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.

and why is there so much HATE?

A negative view of universities, especially "elite" universities, has been part of Republican politics for a long time, but has intensified in the last few years.  Is this in line with public opinion?  A couple of weeks ago, a Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos Poll asked people about their views of various policies and actions of the Trump administration, including their dispute with Harvard.  The figure shows the percent approving of different policies among college graduates and non-graduates (restricting it to non-Hispanic whites." 

 

The diagonal line represents equal approval among graduates and non-graduates.  Most of the points are above the line, meaning that they have more support among non-graduates.  However, the pattern of relative approval is similar in both groups--the policies that are more popular among college graduates are the same ones that are popular among non-graduates.  The question about Harvard is "The Trump administration is trying to take a greater role in Harvard University’s hiring of faculty, admission of students, and operation of its academic programs. Harvard says this intrudes on its freedom as a private university. Whose side do you take on this issue, the Trump administration’s or Harvard’s?"  42% of non-graduates and 32% of graduates said that that they took the Trump administration's side, making it one of the less popular polices.  You could object that the question was slanted because it summarized Harvard's objections but not the administration's rationale, but another question asked about "increasing the federal government’s role in how private universities operate."  Support for that was even lower, at 34% and 24%, ranking above only "reducing federal funding for medical research."    

Turning to the relatively popular policies, three of them involved immigration:  general handling of the issue, efforts to deport undocumented immigrants, and sending suspected gang members to a prison in El Salvador.  The other was "trying to end efforts to increase diversity in the government and private workplaces."  The educational gaps were relatively large for all of these--that is, they were particularly popular among non-graduates.  

Two of the questions are notable for having a small educational gap.  One was shutting down the department of Education, which actually got less support among non-graduates.  The other was "cutting back environmental regulations on oil and gas drilling," which got 44% approval among non-graduates and 41% among graduates.  

Many observers say that working-class resentment of educated "elites" has been a major factor in Trump's success.  I think that the reality is that most people don't pay much attention to elite universities, and to the extent that they do, they are more positive than negative.  The attacks on universities are a matter of Republican elites following their own inclinations rather than public opinion.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Getting the wrong idea

 In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Mitch Daniels said that higher education "has failed to deliver value: Its prices rocketed upward even as its rigor, quality and the marketplace value of its degrees eroded."  Rigor and quality are matters of judgment, but the marketplace value of college degrees can be measured, and over the last 50 years it has increased substantially.  But Daniels was president of Purdue University from 2013 to 2022, so you might expect him to be informed about the latest trends--maybe it has declined in recent years?  I looked up the median earnings of wage and salary earners with a high school diploma and no college and wage and salary earners with a bachelor's degree and computed the ratio:

It increased rapidly from 1979 (the first year for which data was available) until the early 1990s and more slowly since then.  Looking more closely, it's been roughly constant since about 2010.  But there's no period in which it has "eroded."  

The bachelor's degree group includes people with advanced degrees.  So maybe there's been "degree inflation"--people discover that their BA isn't worth much, so they go on to get a master's or professional degree?  Since 2000, there is data for people with a BA only--the next figure compares the ratios for BA only to BA and above to high school only.  

Almost the same:  the payoff to a college degree has not declined.  

What do people think about the value of a college degree?  In late 2023, a Pew survey asked "Thinking about the cost of getting a four-year college degree today, would you say it is worth it, even if someone has to take out loans in order to attend, worth it, but only if someone doesn't have to take out loans in order to attend, or not worth it?"  Among Republicans 19% said worth it, 41% worth it only if without loans, and 38% not worth it; among Democrats, it was 26%. 54% and 19%.  That question was only asked once, but in 1997 a survey asked "A college education can now cost on average from $7,000 to $18,000 a year. Do you think a person gets enough out of a college education to justify what they might pay for it?"  The difference by party was small (Democrats 52-36%, Republicans 49-39% and not statistically significant.  In 2015, there a survey of parents of children under 18 asked "how important is it to you that your child earns/children earn a college degree--extremely important, very important, somewhat important, or not too important?"  Among Democrats, it was 49%, 31%, 16%, and 3%; among Republicans, 36%, 31%, 22%, and 8%.  There was another question on how important it was for the child to be financially independent, and there was no partisan difference on that, suggesting that Republican parents had less confidence that a college degree would help to achieve that.  

So it seems that the gap between Republicans and Democrats on the value of a college education opened up before Trump and the years of "peak wokeness" in the late 2010s and early 2020s (also see this post).As far as why, I don't have any definite evidence, but think it was driven by Republican elites (like Mitch Daniels, who was governor of Indiana before he became president of Purdue).  I offered a possible reason for their increasingly negative views of higher education in a post from 2013.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Separate ways

 A few days ago, Andrew Gelman observed that views on scientific authority have become more politically polarized in over the last few decades.  This post will take a closer look at the timing.  The General Social Survey has a series of questions of the form "as far as the people running these institutions are concerned, would you say you have a great deal of confidence, only some confidence, or very little confidence at all in them."  One of the institutions they ask about is "the scientific community."  The average among self-rated liberals and conservatives (I leave moderates out in order to make the figure easier to read), with higher numbers indicating more confidence:  

The next figure shows the size of the gap (liberal minus conservative).  

There was no consistent difference in the 1970s and 1980s, but a gap emerged in the 1990s and grew gradually for several decades (see this paper by Gordon Gauchat for a detailed account), before growing dramatically in the last few years (the four most recent surveys are 2016, 2018, 2021, and 2022). 

The GSS also asked about "medicine."  The liberal and conservative means:  

No consistent difference until the last few surveys, when a substantial gap has emerged.  

The GSS also asks about confidence in education.  The liberal and conservative means:

The pattern is similar to "the scientific community":  a difference emerging in the 1990s and then growing gradually before increasing dramatically in the last few years.  

This pattern is not universal:  for example, the gap in confidence in business has been pretty constant since the 1970s, and the gap in confidence in organized labor has grown gradually.  The obvious explanation for the recent growth with science, medicine, and education is the response to Covid.  Will it persist or will things shift back to where they were previously?  There was another round of the GSS in 2024; the data will be released soon, which will at least provide the beginnings of an answer.  

Postscript

 In my last post, I forgot to mention that in 2004 they asked whether American trade policy towards other countries was fair or unfair.  People consistently rated American policy towards them as more fair than their policy towards us, but there were some differences in the judgments regarding different countries:  

The more fair people saw a country's policy towards the US, the more fair they saw our policy towards it.  As I mentioned in my previous post, most people have no experience they can draw on to make these judgments, so I think it's just general feeling about whether we are in a cooperative or antagonistic relationship with them.  

The survey also asked about American trade policy towards "poor countries":  51% said it was fair, 36% unfair.  That is considerably less fair than perceived policy towards the other countries:  it is equal to the lowest value on the y-axis.  They didn't ask about poor countries' policies to the United States.  If you extrapolated from the numbers here, you would say their policies must be seen as highly unfair to the United States.  But I don't think they would follow that pattern:  rather, to some extent people figure that rich and powerful countries will mistreat poor countries.  There's some evidence of that in the figure: of the countries included, Mexico would be seen as the weakest economically (China's per-capita GDP was smaller, but it was already seen as an economic power because of the combination of a large population and rapid growth).   And Mexico is below the line, meaning that American trade policy towards it was seen as less fair than would be expected given their perceived policy towards us. 

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]