Here is a chart from Semafor that's been making the rounds:
Zounds! A 40-point gap has opened up between Democrats and Republicans over the past two decades. What happened?!?
To see the simple and obvious answer, all you have to do is look at more than three data points:
Republicans generally thought the federal government was OK when George W. Bush was president. Then they suddenly decided it had too much power when Barack Obama was elected. They changed their minds when Donald Trump was elected. Then the federal government suddenly became too powerful again when Joe Biden took office. Democrats display the same trend in reverse.
Moral of the story: stop trying to deceive us with charts based on transparently ridiculous cherry picking. Alternatively, if you genuinely didn't realize this was cherry picking, please find another job.
The takeaway is that Republicans almost completely lose trust just by having Democrat as President. Meaning they're very reactionary and easily triggered. Nothing like extreme tribalism in your political views. Ironic considering they view themselves the more realistic and pragmatic party.
GOP = cult
Dems = coalition
Exactly.
My view has been consistent for the last 20 years: the government has too much power to do the things I don't like, and not enough power to do the things I do like.
The partisan divide is making a lot of polling unreliable. Hard to get a read on what "the public" thinks when one party reflexively says the opposite of the other. (There's also that group of independents who reflexively thinks both parties are always wrong.)
OT
Does anyone understand the uproar about a site called Prosecraft today? Writers are claiming their works have been "stolen" for use by AI. Seems more like a simple analytics tool used on published books, giving page counts, word counts, and more. Anyway, the site's been taken down. IANAL, but legally I don't understand the problem.
Oh, I’m sure they were just trying to smooth the chart to make it easier to read…
they should have just used trendlines...
Et tu, Brute?
Zounds! I dislike the government when it's denying me equal rights, but I approve of it when those aren't being infringed upon?
C'mon, Kevin. During the Bush Admin, they took away trans people's passports, During Obama's, we got them back. Under Trump, they tried to take them away again.
There are thousands of examples of this. (And none of them comport with conservative conspiracies, by the way)
See previous story just below.
I woke up from a leftest-leaning sleepwalk in 1992. Since then, no matter which party is in power, I believe the federal government has too much power.
This is what I think: https://victorhanson.com/the-remaking-of-america/
Money quote:
"The old ACLU or Sen. Church Committee would now probably be deemed rightwing. The methodologies of Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover are the preferred models, once they were rebooted to the right cause."
Another:
"Never in U.S. history have the Department of Justice and sympathetic state and local prosecutors indicted a leading opposition candidate and likely nominee of one of the two major parties, and at the beginning of a presidential campaign. Donald Trump is currently charged with nearly 100 felonies by at least two prosecutors. He likely eventually will be hit with more than- 500 indictments, from four prosecutors, every one of the latter with a long record of either leftwing associations or Democratic service."
Never before in US history has a likely nominee of one of the two major parties faced convincing evidence that he has committed multiple extremely serious crimes.
You could make the exact same defense of Trump if he had engaged in a murder spree with video evidence.
On 5th Avenue!
It appears that Republicans are somewhat more prone to think the federal government has too much power even when the president is a Republican than Democrats are to think the federal government has too much power when a Democrat is president. The lowest number on the Republican side is about 35% in 2003, whereas the lowest number for the Democrats appears to be 19% in 2021.
It also appears that even the Republicans distrusted Trump. All through the Trump years, more Republicans than Democrats thought the federal government had too much power.
Drum says: "Democrats display the same trend in reverse."
This is not true. Looking at the detailed graph, first both Democrats and Republicans are similar in the percentages says the government has too much power. When Obama is elected, Democrats decrease their % and Republicans increase theirs in roughly the same amount of change. When Trump is elected, both Republicans and Democrats come back to the middle (50%). With Biden's election, the % increases for Republicans as during Obama's terms, and it decreases for Democrats but the amount of decrease is 10% more than when Obama was in office. But this pattern is NOT the same trend in reverse as claimed.
