1970s:  that is, it peaked in the 1970s.  The Republican share of those with elite degrees was higher in the 1950s than the 1970s--that is, the changes since the 1970s continue a longer trend.  (Of course, our definitions of elite universities weren't identical, but they were similar enough so I'm pretty confident in these claims).  

In another post, I suggested that there has been a change in the relationship between elite university background and political orientation.  " At one time, elite colleges played an important part in creating an 'establishment'.... that's no longer the case, at least on the conservative side."  That is, I thought that Republicans with an elite educational background used to be more moderate, but that this was no longer the case.  The Volden, Wai, and Wiseman data lets me test that idea.  I divided it into four periods and compared the DW-Nominate scores of elite graduates and others (controlling for race, sex, and Hispanic status).  Negative numbers mean members with elite degrees have more liberal voting records.

                            House                        Senate
                            R            D            R            D
1973-80         -.045      -.052          -.201    -.043
1981-94        -.083       -.056           -.180    -.035
1995-2008    -.049       -.023            -.085    -.048
2009-21          .007      -.002               .021    -.070

Since 2009, Republicans with elite degrees have been just about the same as those without.  With Democrats, the difference has disappeared in the House, but stayed the same or maybe even grown in the Senate. So my hypothesis is supported:  among Republicans, having an elite degree is no longer associated with more more moderate views.  The reasoning behind the hypothesis was that as the political climate at elite universities has moved left, conservatives increasingly feel like an embattled minority, and consciously reject prevailing views rather than being influenced by them.  That suggests that the change should be mostly a generational one.  An alternative explanation is that party-line voting has become more common in recent years, especially among Republicans, so party is coming to dominate all other differences.  

What do you know?

 I've had several posts about the connection between tastes in reading and political views.  The basic conclusion is that people with more "sophisticated" tastes tend to be more liberal.  I recently ran across another relevant survey (from 1999) which asked people if they could name the authors of the following books:  The Cat in the Hat, Huckleberry Finn, The Shining, The Old Man and the Sea, The Firm, A Tale of Two Cities, A Farewell to Arms, The Great Gatsby, Moby Dick, and Crossings (I list them in order of the percent who gave the correct answer).  The mean was about three correct answers (it was open-ended, not multiple choice).   

The few political questions in the survey were not of much general interest, so I'll just look at ideological self-rating (very liberal to very conservative).  Among people who got 0-2 right (about 30% of the sample), 45% said they were conservative, 37% moderate, and 17% liberal; among people who got 6-10 right (about 20%), it was 27%, 48%, 25%.  If you regress ideology on age, sex, race, Hispanic status, education, and "knowledge" (number of correct answers), the estimate for knowledge was positive and statistically significant (.054 with a standard error of .014).  The estimate for education (1=no HS diploma... 4=college graduate) was .01 and not significantly different from zero.  

Why would knowledge of the names of authors be associated with ideological self-rating?  One possibility is that some people understood the terms in a non-political sense, e. g., "liberal" as meaning something like broad-minded.  Incorrect (or unconventional) understandings are more common among less educated people, so this would suggest that the relation between knowledge and ideology would be stronger among the less educated, but if anything it was stronger among more educated people.  So I think that there really is a connection between knowledge and political views (people who knew more authors were also more likely to say they were Democrats, although the connection was weaker).  This doesn't mean that this knowledge affects political views; rather the general curiosity that makes people learn and remember the names could also make them more critical of tradition. 

PS:  This is the 15th anniversary of my first post.   I didn't really plan to keep the blog running this long, but coming up with new material has been easier than I expected.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

 

Long term, short term, part 2

 My last post showed that conservative confidence in science, education, and medicine dropped over the last several years.  What about other institutions?  Between 2016 and 2024, conservative confidence declined for 11 out of the 13 institutions that the GSS asks about, and one of the increases (banks and financial institutions) was very small.  The only substantial increase was for the Supreme Court.  Among liberals, confidence increased for six institutions and declined for seven.  The figure shows average liberal and conservative confidence across all institutions*:

Until 2008, conservative and liberal confidence was about the same.  Since then, liberal confidence has consistently been higher, but the size of the gap increased substantially in the 2020s.  

