What polls can tell us
The most interesting survey research isn’t that which seeks to measure public opinion on this or that issue, but that which tells us something about ourselves.
When we find out what issues Americans think are most important and what they actually know about those issues, we get a better sense of our capacity for self-government and the degree of responsiveness of those whom we choose to govern us.
How much Americans know about gun control, abortion, tax policy, etc., matters more than what they might think about them at any particular point because knowledge is the prerequisite for the formulation of informed opinion, and informed opinion is crucial to the maintenance of any democratic process (what the founders called “virtue”).
In an era when “misinformation” and “disinformation” (seldom distinguished or defined) are said to be on the rise, we can also use survey research results to determine both their impact and the degree to which our fourth estate is combating or abetting it. When the public unreasonably believes by wide margins something that simply isn’t true, a certain amount of media culpability can be reasonably inferred.
For example, during the pandemic, survey research consistently indicated that Americans greatly overestimated the threat posed by the virus, in terms of their estimates of the death toll as a percentage of overall population, the lethality of the virus for those under the age of 65 (especially those under 25), and the likelihood of hospitalization if infected.
Such misperceptions suggest that much of our media pandemic coverage failed to provide the kind of information and context necessary for the public and the policymakers it influenced to engage in the risk assessments crucial to policy decisions that involved tradeoffs.
Schools were, for instance, closed in many places for much longer than necessary, with educational costs that are now becoming all too evident. Because so many, acting out of ignorance, so badly exaggerated the degree of threat to children, injuries were inflicted that could have terrible consequences for everyone for decades to come.
In addition to telling us the extent to which the public might be misinformed on important issues (perhaps out of journalistic malpractice), survey results can also help to clarify the extent to which right and left see the world differently.
That such differences are vast was suggested not just by their different responses to the pandemic but also by a recent Quinnipiac University poll attempting to identify which issues Americans find most pressing (“the most urgent issue facing the country today”).
As summarized by the Washington Examiner, “For Republican respondents, the easy winner was inflation at 46 percent. For self-described independents, it was also inflation, at 37 percent. In both cases, the next most important issue was a very distant second. In fact, nearly every demographic group agreed that inflation is the most important issue. Men (39 percent), women (28 percent), white people (36 percent), Black people (21 percent), Hispanic people (36 percent), youngsters (29 percent), millennials (41 percent), baby boomers (39 percent), seniors (26 percent), white college graduates (34 percent), and white non-college graduates (37 percent) all agreed that inflation is the most important issue facing the country right now.”
The only group for which inflation wasn’t the most urgent problem was self-identified Democrats, among whom it ranked second at just 14 percent (behind abortion at 18 percent and barely ahead of electoral laws and climate change, at 13 percent and 10 percent, respectively).
Such results baffle at first glance, since it could be assumed that inflation hurts Democrats as they go about their daily affairs as much as it hurts other groups; that while we would expect to see some variation among those groups (as we do), the more than three-to-one differential between Republicans and Democrats (46 percent to 14 percent) on the issue suggests a Grand Canyon-size chasm in worldview.
That differential begins to make more sense, however, when you figure partisan polarization and resulting tribalism into the explanatory mix; more precisely, when we consider that a Democratic administration is presiding over and being blamed by much of the public for the inflationary plague, and that perhaps hard-core Democrats wish to pretend, like Joe Biden, that it isn’t that much of a problem and that, if it is, he didn’t cause it.
Tribalism might require Democrats to pretend inflation doesn’t hurt them much, even if it actually does and, conversely, Republicans to claim it hurts a great deal, even if it might not. The hunch is that if inflation were to get two or three times worse than it already is, Democrats would still tell pollsters it isn’t that big of a problem, and were it to decline to the same extent Republicans would still say it was.
Donald Trump, in only half-joking confirmation of his cult of personality, once boasted that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and not lose any support.
Democrats are now also becoming, presumably because of the continuing threat from the orange ogre, awfully good at stopping up their ears and covering their eyes when it comes to everything Biden.
By such logic is the partisan game played; we don’t so much see different realities as we feel compelled for the sake of tribal loyalty to pretend we do.