This type of polling influences the promises and programs of elected officials, yet seems to have little bearing on political outcomes.
Trump administration officials are preparing to challenge admissions policies they deem to be discriminatory against white students. Unsurprisingly, analysts and commentators have dredged up old poll numbers to try to figure out how it will play politically.
The polls don’ t tell a clear story. Some polls show that affirmative action is very popular. Others show that it’s not popular at all. How pollsters pose the question is a critical factor.
Based on its limited success at the ballot box and my own read of which poll questions make the most sense, my best guess is that affirmative action is fairly unpopular. But I’ m troubled by a wider problem: It’s not clear that even a well-worded question would give us much insight into the politics of the issue.
Over the last decade or so, polls have shown that the public backs the liberal or Democratic position on just about every major issue. By these measures, comprehensive immigration reform, environmental protection, gun background checks and many other issues ought to have been political winners for the Democrats. And yet Republicans now hold full control of government in Washington. There’s a loosely held but widespread assumption that many of these same issues have been a part of the Republican resurgence.
It’s not just the issue questions that failed analysts. The poll questions on character also failed to tell the story of the 2016 presidential election.
In pre-election surveys, Donald J. Trump polled worse than Hillary Clinton on just about every question. Voters viewed him more unfavorably, thought he was unqualified for the presidency and, yes, even thought he was more dishonest than Mrs. Clinton. The most straightforward interpretation of the polling — that her clear lead was fairly solid, since it was underpinned by an advantage on whether she was fit to be president — simply did not pan out.
This isn’ t a small problem. Journalists have traditionally relied on issue and character questions to frame the story of American elections. It’s how most public pollsters rationalize the cost of horse-race polling. Political consultants often take a similar approach to try to shape their messages, which winds up influencing the promises and programs of elected officials. But the seemingly clear story told by the polls has led us somewhat astray, and it’s probably part of why elected officials, journalists and pollsters were caught off guard in 2016.
So what’s going on?
The issue could be something fundamental: The questions are bad, or voters are misrepresenting their opinions. But assuming that’s not the problem, here are a few possibilities.
An issue position might be broadly popular, but those who back the minority view my be far more likely to vote on the issue. This is a common explanation for why gun control seems to play so poorly for the Democrats. The liberal viewpoint on gun control and background checks really is popular; it’s just that the conservatives back their viewpoint far more enthusiastically.
This might be a part of the explanation, but the problem seems to run deeper. Increased background checks for guns — almost universally popular in most polls — prevailed only narrowly in Nevada in November and failed outright in Maine.
Affirmative action hasn’ t been held up as universally popular like background checks, and it has not fared well at the ballot box. It lost in a 2006 referendum in Michigan by a 16-point margin.
The idea here is that there’s some critical group of voters who might matter more than others. Gun control and immigration overhaul might be popular nationwide, for example, but the electoral politics could play differently if a significant share of a persuadable and targeted voting group took the position not favored by the majority.
This could have been a big factor in electoral politics over the last few years. White working-class Democratic-leaners were always the weakest link in the Obama coalition, and there’s plenty of evidence that a significant chunk of them are sympathetic to the minority view on a lot of issues, including trade, immigration and guns. For good measure, white working-class voters have disproportionate sway in the Senate and the Electoral College.
But it’s hard to examine groups of persuadable voters using individual national polls. Making the issue even more challenging: Older white working-class voters are underrepresented in the average national poll of adults compared with their share of the electorate.
By this measure, affirmative action is probably less popular politically than a national survey would imply.
But perhaps the biggest problem of all is that the voters that were decisive in the last election might not be decisive in the next one.
Another possibility is that voters really do support background checks for guns until they hear the counter-messaging, like the prospect that the government might take everyone’s guns.
Similarly, voters might quickly split along partisan lines once a party or a candidate weighs in on an issue.
Whether voters support or oppose a policy may simply not be all that important to their vote.
Maybe the state of the economy and whether they approve of the incumbent president are likeliest to affect their vote choice. Republican strength is certainly consistent with that possibility, given the modest pace of economic growth and Democratic control of the White House for eight years. If that’s true, perhaps the Republican Party’s comparatively unpopular policies might set them up for big defeats.
The party of the presidency might be especially important. Political scientists have long argued that the public is like a thermostat: It tends to move against the direction of policy change and the party in power. President Obama’s health care push, for instance, soured voters on government involvement in health care; President Trump’s effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act has sent attitudes in the other direction. If public opinion toward policy-making tends to move against the initiatives of the incumbent president, a bold policy agenda — like the one pursued by the Democrats during the Obama administration — might be politically damaging even if the individual proposals might otherwise be popular.
Perhaps issues matter, not because of the policy, but because of the message it sends about a candidate.