One of the institutions is "the executive branch of the federal government."  That is closely related to approval of the current president, so also calculated the average for all institutions except the executive:

This was close until diverging since 2018.  

So liberalism is now associated with more confidence in institutions in general.  Is this related to the growth of educational divisions in politics?  Sometimes people say that education is associated with more positive views of institutions--they'll be more likely to think that the people in charge ("the elites") know what they're doing.  There are several possible reasons, but the most obvious one is that educated people are in charge of most institutions.  Of course, the average educated person doesn't have much influence, but they'll have more shared understanding and chance of personal connections with the people who do.  On the other side, there is the argument that education makes people more critical.  I computed correlations of confidence in different institutions with degree (no high school diploma.....graduate education).

Science               .184
Supreme Court   .109
Business             .088
Medicine            .047
Executive           .031
Press                   .002

Banks                -.017
Congress           -.026
Religion            -.027
Education         -.042
Labor                -.095
Military             -.098

But these are averages over the whole time from the 1970s to 2020s.  In several cases, the correlation shifts over time.  The biggest changes:

The correlation was near zero in the early years, but is now negative.  That is, educated people have lost confidence faster than less educated people.

It started out negative and is now near zero--educated people have gained relative to less educated people.  

More and less educated people were about equally confident in the 1970s; now more educated people are more confident. This is different that the pattern for science, where more educated people have been more confident all along.

More educated people were less confident in the military in the early years,  but the difference has pretty much disappeared.  

With organized labor, you could say it reflects changes in composition--blue collar unions have declined and white collar unions (mostly in the public sector) have held steady or even grown.   But as many people have observed, the educational divide in military service has grown.  That is, educated people have become less likely to have military experience, but more likely to have confidence.  I think the changes are evidence of a point I've made in a number of posts:    that there's been a growth of social egalitarianism among more educated people.    Of course, it's possible that more educated people have less knowledge or understanding of less educated people than they used to.  But, contrary to what is often said, they have become less likely to express negative views of less educated people, or the institutions associated with less educated people.

*Except "banking and financial institutions"--that question didn't start until later.

Long term, short term

 The General Social Survey has a series of questions about confidence in "the people running" various institutions that has been asked since the early 1970s.  But the GSS was not the first to ask these questions--they were originally from the Harris Poll.  The very first time was in the 1965 survey of college students that I wrote about recently, but they were also asked of a national sample in 1967.  The figure shows average confidence in institutions in 1967 and 2024 (the most recent round of the GSS):

The line indicates equal confidence in both years.  With one exception, they are below the line, meaning average confidence was lower in 2024 than in 1967.  The exception is organized labor, where average confidence was almost exactly the same.  I think that is because organized labor has become less prominent:  there are fewer strikes or the threat of strikes, or large wage increases that might lead to inflation or tax increases.  In 1967, 23% said they had a great deal of confidence and 33% said that they had very little confidence:  in 2024, "great deal" had fallen to 18%, but "very little" had also fallen, to 24%.  So you could say that there's been a move towards indifference.

The other institutions all have substantial declines, but several stand out:

Congress has had the largest decline (-0.82; changes for the executive branch and the Supreme Court are about -0.6).  Science, military, and television have had relatively small declines (-.25 to -.33).  I've discussed confidence in the military before.  For TV, I think it's because people entertainment programming as well as news (questions specifically about TV news show a large decline).  The relatively small decline for "the scientific community" is interesting, since a lot of people have talked about the growth of anti-science attitudes in recent years.  The GSS also asks about medicine, and the decline is considerably larger than the decline for science (-.52 to -.24).  

I looked at confidence in science, medicine, and education in an earlier post, and noted that there was a growing split between liberals and conservatives in the last few years, presumably because of the reaction to Covid.  That was before the 2024 GSS came out, so here are the updated figures:

Very little change from 2022 to 2024.

A drop from 2022 to 2024 among both liberals and conservatives, but larger among conservatives.  Also, liberal confidence increased in 2018 and 2021, so the decline leaves them about where they were in 2016.  With conservatives, confidence is at its lowest level ever.  

