American Idiot

Voters Know Nothing, Jon Snow.

This book, The American Voter, first published in 1960, is the Bible of my subfield in political science: political behavior.

Political behavior is the study of the way people think, feel, and act with regard to politics and includes everyone from political office holders and candidates (elites) to your average man on the street voters.

As soon as phones became prolific enough to allow for scientific polling political scientists launched surveys to figure out what Americans knew about their government.

The results were shocking. It turned out that other than who the current president is and vague impressions of what the two parties stand for, average Joes and Janes knew next to nothing about their own government!

Now, you might be thinking, isn’t that kind of a problem in a government “for the people, by the people” where the average citizen, through their vote is tasked with self government?

I would argue yes, yes it is.

But the authors insisted that having a public that doesn’t know anything about their own government was just fine because in our two party system, voters don’t have to inform themselves to engage. The authors point out that voters “get around” the vast wasteland of their own political knowledge by using a “heuristic,” a cue, that helps them make sense of the political world despite having little working knowledge of it.

That cue is party identification.

In fact, the authors argued, wouldn’t America be even better if the two political parties were distinct enough from each other that voters could easily spot the difference?

Well, 60 years later we’re living their dream: two parties so divergent that one believes in reality and the other believes in, well, something else.

I’ve shown you many times the strength of party ID on vote choice, but today I am going to show you how it infects our public opinion surveys and renders it useless in terms of measuring actual reality-based sentiment.

Every time the White House switches party control I get to show you, through data, what happens to public opinion among Republicans and their right leaning independent friends.

Behold: The fully predictable crash and magical resurrection of Republican voters "opinion" on the state of the economy.

Ok, what are we seeing on this graph?

On the left half of the graph, right around DEC of 2020, you will see a sharp and sudden rise in the percent of Republicans describing the economy as “getting worse.”

Now, since you’re a bunch of thinkers, you might be thinking, “wait, wasn’t the economy getting worse in Dec of 2020?”

The answer is no.

The U.S. did not begin shutting down for COVID until after Super Tuesday in early February 2021. The dramatic shift you see on the left side of this graph predates the COVID crisis.

But it does not predate another crisis, at least in the eyes of Republican voters: a Democrat getting elected to the White House.

That’s right. Almost the minute Biden won, and even while Trump was launching the Big Lie, Republicans turned sour on the economy.

Fast forward to today and you’ll now switch your attention the right side of the graph. You will see that almost upon the election of Trump, Republicans decided the economy was going to get better.

Now, I need to also show you how Democrats respond to the same event: change in partisan control of the White House.

As you see on the left side of the graph, like their Republican counterparts Democrats also respond in a partisan manner to survey questions.

As soon as Joe Biden won in 2020, the percent of Democrats describing the state of the economy as “getting worse” immediately crashes.

That said, you should also note that throughout the Biden presidency Democrats were far more likely to answer the economics question based on the actual state of the economy. That is why side-by-side you can see that the huge gap in the middle of the Republican graph does not exist on the Democratic graph.

That gap shows how much stronger an effect party ID has with Republican voters.

Though the effect is less strong, Democrats also give partisan-conditioned survey responses. As soon as Trump won in November of 2024, Democrat’s started reporting the economy as “getting worse.”

Now, after Trump’s crazy tariffs were announced those of you following along at home are definitely expecting the economy to get worse.

Given every economist in the world tells us tariffs are inflationary and given that we are still at the outer bands of the pandemic inflation crisis, I expect an inflationary crisis over the next few months as the effects of a sudden implementation of 25% tariffs will combine with mass deportations and an end of the income tax to be replaced by a 23% sales tax on everything you buy. The economy is in for a ride.

What will be interesting to see is if that crisis hits, will it impact the ability of Republican identifiers to evaluate the economy on actual performance rather than partisanship loyalty?

Only time will tell but if I was the chief strategist of a fascist revolution I would have made sure to keep the people fat and happy until after I had consolidated my power and took total control, which they can not do in a month.

The fact that they have decided to move forward with this crazy economic scheme may be the one thing that can wake up average Americans from their civic slumber in time to save us.

Until and unless average people, not left wing protest groups, hit the streets, MAGA has the advantage.

Now here’s some good news: Now that Trump is in power and doing all of the terrible things I thought he might do, I am now better able to assess the state of our future.

If you think about our future as a circle with a bunch of spikes representing possible futures around its radius, we can now remove about 70% of possible future tracks.

The bad news is that 70% comes from the ‘relatively normal” future options.

We now know whatever is coming will not be normal.

More on this Monday on This is America. If you missed the first two episodes, check them out! Everything you need to know to survive in just 30 minutes and with a dose of gallows humor.

-RB