Now and then

Opinion surveys began in the 1930s, when the state of the economy was obviously a major issue.  However, questions on "the economy" didn't appear until much later--the earliest ones I have found are from 1976.  Before then, questions focused on specific aspects of the economy--there were a few on "business conditions," but more on changes in your own situation.   The first of those was in June 1941:  "Financially, are you better off, or worse off than last year? "  31% said better off, 18% worse off, and 51% about the same.  The figure shows the net sentiment (better-worse) every time this question was asked (with some variation in form) from 1941 until the mid-1970s.  

Most of the questions asked about the previous year, but some asked about the "last few" or "last two or three" years.  It looks like assessments of the last few years were more positive than assessments of the last year.  After the mid-1970s, the questions get more numerous.   Here are results of the "last year" question from 1976-95.  

Here are results of the "last few years," which has been included in the GSS since 1972:

There is clearly a difference:  the balance on the last few years question is almost always positive--the only exceptions are in 2010 and 2012--while the balance on the last year question is often negative.  I'm not sure why this would be the case, but it means that you need to have different standards for evaluating the two questions.   Common sense suggest that they will rise and fall together to some extent, but how close is the connection?  I'll look at that in a future post.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Too many people

 In 1947, the Gallup poll asked "Do you think this town [city] would be better off or worse off if more people lived here?"  31% said better off, 46% worse off, 9% the same, 5% that it depended on the type of people, and 10% weren't sure.  There was a parallel question about your state:  for this, it was 40% better off, 27% worse, 14% the same, and 20% no opinion.  So people were more positive about having more people in their state than in their town.  These questions were asked to a randomly selected half of the sample; the other half was asked "There are about 140 million people today in the United States. Do you think this country would be better off or worse off if there were more people living here?"  Only 16% said better off, with 56% saying worse off, 14% the same, 3% that it would depend, and 11% weren't sure.  That is, people were more negative about having more people in America than in their city or state.  Why?  One possibility is that 140 million sounds like a large number, so that mentioning it made people less inclined to say that we would benefit from having more.  But another possibility is that increases in the population of your town or state could involve people moving from other towns or states--an increase in the American population would have to involve immigration.*  

As far as group differences, people who lived in urban areas, more educated people, and people in New England and the Middle Atlantic states were more likely to say that a larger population would be good.  These qualities are all associated with "cosmopolitansim," supporting the idea that answers are related to attitudes towards immigration (the group differences for opinions about your city and state were generally smaller and had different patterns).**  However, negative opinions were more numerous than positive ones in every group.  There was little or no difference by party identification.  

This is one more piece of evidence for something I've mentioned before: Americans were not keen on allowing more immigration during the 1950s and 1960s--in 1964, when the restrictive 1924 law was still in force, more people favored reducing immigration than increasing it.  

*Over the long run, it could be natural increase, but people seem to think about the near future if the time frame isn't specified.  

**Most Gallup surveys asked about religion, but this one did not.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Governors and presidents

 When people were talking about who Kamala Harris might choose as her running mate, Josh Shapiro's high approval rating was often mentioned.  I hadn't heard anything about how Tim Walz stood in that respect, so I looked and found that Morning Consult  tracks the approval rating for all governors.  As of July 24, Shapiro's net rating (favorable minus unfavorable) was +25, which is good but not exceptional (tied for 16th).  Walz was +13, which is below average but not exceptional either (tied for 36th).  There was no obvious pattern in the ratings, although there may be some tendency for governors in smaller states to have higher approval ratings:

The thing that I found most striking was simply that they were almost all positive--only two were "underwater" and those were at -1.  In contrast, Joe Biden has been underwater for most of his time in office, Donald Trump was for almost all of his, Barack Obama for about a third of his, and George W. Bush for about his last three years in office.  That led me to wonder if there was a general tendency for governors to get higher approval ratings than Presidents--often people feel more positive about things that are closer to them.  

There have been several questions about approval of the governor of your state, ranging from 1954 to 2023.*  The figure shows net approval ratings for governors, and presidential approval at the same times.  