Finally, education:

A slight increase from 2022 to 2024 among both liberals and conservatives.  

The liberal/conservative gap for confidence in education and science grew between 2016/8 and 2022, but stayed about the same between 2022 and 2024.  In contrast, the gap for confidence in medicine kept growing.  Why?  My thought is that more people are interested in medicine and feel like they have some basis for offering opinions--they can talk about what happened when they got a vaccine, or someone they know got a vaccine.  As a result, there's more momentum in public opinion when doubts start to grow.  Another possibility is that it was driven by the prominent role of RFK, Jr. in the presidential race.

[Data from the GSS and Odum Institute Data Archive]

Friendship recession, part 4

 I hadn't intended to have so many posts on this issue, but people keep talking about it.  In the New York Times today, Robert Putnam and Richard Reeves write "One in seven young men reports that he has no close friends, up from 3 percent in 1990."  The link goes to a report on the same 2021 survey that I wrote about before.*  In a previous post, I suggested that the apparent decline in number of close friends might reflect a difference in the survey format or the sample, and in this post I'll look at that possibility more closely.  The question about the number of close friends has been asked in two other recent surveys, one by Pew in July 2023 and another by Survey Center on American Life using the IPSOS Knowledge Panel in April 2024 (they also did the 2021 survey).  The percent reporting no close friends:

                   Men          Women

1990          4.4%           1.6% 
2021          16.4%        11.6%
2023            8.3%          7.4%

2024           17.3%       15.7%

The 2021, 2023, and 2024 surveys were conducted using online panels.  I suggested that people in online panels know that saying you had friends would increase the chance that you'd get additional questions, so that some of the "none" answers were just people who were in a hurry to get through.  The 2021 and 2024 surveys show about twice as many people reporting no friends as the 2023 survey, but that's consistent with my hypothesis--Pew and IPSOS may differ in their propensity to ask additional questions (or in how strictly they check for signs that a respondent was rushing through).  

My hypothesis implies that online panels will have more "nones," but doesn't suggest any changes in the relative frequency of other answers.  That is, if you say you have four friends rather than five, you'll still get follow-up questions.**  Here are the mean numbers of close friends for people who say they have at least one***.

                  Men          Women
1990          6.7               5.7
2021          5.0               4.5
2023          4.9               4.6
2024          5.4               5.3

So there does seem to be some decline, and it's larger for men, but the result not a growing gap, but a decline of the gap between men and women.  

These numbers don't fit the story about the social isolation of men today.  Of course, you could say there are offsetting differences--women "really" have more close friends, but also have higher standards for counting someone as a close friend.  That could be true, but you could make a similar argument about changes in the reported number of close friends--that is, people's standards might have risen over the years.  In my last post, I mentioned a question from 1950:  "When you have personal problems, do you like to discuss them with anyone to help clear them up, or not?" and said "Today, the general assumption is that it's a need, not something that you might or might not like to do."  It happens that the 2024 survey asked "If you were facing a personal problem, who is the first person you would turn to for help?" and offered some possibilities (spouse or partner, friend, parents...) , followed by "there is no one I could turn to."  The difference between those questions illustrates the nature of a change that I think has happened--growing emphasis on the ability to discuss "personal problems" as a defining feature of friendship. 

*The numbers in that report don't actually refer to young men, but to men in general.  
**You'll get fewer follow-ups if there are questions about the characteristics of individual friends, but those are unusual. 
***More than 10 is counted as 10.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, Survey Center for American Life, and Pew Research Center]

Friendship recession, part 3

 Some further notes on the evidence regarding a "friendship recession."

