STAT(S) of the Week

🚨Trump Sees Sharp Decline In Approval by Republican Voters

Editor’s NOTE: Ok, I almost sent this post out last night but now I’m glad I decided to let it simmer until this morning because last night I saw this explosive data.

It’s from the Yougov/Economist poll, a high quality public poll I use regularly to track changes in voter behavior.

Just look at it, it’s beautiful.

As The Cycle subscribers, you are better positioned than most readers of election analysis to appreciate how stunning it is that so many Republican voters are finally willing to admit to pollsters that Trump is a shit show.

Like many of you, I harbor deep rage at all the Trump enablers, but for better or for worse (and it is definitely for better) I am able to separate my emotions from my strategic thinking and here is a hard truth you would do well to accept: the only people who can save us now are the 30 million or so people that voted for Trump because of “vibes” who just wanted shit to be cheaper.

We NEED these people so try to internalize your rage and think about anyone you know who voted for Trump who might have buyers remorse and try to make them mad at him for lying to them.

Remember WE know he lies, they do not. Or did not, anyway. Don’t get stuck on the fact that they SHOULD have known better and focus instead on validating their anger against Trump.

Please and thank you.

We will now return to our regularly scheduled program.

The Yale Youth Poll

Folks, I am fairly well versed on the various public and private polling entities including many you have never heard of but today I want to focus on one public poll I completely missed out on until yesterday.

Turns out that Yale funds a large n (lots of respondents) survey with a special bonus of a subsample of 2,025 voters under age 30 called the Yale Youth Poll.

That probably doesn’t excite you the way it excites me but let me tell you why it had me more excited than Thor at a two-for-one sale on hammers.

In normal surveys (say like a Quinnipiac survey) you don’t get enough real young voters (under 30) to respond and it ends up being the heaviest weight you have to apply to make your survey truly representative of the population you are surveying (in this case, voters). All of that is shop talk to say that the number of young voters in the poll is too small to make the data statistically meaningful.

SO, that means we can learn some insights about younger voters and have more confidence in the data’s statistical accuracy than normal.

My point here is not to regurgitate their survey report which you can go check out here, rather, I want to highlight a couple of key insights both about young voters and the electorate in general.

To begin lets look at voters in general. As you know I have been spending some time and ink trying to get liberals to better appreciate where their issue preferences fall in the space of broader public opinion. I am particularly focused on a couple of core issues that this survey touches on and which Democrats are way, way, way out the mainstream.

The first is the issue of trans athletes. As you can see, just 22% of voters overall support biological men who have transitioned into being female in professional sports. Although voters under 30 are more supportive of the concept it is still a vast minority, just 31% of young voters, supportive of allowing trans athletes to compete in professional sports. The numbers for college sports are very similar. Just 24% of voters support trans athletes in women’s high school sports and only 28% of all voters support trans athletes in youth sports.

This probably explains why Democrats are getting some boos at their town halls when this issue comes up, mostly a chorus of boos from Democratic women who support these bans. I asked one of the Yale pollsters, a fine young man with a bright future named Zachary Donnini to provide the party split on trans athletes competing in women’s college sports and guess what?

39% of DEMOCRATS support the bans.

Why is this issue so unpopular, even among a strong minority of Democrats? The reason is the science. The male body, with larger heart and lung capacity and greater strength and endurance produces benefits the female body, with few exceptions, don’t have. Gender reassignment surgery cannot negate these advantages. As we fight to hold onto reality Democrats would do well to be consistent about following the science.

Don’t believe me? Just ask the NIH.

A second thing I want to show you is a well-done A/B test they conducted with this poll. What is an A/B test. It just means you test two or more messaging options to see if one outperforms the other. Side note: when you A/B test negative partisanship strategy-based messaging as laid out in Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts (which at least half you have not read for some reason and that’s SAD! because the book is the new Bible of the DNC and is underwriting the part’s strategic shift (finally) so you really should read it) the effect sizes are YUGE. That’s shop talk for saying when people hear the truth about Republicans they like them a lot less.

But I digress. Whether by intent or by accident the students that conduct the Yale poll testing more traditional Democratic messaging and guess what it finds? It finds that when you frame shit as a human right, it gets significantly less popular, not more.

It reminds me of an awesome book that while older now, you should probably check out. Its called Everybody Lies and it uses Google search data to gain insights about human behavior free from the biases that are inherent in self-reported survey data.

There is a lot of great shit in that book that I can’t waste your time on now, but one insight was very telling. This was the finding that every time Obama lectured America about islamophobia, racist and bigoted searches would explode. The finding was so astonishing they printed an op-ed by the book’s author about it in the New York Times.

Then guess what happened? Obama’s team read the op-ed and the next time they sent Obama out to speak on that topic he framed his approach differently. He highlighted the numerous Muslim American athletes and celebrities. And guess what? It decreased racist searches and led a great many people to Google shit like “Is Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar really a Muslim?

Turns out they don’t hate all Muslims after all (for you deep divers, learn more about this research here).

You’re probably thinking “what’s the point, Rachel?” The point is this: we are liberals. We about 25% of America and we like certain things like collectivism and empathy that are the broader electorate just doesn’t share. With Hit Em Where It Hurts our goal was to get folks to understand the flaws in our messaging stem from vastly overestimating how much of the public follows current events/politics and by using messaging strategy created by liberals that only speaks to liberals.

So, to close out I want to show you something else from this survey, and its not one of the things they focused on in their survey report, as you know I am wont to do. They didn’t graph this data so I want you to read what the polling report’s author(s) had to say about civic knowledge:

Results from this year’s civic knowledge questions were similar to our findings in the fall: majorities of both young voters and the population overall can correctly identify the majority party in the Senate and House of Representatives, and which party appointed a majority of Supreme Court justices. Young voters were slightly less likely to correctly describe gerrymandering, the Supreme Court appointment process, how the Electoral College works, or the constitutional amendment process. Similarly to last year, a plurality of both young voters (45.5%) and voters overall (42.5%) did not know what the Senate filibuster is.

Pulling the toplines from the Yale Youth Poll report you can see the public is very aware we have a Republican trifecta right now.

That said, as soon as you get into civic knowledge, civic literacy rates come way down.

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Look at the size of the “don’t knows” on the filibuster question!!

Don’t forget as you move through your days that the only way tuned-out America will ever know what Trump is doing is if we force them to find out. They will not seek that information on their own. We must tell them.