December 23, 2024
5 min read
Americans are moody and pollsters need to pay attention
The full potential of polling lies in its ability to illuminate deeper social trends that go beyond electoral predictions
In April 2021, the first media survey to gauge a possible 2024 election matchup between President Joe Biden and former President Trump, was commissioned by Reuters just 100 days after Biden’s inauguration. Another 1,279 Biden/Trump and 521 Harris/Trump national elections “horse race” polls followed. Now that the votes are in and Donald Trump has been elected to a second term, it’s worth asking whether this was the best use of polls.
Maybe. Such pre-election polls often attract public attention because of their apparent simplicity: a snapshot of who is winning or losing. If well reported, it helps voters understand the dynamics of the political campaign.
But the news and polling industry’s excessive focus on “the horse race” comes at the expense of surveys that measure the public’s mood. Often that mood can be that tell us more then the ups and downs of the horse race, as we just saw with the presidential election, apparently driven by feelings of economic anger among late-breaking, undecided voters.
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The public mood is a broad term for the shared feeling that arises from the interactions of people within a political community. At the national level, it includes people’s trust in democratic processes and political institutions, their commitment to their communities and trust in other Americans, and their views on the country’s future. These data points are rarely covered in pre-election reporting because they are nuanced and harder to explain. But when surveys of public sentiment are rigorously conducted and thoughtfully interpreted, they convey important signals that we can’t get from horse racing polls alone.
Over the past thirty years, political scientists have demonstrated the impact of public sentiment on policy and political outcomes. Benjamin Page of Northwestern University and Robert Shapiro of Columbia have shown this The attitude of the audience is responsive to important political and social events, and provide a reliable guide for policymakers seeking to align laws with people’s priorities; examples include slow-moving changes in racial attitudes in response to the civil rights movement, or shifts in economic attitudes with changes in unemployment or inflation. University of North Carolina political scientist James Stimson’s groundbreaking concept of the ‘policy vote‘ showed how the public’s general attitudes change over time, moving back and forth between liberal and conservative preferences, and reflecting the country’s evolving priorities. Christopher Wlezien, now at the University of Texas at Austin, described this as “thermostatic public opinion.” When government policy exceeds public preferences in one direction, citizens respond by expressing preferences and voting to move them in the other direction. These thermostatic adjustments predict and explain long-term policy trends, such as support for defense spending and investments in environmental protection.
The value of understanding the public’s mood extends beyond policy preferences. Recent research by Karlyn Bowman of the American Enterprise Institute examined human characteristics tendency towards nostalgiaor the idea that the country was better off in the past, as opposed to the public’s general optimism about the country’s future. By looking extensively at data dating back to the 1930s, she finds that the public swings between these views in logical ways that correspond to the political and economic context of the time. She gives examples of how politicians can gain support if they understand and harness a nostalgic or optimistic mood.
You may have guessed where that pendulum is swinging now. In the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, I and my colleagues at NORC at the University of Chicago and the Louisiana State University Manship School of Mass Communication studied public mood by measuring attitudes toward long-standing and systemic issues in instead of their temporal responses to current events. . We discovered that Americans felt pervasive mistrust and pessimismwith a deep-seated cynicism about institutions and democracy, and rather pessimistic views about the future of the country. For example, only a quarter believed the country’s best days were ahead. And when asked a series of questions about how much trust people have in those running the government, the answers were alarming. Only about two in 10 say you can trust people in government to do the right thing. The same number felt that politicians were more interested in blocking things than solving problems. Only one in ten thought the government represented them well.
Many Americans had lost confidence in the fundamental principles underlying our democracy, including about 70 percent who were at least somewhat concerned that there would not be a peaceful transition of power after the presidential election. A quarter of Americans believed the country needed “complete and total upheaval” to get back on track.
We have shown that, on many of these measures, Americans have become more negative and pessimistic. Twenty years ago, for example, less than half of the public thought politicians were only out for themselves. Now that number stands at 70 percent.
We also found that this cynicism is shared by people across the political spectrum: by those who are deeply involved and those who are not, by those who have a positive view of America’s history of diversity, and by those who are not to have. If the report acknowledges: “In some ways, Americans seem most united in the deep chords of mistrust.”
While the 2024 horse racing polls could only tell us the race was tight, this survey of the public mood revealed the strong headwind faced by the Harris campaign. The campaign attempted to project a perspective of political and economic opportunity rooted in America’s core systems and institutions, while the electorate had virtually no confidence in the system or the future. Understanding the public mood helps explain why Harris sought to discern how she would reform the country wasn’t enough to defeat Trump’s ability to tap into the pessimism and public anger that resonated so deeply with Americans across the political spectrum.
Collectively, this research highlights the importance of public mood for understanding long-term social, political, and economic health. Although public opinion on individual issues and candidates can be volatile, in the longer term the general public mood tends toward stability and rationality. This consistency ensures that public opinion can serve as a reliable guide to understanding the electorate.
To realize its potential, pollsters must broaden their focus during election cycles. Horse race polls serve their purpose, but they are only a snippet of what polls can reveal about our democracy. By investing more resources in measuring public sentiment—tracking shifts in optimism, confidence, and policy preferences—we can deepen our understanding of the electorate and the forces that shape their decisions. We can help people understand where their fellow voters are coming from and perhaps reduce the number of election surprises. As media pollsters, we have a responsibility to preserve public opinion research as a tool not only for predicting elections, but also for enriching public debate and informing a more responsive democracy.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views of the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American. The author’s opinions are solely her own and do not represent any organization with which she is affiliated.
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