1.  My last post mentioned a survey from 2019 that asked about the number of "true friends."  That survey also had a question on loneliness:  "How much of the time do you feel lonely:  All of the time, most of the time, only sometimes, or hardly ever?" 3% said all the time, 5% most of the time, 23% only sometimes, and 67% hardly ever.  A 1990 Gallup survey asked "how often do you ever feel lonely,":  10% said frequently, 26% sometimes, 40% seldom, and 23% never.  A Los Angeles Times survey from 1989 asked "Everybody is lonely sometimes. Would you say that you are often lonely or seldom lonely?"  9% said often, 82% seldom, and 7% volunteered that they never felt lonely.    A NORC survey from July-August 2020 asked whether you had recently felt "very lonely or remote from other people."  32% said that they had. The same question was asked in a number of surveys from 1963 to 2001, with "yes" responses ranging from from 17% to 28%, so the 2020 figure was the highest ever.  But that was in the early stages of Covid, when there were significant restrictions on face-to-face interaction.  Considering all of those questions, I don't think that there's much evidence for a long-term rise in loneliness.  

2.  Claude Fischer had a post on changes in the reported number of friends.  In addition to the 2021 survey that I discussed in my previous post, he found a 2023 Pew survey in which similar numbers said that they had no close friends.  

3.  There were two surveys of teenagers (13-17) that asked about the number of close friends.  Unfortunately the categories used in the reports weren't identical, but they were close:

                      2018                  2024

0                       2%                   2%
1-5                  77%                 78%
6-9                  11%
6-10                                        15%
10+                    9%
more than 10                             5%

The results are very similar.  Moreover, the 2018 survey just asked about the number of close friends, while the 2024 survey included the qualifier "not counting family"--to the extent that matters, it would mean the comparison is biased towards finding a decline.  

4.    Back in 1950, the Gallup Poll asked ""When you have personal problems, do you like to discuss them with anyone to help clear them up, or not?" 64% said yes and 35% said no.  There was some sex difference between men and women, but it was not that large (69% yes among women, 62% among men).  Apart from the results, I think that it's interesting that they asked it that way.  Today, the general assumption is that it's a need, not something that you might or might not like to do.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Friendship recession, part 2

 In my last post, I noted that the evidence for a “friendship recession” came down to one survey conducted in 2021.  In that survey, the number saying that they had no friends was a lot higher than in several surveys conducted between 1976 and 2003.   But the earlier surveys were conducted by telephone using random digit dialing—ie, calling people and asking them to participate.   The 2021 survey was given to an online panel—people who agreed to participate regularly in surveys and received a small payment for doing so.  Although the panel was weighted to be representative of the population, it has one inherent difference—the respondents have more experience with surveys.   Consequently, they realize that if you say you have friends, you may get follow-up questions about those friends; if you say you don’t have any friends, you’re less likely to get follow-up questions.  Some respondents may be in a hurry, reluctant to answer more questions on the subject, or just want to get paid with minimum effort, and they will tend to say they have no friends (or only a few).   Of course, I don’t know that this makes a difference—the only way to find out is to compare it to recent surveys conducted by the traditional method.  There don’t seem to be any that ask the same question (not counting family members, how many close friends do you have), but I found one that is similar, from January 2019: “How many people would you consider to be your true friends?”

                  2019           2003

0                  5%             2%

1-2             22%          14%

3-5             35%          39%

6-10           17%          18%

10+.           19%.         27%

The report of the 2019 survey lists the categories as 6-10 and 10 or more, so it’s not clear how they counted people who said they had exactly 10; the 2003 categories are 6-9 and 10+.  Comparing 2019 to 2003, there is some increase in the numbers saying that they had none or just one or two friends.  Also, the 2019 question doesn’t add the condition of not being a family member.  So you could argue that it supports the claim of a decline in friendship.  However, it’s much smaller than the decline suggested by the 2021 survey.  Also, people may understand “true friends” and “close friends” differently:  “true friends” seems more restrictive to me.  Of course, I don’t know if I’m representative on this point, but if I am that could account for some or all of the difference.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

The Friendship Recession: men, women, both, or neither?

