Politicians Think You're Dumb. Are They Right?

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

73% : Like, people usually like their public schools, but they'll say, like, Public schooling in the country is just absolutely trash.
61% : But there's another study that pairs quite nicely with this that just came out recently in PNAS by a friend of the show, David Broockman and his frequent co-author Josh Kalla, about whether political practitioners have good instincts.
58% : I think it's really remarkable that in countries as diverse as the ones we're studying -- some have proportional-representation systems, some have single-member plurality systems, some have compulsory voting, and some have mandatory -- I mean, it's just really diverse party systems and institutions.
58% : And on those issues, there was some kind of policy alignment that Donald Trump was able to create, I think, that's really important.
57% : And then they ask political practitioners and lay people to predict which ones were effective.
52% : Though, in my head, maybe realists, I would classify them as pessimists.
50% : And so what you're going to see if you talk to political scientists is varying degrees of acceptance of the core tenets of democratic realism or spatial voting or whatever.
50% : Demsas: That raises, for me, a question about how stable you would expect findings about people's self-assessments and politicians' assessments of voter publics to be on these political theories.
50% : We don't want to make the claim that when members of the general public encounter these questions, they think, Well, I'm glad you asked, because I've been spending the last eight months thinking about prospective versus retrospective voting, and here's my position.
49% : And also, as you add more kind of counterintuitive policy commitments on the part of the candidate -- like, you have a Republican who is, I don't know, supportive of income-tax increases on the rich or something -- that in those circumstances, you also see that people move away from those candidates.
49% : So you can imagine a scenario where a party runs an election campaign which is really focused on social identity, in-group appeals, anti-outgroup kind of sentiment, etcetera, and that party loses.
49% : Well, let me first say, as you well know, there's quite an industry of research on the correlates of vote choice for Donald Trump these days, and I don't have a particular comparative advantage on that as a person who mostly studies Canadian politics.
48% : So we have theories -- political scientists have theories -- about voters and voting behavior, and we spend much of our career arguing with each other about those theories.
48% : Demsas: After the break: the foreign national election that is somehow about Trump.
46% : Lucas: -- tell people what proportion of political scientists hold these different theoretical positions.
46% : You know, we've seen this, also, in crime, as well, when you ask people about how much crime is happening, but also about public schools.
45% : But to come back around to your original question: Yes, I think if I were to preregister a hypothesis on this, my guess is that the democratic realists are the majority among political scientists who do voting behavior right now.
44% : So we wanted to understand on all of these debates that we've been talking about where politicians and members of the general public stand, rather than political scientists.
43% : But I think you're right that, at the moment, you know, we haven't done a survey of political scientists, so we've always talked about how we should, so that we can actually -- Demsas:
41% : On Medicaid and Social Security, he's made multiple comments in public that he doesn't want to touch.
40% : But things have changed, both after Trudeau resigned but notably after Trump was elected.
37% : Despite this, Lucas is an optimist: "I'm more on the 'voters aren't that dumb' side of the spectrum," Lucas tells me, acknowledging this puts him in the minority among political scientists.
31% : Well, I guess to steelman it, right, because the case that some people will make about Donald Trump, for instance, who I think is maybe the elephant in the room in every conversation right now, is that, you know, Donald Trump did attempt to moderate on key political promises.
28% : " The following is a transcript of the episode: Jerusalem Demsas: When Donald Trump said, "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters," he was ostensibly making a joke about the loyalty of his followers.
19% : But there is a story you could tell where Donald Trump really attempted on key issues to the electorate to appear more moderate.
19% : And they saw themselves much closer to Donald Trump than to Kamala Harris.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.