Gubernatorial approval ratings have not been consistently higher than presidential--they were lower in six of the first seven times, and have been higher in the last three.  With only ten cases, it's hard to be confident about anything, but they suggest that the 21st century discontent is specifically about national politics, not about politics in general.   

*The Morning Consult data go back to 2017, but require a subscription which is beyond what my research budget can afford.  

Left behind?, part 3

The final issue I want to consider is whether people living in rural areas feel left behind in a material sense.  The GSS has a question on satisfaction with your financial situation which has been running since 1972.  There is no essentially no difference between the averages for people in MSAs, "other urban" counties (ie, with towns of over 10,000), and rural counties.*  The trend is -.01 in MSAs, -.02 in other urban counties, and -.04 in rural counties; the difference is probably statistically significant, but is too small to show up clearly in a figure.  Since 1994, there has been a question on how your standard of living compares to your parents' standard of living at the same age.  There's no clear difference on the average (if anything, people in rural areas are a bit more positive):  the correlations with time are -.07 in MSAs, -.10 in other urban, and -.06 in rural counties.  Finally, there's a question on how you see your family income relative to other American families--people in MSAs see it as higher, but there is little or no difference in the trends.  The GSS also asks about actual family income, which is indeed higher in MSAs.  The trend on family income is .15 in MSAs, .10 in other urban, and .16 in rural counties.  

So the growing relative dissatisfaction in rural areas doesn't seem to be a result of growing relative dissatisfaction with economic conditions.  That is, to the extent that people in rural areas feel "left behind," it's not by economic developments, but by something else.  

A couple of other notes:

1.  In the 21st century, over half of the white respondents live in MSAs, about a third in "other urban," and about 12% in rural counties.  

2.  In his speech at the Republican convention, J D Vance said he grew up in "Middletown, Ohio, a small town where people spoke their minds, built with their hands, and loved their God, their family, their community and their country with their whole hearts."  Middletown has a population of about 50,000 and is classified as part of the Cincinnati metropolitan area.  There's necessarily some fuzziness in the boundaries of metropolitan areas, and it's about 40 miles from Cincinnati, so you could argue about whether it should really be included.  But 50,000 isn't a small town--in Maine, where I live now, that would make it the second largest city.  So why did he say that it was?  I think it's an example of a tendency in political rhetoric and journalism to treat small town/"heartland"/working class/economically declining as more or less the same thing.  

*As before, I limit the analyses to whites.   

Left behind?, part 2

 After I finished my last post, it occurred to me that if people in rural areas felt "left behind," that should lead to a decline of confidence in institutions.  The General Social Survey has a series of questions about confidence in "the people running" various institutions.  For most of them, there's been a long-term decline (see this post):  the question I'll consider here is whether that decline has been larger in rural areas.  By and large, it has:  taking the twelve that have been asked about since the 1970s, the median correlation of confidence with time is -.115 for people living in MSAs, -.15 for people living in "other urban" counties, and -.18 for people living in rural areas.  Two of them stood out as especially large gaps:  medicine and education.  The figures show means by place of residence over time:

There's a lot of sampling variation in the individual years, so I include smoothed estimates.  Their exact shape should not be taken too seriously, but it's clear that in the 1970s and 1980s confidence in education was generally higher in rural areas and "other urban" than in MSAs, and in recent years the difference has disappeared.  

In the 1970s, confidence in medicine was higher in towns and rural areas than in MSAs:  now it is lower.  

Why would those two institutions show a particularly large decline in confidence in rural areas?  One possibility is that it's part of a general decline in trust in science and experts, maybe because they are all seen as part of a distant elite.  However, there's also a question about confidence in "the scientific community," and the trends for that are about the same in all types of places.  That suggests that the explanation is something specific to medicine and education.

There has been a trend towards geographic concentration of medical services, so people in rural areas are less likely to have medical providers in the community or nearby.  This could help to explain the relative decline in confidence.  For education, there was also a process of consolidation as small school districts were merged into larger districts.  That is, people in rural areas didn't have as much connection to and control of the schools as they previously had.  Although most of the consolidation took place in the 1950s and 1960s, the regional schools started with the teachers and administrators who had been in the local schools, so it may have taken a while for perceptions to change.  