 For a while I had a lot of posts about the claim that there has been a decline in social connection.  I was reminded of the issue by a New York Times story which drew on a recent paper in Psychology of Men & Masculinities.  The opening sentence of that paper:  "A variety of global research reports suggest that the size and quality of men's social networks has declined disproportionately in relation to women in the last 30 years (Cox, 2021; Gallup Organisation, 1990; Figures 1 and 2)..."  The citations involve two surveys of the United States, one in 1990 and one in 2021 (the Figures 1 and 2 in the citation are based on data from those surveys), so "variety" is an exaggeration, but the difference between those surveys is dramatic.  To quote from the New York Times: "In a 2021 survey, 15 percent of men said they didn’t have any close friends, up from 3 percent in 1990."  My calculations were slightly different (maybe because of treatment of "don't knows") but also showed a dramatic increase  4.3% in 1990 and 16.4% in 2021.  However, the Times didn't mention that there was also an increase in the number of women reporting no close friends:  from 1.6% to 11.6%.  That is, it increased by a factor of seven, compared to a factor of four among men.  The mean number of reported friends for men went from 11.3 in the 1990 survey to 5.2 in 2021; among women, it went from 8.2 to 4.7.  So you could argue about whether the "friendship recession" was larger among men or women:  either way, if you go by the comparison of these surveys, it was substantial among both and limiting your attention to either men or women alone is misleading.

But is the difference between those surveys a reflection of a change in society or of differences in the surveys themselves?  I wrote about this issue a few years ago, and noted a couple of differences:  the 1990 survey was by telephone and the 2021 survey was an online panel and the 2021 question was preceded by a number of questions about whether you had done various things with friends recently, which may have pushed people towards a stricter definition of "close" friend.  I noticed another difference when I looked this time:  in 2021, the question about the number of close friends is preceded by "Now, thinking only about the friends you are close to…"  You could say that doesn't matter--they just said "close" again.  However, I wonder if some people interpreted that in geographical terms:  "close to" as "live close by," and answer the next question in terms of only those close friends living nearby.  

The Times offered another piece of evidence about the plight of men:  "in 1990, nearly half of young men said they would reach out to friends when facing a personal issue; two decades later, just over 20 percent said the same."  In this case, the questions were the same "Who do you usually talk to first when you have a personal problem?"  Among young men, there was indeed a shift away from friends and towards parents--but was this because they had fewer friends, or because they became closer to their parents?  The question asked about who you talked to first, not about whether you would talk to your friends.  

So my general conclusion is that:  (1) we don't know whether there's been a decline in friendship or social connections and (2) if there has, the evidence is that it's been similar among men and women.  There's also a more technical but still important point:  men are more likely to report having no friends than women are, but also more likely to report having large numbers of friends.  That is, the difference is not a straightforward matter of men having fewer friends.* 

Despite the public interest in this topic, there don't seem to be any other recent surveys.  The question on number of close friends was first asked in 1976 and then was asked a number of times, mostly by Gallup, until 2003.  Since then, it hasn't been repeated except in the 2021 survey (there have been some other questions about friends and/or social connections, but none have been repeated over a span of more than a few years).   

*Of course, reports of the number of friends don't tell you about the nature of those friendships, and it's possible that men and women differ in what they mean by "close friend."  But this just adds to the general point that we don't have much information. 

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

On the eve

 In 1965, there was a Harris poll of college students.  One of the questions involved showing people a list of authors and asking if any were among your favorites.  The authors, listed in order of number choosing them, were William Faulkner, JD Salinger, Ian Fleming, James Baldwin, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Edward Albee, Henry Miller, John Updike, CP Snow, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Jean Genet, William Burroughs, John Cheever, and Doris Lessing.  Baldwin was known for his writings on race and the civil rights movement, and Fleming was a genre novelist (James Bond)--the others could be called "literary" authors.*  I made an index of the number of literary authors that students named as favorites (capped at 4)--about 30% scored 0, 30% 1, 24% 2, 8% 3, and 8% 4 or more.  The survey was mostly about college affairs, but there were a number of political questions, and I looked at their association with score on the literary authors index and with picking Fleming as a favorite.  Baldwin took clear positions on some of the issues, so picking him was an obvious signal of political views--I was interested in whether general taste in literature was associated with political views.

