A Majority Only We Can See

The tension between democracy and belief

I.

It sometimes feels as though each subculture of American politics believes that secretly, most of America agrees with them.

As an example, the third-highest rated post on r/MurderedByAOC in the last month declares “AOC is the Democrat’s best shot against Trump”.

From a purely polling perspective, this seems unlikely. As of a 2022 Statista poll, 35% of voters like AOC and 42% don’t, including an unfortunate 33% who really don’t like her. A -7% disapproval rating surely isn’t the best shot against Trump.

And yet, 13,500 Redditors saw the original post and upvoted it.

It’s not a shocker that a pro-AOC subreddit thinks that AOC could totally win a national general election. And there are reasons to view the article’s popularity with light skepticism. Even within a community dedicated to verbal-homicide by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, many users says AOC is great but worry that the party establishment wouldn’t allow it. There’s even a highly-rated comment saying:

As much as I would love President AOC, she wouldn’t stand a chance and she would hand the country to the conservatives.

It’s not the top comment! But it’s got upvotes. Of course, the top responses to that comment say actually America is very progressive:

Progressive ideas are actually very popular in America. It’s just that it’s never presented correctly or is villianized

And:

There is MASS APPEAL for most progressive positions. Especially when it comes to healthcare and the economy.

This discussion reminds me of the 2016 and 2020 primaries and arguments about Bernie Sander’s electability. Centrist-Democrats argued that Bernie couldn’t win because he was all “what if we just ban private insurance”. With very progressive policies, the thinking went, he wouldn’t be able to win moderates, and you usually need some to win a national election. The retort (preferably read in Bernie’s voice): we’re gonna have the largest voter turnout in the history of this country.

Bernie Sanders @BernieSanders

The way we beat Trump is with the largest voter turnout in the history of the country. We win it with a campaign of energy and excitement. We are that campaign.

People for Bernie @People4Bernie

"The way you beat Trump and the way we grow the voter turnout is to deal with the issues that working class people are feeling. You don't have to worry about tax cuts for billionaires, they're doing fine, lets focus on the needs of the working class" @BernieSanders to @unitehere

Bernie and his advocates continually returned to this argument. The underlying idea: there’s a huge, untapped reservoir of disillusioned voters who support progressive policies. With the right movement, Bernie said, the hidden progressive majority could be brought into voting booths and reshape the electoral landscape.

On the first half of the rationale, Bernie’s not wrong. Only 58% of eligible voters voted in 2012 election, so more people didn’t vote (42%) than voted for either presidential candidate. In fact, in every presidential election from 1980 to 2016, more eligible voters abstained than voted for any one candidate. This streak was only broken in 2020 by rousin’ Joe Biden, who so electrified America that he beat out ‘nobody’ as America’s top choice.

So, yes, there is a huge untapped reservoir of voters.

But, as Bernie himself discovered, these voters aren’t progressive sleeper agents waiting to be activated by the phrase “break up the banks”. During the 2020 Democratic primary and especially after Super Tuesday (which plays a huge role in deciding the presidential nominee) the media was littered with takes about how lackluster Bernie’s vaunted voter turnout, turned out. There’s:

• “Sanders Says He’ll Attract a Wave of New Voters. It Hasn’t Happened.”

• “How Huge Voter Turnout Eluded Bernie Sanders on Super Tuesday”,

• “Bernie' Sanders’ Call for Young Voters Isn’t Working Out the Way He Planned”

Progressive plans for a drastic expansion of their voter base, especially among young voters who lean left but vote less, never came to fruition. Even when Bernie looked like he might win the whole nomination before South Carolina, the NYT wrote, “there was no sign of a Sanders voter surge in New Hampshire either, nor on Saturday in Nevada.” Instead, his lead was based on a combination of caucuses and a fragmented moderate wing.

Oddly, the progressive wing overlooks that higher voter turnout isn’t always in its favor. In the 2020’s Super Tuesday, the Washington Post calculated that “Biden won nearly 60 percent of voters who sat out the 2016 primary but cast ballots on Tuesday.” New voters in the 2020 Democratic primary did show up.

They just helped Biden, not Bernie.

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II.

I don’t mean to single out Bernie supporters here. One way or the other, political groups like to claim that the majority of Americans are on their side.

