Using the 2007-2020 ISCAP panel survey, I track a population-based sample of Americans who were 18 by 2008.
So I can isolate specific individuals' attitudes & see if they were shifting in ways that might have predicted the coming threat to democracy.
2/
For example, as of October 2020, there was no evidence that people who were Republicans in 2008 thought American elections were less fair than Democrats.
Trends are similar for two measures of system legitimacy.
(Of course, post-election 2020, it's a different story.)
3/
What about support for Trump specifically, and the intensity of that support?
Yes, there was a sizable fraction of people who were very pro-Trump in October 2020...
4/
But Obama actually enjoyed even higher levels of intense support. So the key question isn't about the distribution of views toward the two presidents--it's about how they did or did not mobilize their intense supporters.
5/
And in open-ended questions, Trump supporters were actually less likely to say that they were voting against someone that Biden's supporters were. The responses didn't show much disaffection, either.
6/
What about racial prejudice? Anti-democratic efforts have been connected with the preservation of White citizens' power and the disenfranchisement of Black citizens, American Indians, Latinos, Asian Americans & other groups for centuries.
7/
However, White respondents' levels of expressed racial prejudice against Black Americans have dropped since 2016 and remain well below their Obama-era levels.
Ideological extremity is another worrisome possibility. Citizens who see the opposing side as extreme may be less likely to accept a result that puts it in power.
But there's no real evidence Biden/Trump were perceived as more ideologically extreme than Obama/Romney in '12.
9/
To be sure, there are very alarming features of contemporary public opinion, including high affective polarization & continued racial prejudice.
Those are the building blocks of anti-democratic efforts.
10/
But my point is this: if you wanted to build an early-warning system, there weren't *changes* in American public opinion between late 2007 and October 2020 that would have tipped you off to the emerging threat.
11/
In part, this is important because it suggests that if we want to understand 1/6 or anti-democratic efforts, we can't just look at general population polls. We've got to focus on the much smaller group of elites who mobilize people & the activists who answer those calls.
/end
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Excited that my new article "Not by Turnout Alone: Measuring the Sources of Electoral Change, 2012-2016" with @seth_j_hill & Greg Huber is out today in @ScienceAdvances:
It looks at a question about elections which is both important and overlooked—when we see changes in party support from election to election, are they driven by changes in who turns out (composition) or in which party consistent voters support (conversion)?
2/
The U.S. uses the secret ballot, so this question is deceptively hard. But we compiled individual-level voter file data from 2012 and 2016 for 6 key states (FL, GA, MI, NV, OH, and PA), and merged it with precinct-level election returns. So we can estimate shifts 2012-2016.
3/
Last week, I posted some results from the ISCAP general-population panel showing a 2016-2020 pro-Trump shift among English-speaking Latino respondents--but no corresponding shift in partisanship.
With respect to levels, it's key to note that English-speaking Latinos in that general-population panel were markedly cooler on Trump even in October '20 than White Americans--36 vs. 48 on a 0-100 scale.
2/
Still, with @EfrenPoliPsy and @cherylrkaiser, I collected additional panel data 2016-2018 via GfK/Ipsos tracking a different, population-based sample of Asian Americans and Latinos. This panel includes interviews in English and Spanish.
With @ProfHansNoel, I've been doing research that may shed some light on divides within the Senate GOP.
In 2016, we asked groups of 500 GOP and 500 Dem activists via YouGov to tell us who in a pair of senators was more conservative in 3 online surveys throughout the year.
1/
This is a fairly challenging task, since respondents could be asked about any of their party's senators (or centrist out-party senators) at the time. And let's just say not everyone has an opinion about every single senator.
2/
We then used a Bradley-Terry model to generate one-dimensional "perceived ideology scores."
Here are the perceived ideology scores (y-axis) by DW-NOMINATE's first dimension (x-axis).
Was Trump's 2016 victory driven more by turnout or persuasion? That question shadowed the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. In this new @monkeycageblog piece I try to answer it, drawing on new research with @seth_j_hill and Greg Huber.
That lets us make figures like this, which plots the GOP's gain on the y-axis by decile of precinct turnout stability (x-axis). Higher stability=more of the same voters in 2012, 2016.
Shift to GOP is *larger* on average in more stable precincts. Suggests persuasion is impt. 3/n
I've been fortunate to be able to track the political attitudes of a set of American adults recruited by Knowledge Networks using off-line methods before 2008. I've repeatedly surveyed these folks, most recently via Ipsos 10/7-10/22/20. n=1,131. Some initial results.
(By the way, if you are curious for some previous work using this panel, check out these @FiveThirtyEight articles:)
This is *not* a representative sample of the current electorate. Since this is a long-running panel, the youngest respondents are now 30. And it has been subject to attrition. Here I report unweighted results.