The results:

Vote (or preference) in 1964 election: 
   literary authors:  more likely to support Johnson
   Fleming:  no  clear difference

Party ID:
   literary authors:  more likely to be Democrats or Independents
   Fleming:  no clear difference

Have your views on politics changed a good deal, some, or only a little in college?
    literary authors:  more likely to say a good deal or some
    Fleming:  no clear difference

Vietnam (carry war to North Vietnam; negotiate and get out; hold the line)
   literary authors:  more dovish
   Fleming:  more hawkish    

Should "girl students" be able to obtain contraceptives at the school infirmary?
   literary authors:  more likely to say yes
   Fleming:  no clear difference

Should laws on abortion be relaxed, tightened, or kept the same?
   literary authors:  more likely to say relaxed
   Fleming:  maybe some preference for tightened or kept the same

Approve of Mississippi Freedom Summer
    literary authors:   more likely to approve
    Fleming:  less likely 

Approve of Negro and white students living in the same dormitories:
    literary authors:  no clear difference
    Fleming:  no clear difference

Approve of Negro and white students eating in the same cafeterias:
    literary authors:  no clear difference
    Fleming:  no clear difference

For the preceding two questions, overwhelming majorities approved.  

Approve of Negro and white students belonging to the same social clubs
    literary authors:  no clear difference
    Fleming:  less likely to approve

Overall, there was strong approval, but 21% of students who chose Fleming as a favorite author disapproved, compared to only 9% of those who didn't choose him.

Approve of Negro and white students dating each other:
    literary authors:  more likely to approve
    Fleming: less likely to approve

Approve of "intermarriage between the races"
    literary authors:  more likely to approve
    Fleming:  less likely to approve

There was a pretty consistent tendency for people who liked more literary authors to take liberal positions.  With Fleming, it was less consistent, but when it made a difference, choosing him as a favorite was associated with more conservative positions.  Why?  There's a saying (usually attributed to Robert F. Kennedy, Sr., but apparently George Bernard Shaw said it first):  "some men see things as they are and ask why; I dream of things that never were and ask why not?"  This leaves out a third group (and probably the largest one):  those who see things as they are and say "that's just the way it is."  That is, people who are curious about things are more likely to be critical; conversely, people who just want to be more entertained are more likely to favor keeping things as they are.**  

The more general point is that the association between intellectualism and left-of-center political views is deeply rooted.  

*Sartre also wrote on politics, but I think that at that point he was better known for his novels and plays.

**See also this post.  

I couldn't resist

 As I mentioned in my last post, I have a number of new posts planned (dealing with confidence in institutions and the relation between college education and politics), but this isn't one of them.  A few days ago, a New York Times op-ed by Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner mentioned a Gallup question that goes back to the 1940s:  "looking ahead for the next few years, which political party do you think will do a better job of keeping the country prosperous — the Republican Party or the Democratic Party?"  and I couldn't resist taking a closer look.  The difference between percent saying Democrats and percent saying Republicans:

Rauch and Wehner say "In the post-World War II period, Democrats — still remembered for ending the Great Depression — held a seemingly impregnable prosperity advantage, forcing Republicans to fight every national election uphill."  That had been my impression too, but I'm not sure that the figure bears it out.  In the 1940s and 1950s, the parties were about even.  The Democrats pulled ahead after the recession of 1958, and built their lead in the Kennedy-Johnson administration, but those changes could plausibly be explained as a reaction to short-term economic conditions.  On the other hand, the Republicans never managed to get more than a small lead, so maybe the public did have a tendency to favor the Democrats after taking account of current conditions.  But since the late 1970s, it's been close, as Rauch and Wehner point out.  Also, there seems to have been less variation over time:    between 1964 and 1968, it went from +41 for the Democrats to +2, and between 1972 and 1974 from -5 to +30.  In the last 25 years, the range has been from -14 to +20).    That's probably a reflection of the growing strength of partisanship--people are more likely to say that their party is better, regardless of current conditions.  A possibly related point is that the number of people who name a party (rather than saying that they're both the same or that they don't know which would be better) has increased:  

That may be influenced by changes in interviewing techniques, but the shift has been so large and steady that it seems likely that there's an underlying change in propensity to choose a party--that is, a decline in the number of real independents.  Finally, in recent years, Republicans have had an advantage:  they've led in 13 of the last 15 surveys.  

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

Where was I?