First, Democrats never show the same amount of increase in distrust of govt power as Republicans. Even though they start out the same during Bush's terms, the Democrats never increased to 80% as Republicans did twice. Even under the greatest provocation in Trump's term, they rose only to 50%, the baseline during Bush's terms.
Second, because the graph is truncated at 80 instead of going to 100%, it doesn't show that Republican distrust is no more extreme than Democratic trust. It creates the impression that Republicans are more extreme because the Republicans appear to be topping out. That is a bit misleading.
Third, there is an interaction in this graph besides the so-called opposite response. That is that both parties had similar levels of distrust during Bush's term, but starting reacting in big swings only when Obama and Trump and Biden were elected. This doesn't appear to be a phenomenon before 2008. That needs explaining. It is too glib to simply say that Obama's race provoked it, when the same reaction is occurring under Biden. Further, there may be other explanations, such as a demographic swing in favor of Democrats confounding Obama's election. Or polarization due to extreme hate speech from Limbaugh and Fox News worsening during Obama's term. It can be argued that this was ramping up in 2006-2008 because there are increases in concern about govt control by both Republicans and Democrats during those last two years of Bush's terms.
It is also interesting that the Independents seem unaffected by this. I find myself wondering whether the Independents have stayed the same group of people of whether Republicans and Democrats drift into and out of that category over time. But they don't seem to be worried about govt. control and I think that needs explaining. Are they less involved voters or moderates of some type who share the lack of concern about govt. intrustion? Or maybe they don't watch Fox or MSNBC?
I agree that the oversimplified graph is misleading, but I think it is also too glib to just say that the Democrats show the same trend in reverse. They don't really. For one thing, Democrats appear to show less concern about government control with Biden than with Obama, which may be racial or may be due to Biden's greater experience, or could be due to the pandemic (as could the Republican reaction of great concern in Biden's term, after lockdowns and mandates).
My point is that a graph needs to be interpreted in the context of what was happening and not just tossed off with a superficial comment like that one, especially when the pattern is observably NOT the same for both parties (except in reverse).
I agree with many of the questions and criticisms above. But I’m really curious about the change from 2021 to 2022, when the recent trends reverse: Democrats’ distrust *increases* by ~13% and Republicans’ distrust *decreases* by ~8%. Here, I certainly would assume the trends to continue, based on any number of political factors. And Kevin’s explanation certainly doesn’t hold. Supreme Court, perhaps?
I am registered as non-affiliated. I have voted for both D and R candidates in every election it seems.
Is one party worse than the other? No, but lets be honest we all hate to be wrong about the guy we voted for and in some ways THAT is what's driving this feeling of D's are bad, or R's are bad
I voted for Nixon and I was wrong, he was a crook
I voted for Clinton once and I was wrong - he was a womanizer and used an intern for his own pleasure.
Do I hold grudges against either party? Oh yeah. Not because THEY put up guys like Nixon and Clinton but because THEY STOOD BY HIM while they were being "charged".
Whatever happened to people willingly admitting they were wrong? I was glad to vote for Obama. I hesitated on HRC because I din't know if she was running to prove she was better than her husband (thats not a bad thing either). I did end up voting for her
I have been waiting for a good third party candidate to come along. Ross Perot was the closest we've come to that . His choice of VP did him in for me.
I was raised Catholic, and I don't personally believe in abortion - but I DO BELIEVE its a woman's right to choose. So long as it's not being done as a birth control method of last resort. Yes, birth control should be free and available to teens these days. I have 3 adult daughters one of whom is a lesbian and married to a wonderful black woman - and my wife and I stood up for them at their wedding because THEY wanted us to. It was hard for a couple of older Catholics to do that but we did it out of love for both of them. We have no reservations about them as I told my DIL you will find out that being and asshole is "non-sexual" my daughter CAN be one and at times YOU will be one.
Welcome to life !!!
I just don't get all the vitriol that is being spewed these days by everyone.
OK rant off
"Is one party worse than the other? No, ..."
Maybe ten years ago that made sense. By now the party that supports a Putinist is obviously much worse than the one that doesn't.