A recent podcast from the Niskanen Center focuses on whether political elites have a good sense of what the public believes. Short answer: not really. Alex Furnas, a professor at Northwestern's business school, summarizes his research this way:
We found that for policies that elites themselves strongly favored, they overestimated public support by about 12 percentage points. And for policies that they themselves strongly opposed, they underestimated public support by about 12 percentage points. So there’s sort of a 20 to 25 percentage point difference in elite evaluations of public support for policy, depending on whether the individual elite strongly supports or strongly opposes that policy.
Here's the chart:
Basically, liberals think the public is more liberal than it is, and conservatives think the public is more conservative than it is. But there are exceptions:
- The public favors a wealth tax even more than liberals do.
- The public dislikes a path to citizenship even more than conservatives do.
- The public hates carbon taxes.
- But they love low-income clean energy.
Elsewhere in the podcast, Adam Thal, a political science professor at Loyola Marymount, talks about elite perceptions of poor people:
Why do politicians sort of ignore problems facing low income people in the United States?... There’s good reason to think that because they don’t experience a lot of economic problems themselves, they might underestimate the scale of those problems, not really understand how bad things are for low income families.
....I did not find that to be the case.... [But] there’s definite polarization. Democrats in particular tend to really overestimate the scale of these economic problems. Republicans are less likely to overestimate them and in some conditions underestimate them.
It turns out that political elites know perfectly well how tough things are for poor people. In fact, Democrats overplay this significantly. As for Republicans, they have a pretty accurate sense of things but just don't feel like doing anything about it. Their lack of concern has nothing to do with misperceptions. It's deliberate.
VERY short summary of Professor Furnas's findings, and especially his chart:
The general public is consistently more middle-of-the-road than politicians of both parties.
That simple fact ought to point the way to politicians from either party winning more elections, holding on to their hard-won gains, and governing this unruly mess better. Oh well, don't count on it.
Thanks to Citizens United and PACs, pols almost don’t dare consider what the general public thinks. They look to K St way ahead of Main St.
K St offers unlimited reelection campaign money for negative ads against the competitor, and additional money from “grass roots” advocacy groups who also slam the competitor. otoh if the pol doesn’t play (K-St Ball) all that support goes to his competitor. I believe the Columbians call it “the silver or the lead”
"The general public is consistently more middle-of-the-road than politicians of both parties."
With the ginormous exception of the question of whether to tax the rich more, on which the public is more strongly left-wing than even the liberal wing of the D Party.
Taxing the rich is probably a major shortfall of Dems. They promise to pay for something by taxing rich. But the rich direct their PACs to lobby tax loopholes to avoid the needed revenue. So either deficit climbs or middle class gets stuck with the tab. Either way the TeaParty gets more campaign ammunition.
I think using survey responses, for complex issues, has its limits. For example, "being carbon free by 2035." Its easy to say yes to that simple question. Now, if the question included the likely tradeoffs (new taxes, loss of ICE cars etc or whatever change this policy would require) I suspect the survey responses would change.
Note, I am not making commentary on the goal of being carbon free: rather, I think real policy has significant trade offs, that are often not described in a survey.
The "carbon tax" question really makes me grit my teeth. Anyone who is asked "Do you a favor a [insert any word] tax?" is going to say "Why no, and please get out of my face." This is galling because it all depends on who ends up with the money.
If it's a carbon fee and dividend, all the money would be taken from the carbon-extracting industries and then distributed equally to households. So the proper question would be "Do you favor taxing polluters and dividing the money among all citizens?" I bet you would get a different answer.
And yet, in reality, there aren't any significant tradeoffs. Replacing one implementation of transportation with another implementation that is equally effective isn't a tradeoff. There aren't any new taxes required. There are multiple benefits.
Of course we know that politicians always tell the truth about what they think. They would never deliberately overestimate the popularity of the things they advocate, or underestimate that of what the other party advocates.
But apart from the truthfulness of politicians' responses, they must first align with the preferences of their own parties' voters to get through primaries. I think there would be better agreement of the politicians with the voters of their parties. I suspect that elected politicians would usually be more conservative, in the sense of favoring big business and donors, on most economic issues than most voters. At least that's the way they act.
I see the poll this time is of "unelected elites", but those appointed by politicians are going to share the attitudes of the politicians who appointed them. They may be even more ideologically partisan in some fields. In policy-making positions - which is what I suppose "elite" means - they are put in to implement things which are typically fairly partisan.
If the poll had more economic questions, for example on higher income taxes on the rich, I think the conservative bias of policy-makers would be stronger.
Democrats automatically factor in the antagonism of Republicans to do anything to help the poor which doesn't factor into Republican perception of the poor persons' immediate difficulty.
Is there a standard definition of "elites"? It seems there's a lot riding on that.
This pretty much makes sense. The general public is a mix of Republicans and Democrats. You would expect them to poll in the middle of the two parties. The one surprise is the general support for the wealth tax. Maybe that makes sense because the general public is not as wealthy as all of the elites.
It isn’t just that Republicans don’t care about the poor, many actively blame them for their situation. Even Joe Manchin shows disdain for his poor constituents. He opposed the increased child tax credit because he said parents would just spend the money on drugs and opposed paid leave because he said people would just take time off to do things like going hunting. Manchin was also an obstacle to extending Medicaid coverage.
It doesn’t matter what we think. Silly
Primaries select for extreme elements on both sides, but gerrymandering has allowed the Republicans to go full on batshit crazy and still not lose.
Also poor people don't vote as much as other income levels.
I suspect that this is true of almost everyone. Nearly everyone thinks that public opinions are more closely aligned with their own beliefs.
Its been a decade since I thought I had any clue what the public thinks. I am a political junkie who occasionally gets involved in the process. I am not the public
Robert Reich's excellent class on Wealth and Poverty at UC Berkeley (free!) is pretty darn clear on the point that poverty is a policy decision. Poor people tend to not vote and a large percentage of people have a moralistic "they need to some tough love to get themselves together" view of poverty.
The corporate American economy just doesn't care about people who don't have money, they're a liability, not an asset.
https://youtu.be/1f2blKai7HA?si=FYvYbEbsKUKAD1uX
Seems to me that if you replaced "likely voters" with two bars, one for likely republican voters and one for likely democratic voters, the "elite" bars would be much more closely aligned to the voters the elites represent.