The GSS also had a question on how much satisfaction you get from "the city or place you live in."  Unfortunately, they dropped the question in the mid-1990s, but there's a striking trend in the years before then.  In the 1970s, people in rural areas were substantially more satisfied than people in MSAs; that advantage was gone by the 1990s.  Hopefully, there are questions that are similar enough to take the story up to the present:  if I find any, I'll talk about them in a future post.

Left Behind?

 A few weeks ago, the New York Times had an article on rising support for the National Rally in rural France, which it said was due to a feeling of being neglected by the national government:  "Residents in this sparsely populated region ... - describe what is happening to their community as 'desertification,' by which they mean an emptying out of services, and of their lives."  Rural areas in the United States are also moving to the right, and people often give a similar explanation--they are "left behind" by changes in the economy, think the government isn't interested in their problems, and in some accounts resent the places and groups that seem to be moving ahead of them.  Economic growth has clearly been lagging in many small towns and rural areas, but I haven't seen much information about changes in political views, so I'll look at that issue in this post.  

The General Social Survey classifies places into six groups:  central city of the twelve largest metropolitan statistical areas, suburbs of the 12 largest MSAs, central city of the 13-100 MSAs, suburbs of the 13-100 MSAs, counties with towns of 10,000 or more, and counties without towns of 10,000 or more.  I combined the first four, so that there are three groups.  Then I calculated the correlation between year and opinions for each question.*  I'll start with two general measures of political orientation:  self-rating as liberal, moderate, or conservative; and whether the government is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and private business.  Each is coded so that a positive correlation means that opinions have tended to move in a liberal direction since the question was first asked (in the 1970s).

                          MSA     Town      Rural

POLVIEWS       .00        -.05         -.07
HELPNOT         .01        -.01         -.07

So urban areas have stayed about the same, while rural areas have become more conservative on both (generally, differences of about .03 or more are statistically significant).  

Now a few "social issues," again with positive signs meaning liberal trends:  legal abortion, whether sex between two adults of the same sex is wrong, whether there should be prayer in public schools, and whether a police permit should be required in order to buy a gun:

                             MSA     Town      Rural

ABSINGLE           -.05       -.05        -.03
HOMOSEX            .37        .32          .32
PRAYER                .07        .02          .01
GUNLAW             -.03        -.03        -.06

Rural areas have become more conservative relative to MSAs on three of the four.

Now some opinions related to race and ethnicity:  whether racial inequality is mostly due to discrimination against blacks, whether it's because blacks don't have the motivation and will power to get ahead, and whether the number of immigrants should be increased or reduced.  Again, a positive sign means a liberal trend:

                              MSA           Town         Rural
RACDIF1                 .06              .04            -.06
RACDIF4                 .22              .15              .17
LETIN1A                  .18              .15             .21

Rural areas have become relatively more conservative on the two questions about race, but there's no clear difference on immigration (that question has been asked only since the 1990s, so the standard errors are larger).

Now some questions about government spending on various issues.   Positive numbers mean a trend towards support for more spending.  There are a lot of questions, so I won't list them all, just talk about the general pattern and some notable cases.

                             MSA    Town    Rural

Nataid                .15  .10         .07
Natpark                .01  .05         .03
Natarms                .01  .05         .12
Natroad                .09  .08         .07
Nateduc                .13  .15         .16
Natrace                .14  .10         .09
Natheal                .00  .01         .06
Natenvir                .02  .01         .04
Natcity               -.02  .02         .05
Natmass                .05  .04         .10
Natfare                .11  .08         .06
Natsoc                .03  .05         .09
Natfarey                .06  .01         .05
Natspac                .19  .18         .22

Almost all of the trends are positive (towards favoring more spending)--the 1970s were a time of backlash against government spending.  The average across the questions is about the same for all groups, but there are some differences for individual items.  The upward trend is stronger in rural areas for spending on defense and the military (NATARMS), and weaker for foreign aid (NATAID), spending to help blacks (NATRACE), and welfare (NATFARE).  So far, it's a relative conservative shift in rural areas.  But the upward trend is also stronger for social security (NATSOC), health care (NATHEAL), mass transity (NATMASS), and even "solving the problems of big cities" (NATCITY).  