Conservative sources write headlines like “71% of American support abortion restrictions” and “Polls show Democrats becoming party of elites as working class and minorities shift toward Republicans”.

More traditional Democratic sources point to public polls that suggest suggest a majority — sometimes an overwhelming majority — of Americans support liberal views, even if they don’t know it.

On gun control, for example, Democrats point to polls that say 80-90% of Americans support universal background checks. That’s an insane majority! If 60% is a landslide, 80%+ is a tectonic plate cruising over the entire country.

But as Nate Cohn describes on the NYT’s Daily podcast, there’s a catch to these numbers (emphasis mine):

The public support for background checks has been much more equivocal when voters have the opportunity to enact expanded background checks into law. And I think the best examples come in 2016, when there were three referendums put up to a vote in California, Maine, and Nevada, three states that voted for Hillary Clinton in the general election, that proposed, in different ways, expanded background checks on guns or on ammunition purchases.

And those initiatives you would think might have received overwhelming support, based on national surveys. But in the end, they basically fared about as well as Hillary Clinton did. And overall, the initiatives fared a little worse than she did.

So there wasn’t unanimous support at all. It was a deeply divided election that closely resembled the typical issue in national politics, not a matter of broad national consensus. […]

If the electorate in several blue states basically returns a result that looks like a typical Democrat versus Republican election, it raises the possibility that the public is just simply more divided on this issue than the polls have made it seem.

So: polling suggests widespread support, but background checks end up failing or scraping by in referendums in blue states. These failures in direct-democracy votes undercut claims that background check laws only fail due to the biased Senate and backdoor lobbying. But then why the huge gap between the polls and referendums?

I recommend listening to the whole interview when you have time, but to paraphrase Cohn, you have to consider the biases in these polls. These include:

• Acquiescence bias. The tendency for people to just say ‘yes’, even when doing so doesn’t represent their actual beliefs. There are lots of reasons why; my preferred theory is that conversational norms bleed into polling. We’re encouraged to be positive and polite, so we say we agree in polls even when we don’t.

• Lack of comprehension. People often don’t understand the poll question. Maybe they understand the basics - what a background check is, for example - but don’t know the current background check rules. Or, more extremely, they have no idea what the pollsters are talking about. Famously, a 2015 Public Policy Polling study found that 30% of Republicans and 19% of Democrats wanted to bomb Agrabah, the fictional city from Aladdin. An additional 13% of Republicans and 36% of Democrats did not want to bomb Agrabah, implying that half of America needs no knowledge of a city before deciding whether to bomb it.¹

• Talk is cheap. Answering a poll question is easy. It doesn’t inform actual policy, so who cares if you say something that you end up disavowing later? A pollster asks about ‘background checks’ and it sounds reasonable enough, so you say yes. It’s not like you’re gonna do a bunch of research on the issue right then. When you look later, you realize that these restrictions sound really cumbersome and you vote against it.

These are issues that appear even in well-run, graded-A-on-538 polling sources. The pollsters are doing their best. It’s just hard to get the truth.

Moreover, different wordings generate very different results. For example, a 2020 Hill-HarrisX poll that asked “Would you support or oppose providing Medicare to ever American?” got a 69% support. In what sounds like a reasonable summary, the Hill described this as “69 percent of voters support Medicare for All”.

Elsewhere, a 2019 Marist poll found that:

• 70% of Americans said that “Medicare for all that want it, that is allow all Americans to choose between a national health insurance program or their own private health insurance” is a good idea.

• Only 41% of Americans said “Medicare for all, that is a national health insurance program for all Americans that replaces private health insurance” was a good idea.

America is the land of choice, so we even have choice in our poll results. If you like Medicare for All, you can read the Hill article and come away believing most people support it. If you read the Marist poll, you’ll get the sense that most people want “Medicare for all that want it”, but they don’t support Medicare for All (which also bans private insurance). Thanks to differences in wording, you can find a poll that says what you want it to say.

Then there’s how polls frame an issue. Some polls suggest that most Americans want restrictions on abortion; others that most Americans want abortion to be legal. Also polls that suggest that most Americans support student debt relief or are worried that it will worsen inflation. Of course, these results aren’t mutually exclusive. People can want abortion to be legal but restricted; like student debt relief but worry about its effect on inflation. But depending on which results an article highlights, it paints the picture very differently.