It has been a long time since my last post.  I've been away for the past couple of weeks, at the International Sociological Association Forum of Sociology and then vacationing.  I have a number of posts planned, but also an accumulation of other things that need to get done before I can work on them, so for anyone who is eagerly awaiting another post, here are the slides for my presentation:

College electors, part 3

 I had two previous posts on voting preferences among college students in the 1940s-70s.  This post will look at faculty at two elite universities, Yale and Princeton.   Polls of faculty were less common than polls of students, but were taken in some elections.   In 1948, a poll of Princeton faculty found 47% for Thomas Dewey, 31% for Harry Truman, 16% for Norman Thomas (Socialist), 3% for Henry Wallace (Progressive), and less than 1% (1 out of 220) for Strom Thurmond.  The biggest difference from the national vote was with Thomas, who got only 0.3% in the election.*  I think that some of his support in the poll was sentimental (he was a Princeton graduate) and would have gone to Truman in a real election.  But either way, Princeton faculty were well to the left of the students, who went 70% for Dewey and 10% for Thurmond.  Dewey did better in the sciences and engineering.  

In 1952, 57% of Yale faculty favored Adlai Stevenson and 41% went for Dwight Eisenhower.  Engineering went for Eisenhower by a 3:1 margin, but all of the other schools went for Stevenson, with the Law and Divinity schools especially one-sided (they didn't break it down by department within Arts and Sciences).  The survey also asked about preference in three Senate races, two in Connecticut (one was to fill a vacancy) and one in Wisconsin, where Joe McCarthy was running for re-election.  The results for the Connecticut races were similar to the presidential results, but McCarthy got only 11%, while his Democratic opponent got 82%.

In 1964, 93% of Princeton faculty favored Johnson and only 4% favored Goldwater.  Four of the ten Goldwater supporters in the poll were from Engineering.  The survey also asked about party identification:  55% said they were Democrats, 30% independents, and 15% Republican.  

In 1968, a poll of Princeton faculty found 71% for Hubert Humphrey, 6% for Richard Nixon, 8% for Dick Gregory (Freedom & Peace Party, 0.1% nationwide), and 7% probably wouldn't vote.  The poll also gave space for comments, and "many expressed disenchantment, even disgust, with the choices offered for president."  One physics instructor wrote "I do not support Humphrey-Muskie; I oppose the others.  Wallace, Agnew, and LeMay appeal to the kinds of hatred that put Hitler in power, and Nixon welcomes the fruits of those kinds of hatred."   Engineering gave Nixon his strongest support, although even there he was well behind.  There was no clear difference between the science, humanities, and social science departments--Nixon was below 5% in all.  

Despite the scattered nature of the information, some points are clear.  First, there were differences by field, and they weren't just Humanities and Social Sciences vs. STEM.  This suggests that there is some intrinsic connection between intellectual interests, or certain kinds of intellectual interests, and political views.    Second, there was a big gap between faculty at elite universities and the general public by the late 1960s.  This means that the recent decline in public confidence in higher education isn't a straightforward matter of conservatives reacting to their underrepresentation on university faculties:  if it were, it would have happened long ago. Of course, the general distribution of votes is a not a complete measure of political climate, and you could argue that the decline is a reaction to some other political change on campus, like the rise of DEI.  But if people didn't react to a clear and simple change--the collapse of Republican support among university faculty--it seems unlikely that they would react to a more subtle one.    I think the decline in confidence has been driven by Republican elites:  they became more critical of higher education in recent years, and that has influenced public opinion.    Third, there were large shifts from one election to the next until the 1960s.  From personal observation I'm confident that faculty support for Republican candidates in presidential elections has been consistently low since the 1980s.  But  in 1980 John Anderson, a Republican running as an independent, got a lot of support among students at elite universities.   Anderson represented a strand of Republicanism that was once important but has now disappeared, so that raises a question of how much of the decline of Republican support among university faculty was the result of changes in the Republican party.  That is, when they had an opportunity to pick a liberal/moderate Republican, did they take it?  Unfortunately, I didn't find any faculty polls for the 1980 election.

[Data from the archives of the Daily Princetonian and Yale Daily News]

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.