What American Voters Want

What American Voters Want

Polarization vs Outsourcing Their Opinions

We’re in media headline mode in this country. There is pressure on individual voters from political parties, social media, pastors and priests as well as peers “to pick a side.” This almost always devolves around “red or blue” instead of the traditional categorization found on most ballots, mostly Republican, Democrat or Independent. Red is technically Republican, but if you delve into traditional GOP platforms and policies, aside from low taxes and reduced commercial regulation, these days there is an extreme focus on evangelical values under “MAGA Republican” to the truest descriptor of what being a member of the Republican means these days… vs a “Lincoln” Republican, which is not particularly represented among elected GOP officials these days.

To make matters worse, once you actually fall for the demand to “pick a side,” you now can filter the information you receive by narrowing social media and mass media flow to fit the side you picked. So, we now live with the big story: America is hopelessly polarized, we are at each other’s throats and ready to kill each other in an “inevitable” civil war. Indeed, that social and mass media filtration encourages divisiveness, exaggeration and a tsunami of “only I can fix it” candidates. Exaggerating the horribles, always trashing “the other side of radicals,” candidates without any moral compass smell opportunity. Polarization may be bad for the nation, but it sure is good for a campaign of blame and very narrow vectors for a “my way” future.

Karl Vick, writing for the July 3rd Time Magazine, proposed that once you dig into what Americans want, the commonality that crossed red/blue lines suggest that the description of a polarized nations is genuine falls apart when you strip out the labels; it is a myth, he says: “In January 2021, in the turbulent wake of the last presidential contest, a former professor named Todd Rose asked some 2,000 people a question. The survey was, at least on the surface, designed to deduce what kind of country Americans would like future generations to inherit.

“Each person was presented with 55 separate goal statements for the nation—'People have individual rights’ was one; ‘People have high-quality health care’ was another—and asked to rank them in order of importance. Each person was also asked how each goal would be ranked by ‘other people.’… When the results were tallied, the surprise was not that ‘People have individual rights’ came in first, or that ‘People have high-quality health care’ finished second. The surprise was the third highest priority: ‘Successfully address climate change.’ We know that’s a surprise because, on the list of what ‘other people’ considered important, climate came in 33rd. In other words, no one thought their fellow Americans saw climate as the high-priority item nearly everyone actually considered it to be.

“That gap—between what we ourselves think and what we reckon others must be thinking—may hold the power to upend a great deal of what we believe we know about American civic life… ‘People are lousy at figuring out what the group thinks,’ Rose says. This collective blind spot is a quirk he would underline to students when he was teaching the neuroscience of learning at Harvard. At Populace, the think tank he co-founded to put such knowledge to practical use, the foible plays a prominent role in efforts to undo what Rose calls the ‘shared illusion’ that Americans are hopelessly divided.

“And divided we certainly think we are. The only thing Americans seem to agree on is that Americans cannot agree on anything. It’s hardly worth summarizing the headlines about doom and radicalization. In the prelude to a November ballot featuring the candidate synonymous with polarization, all the dapple and nuance of life is once again being reduced to a binary. Choose a side: red or blue.

“Yet in the wintry interval between Jan. 6 and Inauguration Day 2021, that Populace survey, dubbed the American Aspirations Index, found ‘stunning agreement’ on national goals across every segment of the U.S. population, including, to a significant extent, among those who voted for Donald Trump and those who voted for Joe Biden. On the few points where the survey registered disagreement (notably, on immigration and borders), the dissent was intense. But intense disagreement was the exception, not the rule.” But how do Americans make election decisions? Generally, when voting for candidates, they are given just two viable choices. But the issues are complex, built on diverse variables, and having to summarize a vote with one of two choices is often difficult and confusing.

“Katherine Krimmel, assistant professor of political science at Barnard College, said it might be easier to understand what kind of policy action people think best suits a given problem than getting an accurate sense of which problems they think should be prioritized given the seemingly infinite possibilities… But she felt that the data show that Americans can have reasonably formed preferences on issues that are important to them, even if their preferences might not align perfectly with the blunt instrument of a single vote they can assign to — usually — one of two viable candidates… ‘If you are somebody who has very thoughtful, well-informed preferences about, say, four or five issues, maybe they don’t map onto our partisan landscape cleanly,’ Krimmel said. ‘It can be really challenging for people to locate themselves in the party system we have.’

“Researchers and representatives in government need to understand public views even if the public’s understanding of issues might be incomplete or lacking in nuance, [UCLA Professor Chris] Tausanovitch said… ‘We could all think of issues that are way too technocratic for your average voter,’ he said. ‘Nonetheless, the government needs to make choices. And those choices should ideally be in line with voters’ values.’ … ‘Sometimes we are asking people about things they never thought about before, but other times we are asking about things they have thought about a lot and care very deeply about,’ he said. ‘That is what a lot of this work is getting at, and so I know we can get better.’

“The goal for political scientists, Tausanovitch said, is to gauge public opinion as accurately as possible as voters respond to how the political system is performing… ‘Studying the influence that voters have on the political system, for me, means trying to understand what voters care about,’ he said. ‘And trying to find the areas in which we would actually expect voters’ opinions to make a difference.’ A June 26th report from the Yale University Institution for Social and Policy Studies summarized by Rick Harrison.

But this complexity, subjected to the pressures on individual voters based on their education and their environment as noted above, often manifests itself in a herd-like outsourcing of opinions to leaders who reflect enough of the voter’s commonality, embraced by determined (often dogmatic) forceful rhetoric, to carry the rest of the extremes that define that red/blue divide. We could reverse course… and begin with a discussion of that commonality without blaming the other side for… everything bad and stupid.

I’m Peter Dekom, and as Americans not bound by some faith-driven mandate where choice is not allowed look to make decisions about “us,” perhaps the secret is in sharing the factors that truly make “us”… well… a bona fide “us.”