This is no reason to be nihilistic about polls. Once you untangle the wording and interpretation, the Hill-HarrisX poll and Marist poll pretty much agree. Most people just think ‘Medicare for All’ means ‘Medicare if you want it’. In the abortion and student debt relief polls, the different framings help illustrate the public’s complicated views of complicated issues. If pollsters phrase questions carefully, you interpret results with nuance, and validate polls against what happens in elections, polls can be extremely useful.

But nobody makes us do all those things. We can ignore biases in how people respond to polls, even when elections contradict those results. We can cherrypick polls or interpret them to favor our side. The quirks in polls give us a ton of latitude in deciding we believe what most Americans support.

With this latitude, it’s easy to decide that most people agree with us.

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III.

Part of this is surely just wishful thinking.

It’s nice to believe that your candidates would win, that your policies would be put into place. It’s nice the same way it’s nice to think your favorite team would have totally won if the refs hadn’t been incompetent or blind or paid off by Bill Belichick. You’re on the side of righteousness!

Part of this is probably projection.

We live in political bubbles. When we think about other people, it’s easy to assume they think like us. Especially when we believe something deeply — whether it’s “healthcare is a human right” or “the free market lifts up everyone” — it’s hard to imagine that other people don’t genuinely believe it. Our bubbles make this even harder, because we often have no good role models for the opposing side.

But I also suspect that part of this is cognitive dissonance.

Americans love democracy. 92% of Americans believe that “Democracy is the best form of government for the United States.” While you might think “Doesn’t my political opponent actually hate democracy?!”, no, they don’t. At least they don’t think they do. 95% of Democrats and 93% of Republicans believe democracy is the best form of government, with Independents dragging down the average at 90%. Everyone, left and right alike, think democracy is the way to go.

(Given that the previous section is entirely about skepticism of polls, take all these results with a heaping mound of salt. But nonetheless, I can think of no other way to show that most Americans at least believe they like democracy.)

But we also have strong opinions about political parties, candidates, and policies. For the politically active, politics can become something like a religion. According to Pew Research 63% of Democrats think Republicans are immoral; 72% of Republicans think the same of Democrats. 47% of Republicans say they would not or probably would not date someone who voted for Clinton; 71% of Democrats say the same for Trump voters. (This implies there are Republicans who think Democrats are immoral but would still date them. Can’t be too picky.)

So we think democracy, i.e. majoritarian rule, is the best form of government. But we also think that the opposing party is immoral and — dare I say it — undateable.

These two goals — supporting majoritarian rule and putting our preferred political views into power — are in tension. What if our political views aren’t the majority view? Well, in a proper democracy, we give the keys to the majority, even if we think they’re immoral and undateable. Our immoral-but-popular opponents run the government, and we say thank you.

This doesn’t sit well with us. We naturally, almost axiomatically, don’t want immoral, undateable people to be in positions of power. It’s unjust. But if most people support a view we consider immoral, then democracy requires giving them (or at least their leaders) power.

I think we resolve this tension by subconsciously deciding that a majority of people align with us. If your views are always the majority view, there’s no problem. You can have democracy and your preferred policies, too.

On the principle that it’s better to have an accurate map of reality, I don’t like this coping mechanism. Let’s not kid ourselves into thinking we have a majority if we don’t.

Moreover, overestimating our own support can lead us down self-destructive rabbit-holes. We already have the majority, so why bother trying to win anyone over? Rather than persuading or compromising to expand support, we draw harsh lines and demand concessions. Worse, this alienating behavior might further lose support. But if we’re convinced we definitely have the majority, we ignore the signs that our current behavior is making us less popular.

Instead, paint an accurate picture of your movement’s support. Really, genuinely seek out signs that your policies or candidates might be unpopular. Knowing something is unpopular is the first step to making it popular. Genuinely learn what people dislike about your favorite policies and candidates. Persuade, compromise, and build coalitions until your movement starts winning.

And at the end of the day, accept the harsh reality that a real majority might support the wrong movements.

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1. For what it’s worth, I think “Don’t bomb places you don’t know about” or “Don’t bomb anywhere” are defensible heuristics, so I cut some slack to the people who answered that way.