Finally, there's a question on the amount of federal income taxes you pay.  A positive number means that it's too low or about right rather than too high.

                              MSA       Town      Rural

TAX                       .06            .04          -.01

People in MSAs have been getting more satisfied (or less dissatisfied) and people in rural areas have stayed about the same.  That is, although people in rural areas have become more favorable towards spending on a lot of things, they haven't become more willing to accept taxes.

Overall, the movement in rural areas hasn't been a straightforward conservative one.   The spending questions suggest that people in rural areas have moved towards wanting the government to do more for Americans in general, but not for blacks specifically, and not for foreign nations.  There doesn't seem to be growing resentment against cities--if anything, it's diminished (see NATCITY and NATMASS).  And although rural areas have become relatively more conservative on race (NATBLACK, RACDIF1, RACDIF4), they haven't generally turned against "outsiders" (see LETIN1A).  

*I limited the analysis to whites.

The elites vs. the public?

A negative view of "elites" has become a central part of American conservatism.  It was always present to some degree, but it used to be focused on specific groups, especially journalists and intellectuals.  Now it's become a more general vision of a "deep state," "blob," or "uniparty."  In some versions, the elite has left-wing views and despises ordinary Americans--I wrote about one example a few weeks ago.  But there's also another version, which doesn't see the difference purely in terms of left and right, and where the elite is just not very aware of the public.   According to Oren Cass, the underlying problem in America is "elites who remain fully committed to their own preferences, to pulling the levers of power for their own benefit and to offering candidates in both parties who would preserve the status quo."  By "candidates in both parties" he doesn't mean Biden and Trump, but Biden and Nikki Haley--Trump represents the people, although he does that "imperfectly."  Although Cass doesn't offer any data on elite opinion, he is right in suggesting that Trump appeals to some views that are popular in the public but not among elites.  

The figure is from a Chicago Council on Foreign Relations (Chicago Council on Global Affairs) survey that asked people and members of "foreign policy elites" to rank the importance of various possible foreign policy goals (1-3, higher means more important).  The ones below the diagonal line were ranked higher by the public than by elites; the ones above the line were ranked higher by elites.   The biggest gaps are for "helping to improve the standard of living of less developed nations" (ranked higher by elites), "controlling and reducing illegal immigration" (ranked higher by the public), and "protecting the jobs of American workers" (ranked higher by the public).  

Here is the corresponding figure for 2016.  The question on improving the standard of living wasn't included in this survey, but illegal immigration and jobs were, and again they were ranked more important by the public.  The 2016 survey added a question on "attaining US energy independence," which was ranked higher by the public (the 2004 survey had a question on "securing adequate supplies of energy, which was also ranked higher by the public).  The biggest gap in the other direction was "limiting climate change"--that question wasn't in the 2004 survey, but "improving the global environment" was ranked higher by elites in both surveys.  Compared to the general public, elites also placed a higher priority on "defending our allies' security."

So there are large and persisting gaps between elite and public opinion, and the goals which the public ranks more highly are ones that Trump has emphasized.  Cass says that  "leaders might seek to shape public opinion and alter preferences — indeed, that is part of leading — but they must yield to the outcome. Their obligation is to pursue the community’s priorities, not their own." The problem with this principle is that different potential goals are not independent of each other--people think protecting American jobs is important, but it's safe to say that they also think that having low prices is important.  On the other hand, sometimes goals are complementary--for example, a higher standard of living in less developed countries might reduce illegal immigration.   So if elites don't follow public opinion on specific policies, it's not necessarily because they are thinking about their own benefit:  it could be because they think they have a better understanding of how to achieve "the community's priorities," as they understand them.  Of course, those beliefs could be wrong, and Cass suggests they are:  his essay is called "This is what elite failure looks like."  Many other observers have offered similar accounts:  the idea is that decades of policy failures led to popular discontent and a revolt against the elites.  But have elites actually done so badly?  I'll look at that question in a future post.