3 Takeaways - President of Pew Research Center, Michael Dimock: On the Attitudes and Trends Shaping America Today (#13)

Episode Date: October 27, 2020

Find out how what America is looking for in a leader has changed. In addition, not only are there doubts about the mechanics and logistics of the U.S. election, but also the American public is going into it with deeper doubts about the qualifications of the voters in the first place. Learn how Americans’ attitudes are shaping the country.

Welcome to the Three Takeaways podcast, which features short, memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, scientists, and other newsmakers. Each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers. And now your host and board member of schools at Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, Lynn Thoman. Hi, everyone. It's Lynn Thoman. Welcome to another episode. I'm delighted to be here today with Michael Dimmick. He's president of Pew Research Center, which is well known for its demographic research and polling, both in the U.S. as well as globally.

He will provide a data-based and surprising perspective on the issues, attitudes, and trends shaping the U.S. and the world today. Mike, welcome, and thank you so much for our conversation today. Oh, thank you, Lynn. Can you offer any insights on partisan polarization? As you know, last week, our guest, Yale professor Amy Chua, explained the tribal or psychological roots of partisanship. What are your thoughts? I did listen to Amy and I've read her work and she's definitely right. There is a sort of tribal

element to that, by which I simply mean psychological. In America, the teams of political party have become really resonant identities for us in a way that wasn't so much the case in the past. And I think all I'd add to what Amy offered is to emphasize two things. One, what's really characteristic about partisanship right now in America is how much it's negative partisanship, how much it's about a deep disdain, even fear of the other side, more so than about a real expression of identity and loyalty to your side. And there have been many, many measures that one of the most compelling is how people view presidents of the other political party, whether it was Trump or Obama most recently, whereas previous presidents weren't that polarizing, not because their side loved them

more, but because the other side really didn't dislike them as much. The second element of it is that it's really very much at this national level. And some part of this dynamic is how focused we've become in America at national politics, and how much we're not seeing what's happening at state and local levels where that dynamic isn't nearly as extreme. And are these factors global phenomenons or are they unique to the U.S.? They certainly have echoes in a lot of other countries, but a big part of this is unique to the U.S. We have fairly uniquely two-party political system in the U.S. Other countries have two parties, but where they do, there's more

change. There's more evolution of those party bases in places like Canada and the U.K. In the U.S., we've had the same two parties for decades going on a century now, and that consolidates all of the tensions in society into those two camps. There's a tendency towards tribalism that's happening in a lot of countries. The extent to which it's really consolidated around party is very unique to the U.S. What has happened to the favorable and unfavorable ratings in terms of the data, the numbers? About presidents? Yes. That's really where you've seen this stepwise change over the last few decades. So for example, when Ronald Reagan was president, and when Bill Clinton was president, so not that long ago, there was never a

point in their presidency where the opposition party, so Democrats under Reagan, Republicans under Clinton, there was never a point when less than about a quarter of the opposite party still approved of the job they were doing. That's inconceivable today. Right from the get-go, about 12% of Republicans said they thought Obama was doing okay and was a good president or had a favorable view of him. And it went down from 12 into the single digits within months. And for Trump, right out of the gate, you know, his job approval, his favorability ratings among Democrats were in the single digits and never moved over the course of his presidency.

Again, maybe there were unique characteristics of Obama and Trump involved in that. But when you look at the historical data from the earliest polling around Eisenhower's presidency to now, it's just this stepwise progression in deep, deep unhappiness. And again, it's this sense of deeply negative feelings about the other political party, that they're a threat to our well-being, that they're harming the country. It's not just a policy disagreement. It's a really, really deep feeling of threat in the other side. And this feeling of threat from the other side and these very high unfavorable ratings must have broad impact. What do you see in terms of changes of trust in institutions in the U.S.? I mean, the other commensurate trend is this low level of trust in government that America has been in a trough now for a little bit over a decade. It started under Bush, George W. Bush's presidency in the late Iraq war period. And after Hurricane Katrina and a confluence events really cratered public confidence in

government. And at the moment, it felt like a short term effect. But we're now looking back over a decade later, this has become the new normal in how Americans look at government and effectiveness. And it's deeply intertwined with this partisanship story because that just has led to a cynicism about government and politics and a mistrust that's very deep. If I could just take a second, though, to put the caveat around that, which is we really tried to dig deeply into what this mistrust does and doesn't mean. And it is very much focused on elected officials. It's very much rooted in the

sense that the electoral process, the process through which the public voice is ultimately expressed and represented in our political system is just broken. That's how Americans feel right now. But the concern we have is that that politicization may creep into other elements of how people view government, at which point the credibility of government writ large really comes into question. So underpinning it with numbers, what would the numbers on the percent of people that would have faith in the federal government to do the right thing, what would that have been 30 or 40 years ago versus recently under Republican and Democratic presidents? It's one of the oldest public opinion survey questions that we've sustained over

decades. And it goes something like, how much of the time do you trust the federal government in Washington to do what's right? And when it was first asked in the late 50s and early 60s, you had 70 plus percent saying always or most of the time. In fact, the options it gives are always most of the time or only some of the time. And the balance was so tilted that in a positive direction when the question was first invented that nobody thought you needed to add a never category to it today. But now when we ask that question, people are volunteering never, and if you offer them never, you'll get 20, 30% saying never, which was just inconceivable when it was first asked in the 50s and early 60s. It eroded over time. It took a real hit after Watergate, not surprisingly. It's recovered in previous periods under Reagan's presidency,

under Clinton's presidency. You saw public trust in government ebb and flow with economic conditions, with events that were relevant to it. But what's really unique today is how low it's been. It hovers at around 12 percent of Americans saying they even have some confidence in the federal government to do what is right. And it's, as I said, been stuck there for a little more than a decade now and just hasn't shifted at all with changes in presidencies, with changes in economic conditions, with changes in foreign affairs. It's just been stuck. What institutions do Americans have the highest trust in? When it comes to government, the military is viewed very highly still and some other parts of government. Science does stand out.

There's a lot of hangringing among scientists about credibility of science and public skepticism about science. And that is true on many issues. But as a general principle, public confidence in science and scientific leaders has really been pretty resilient. People may question particular findings or have a kind of skepticism, but for the most part, the reputation has stayed strong. And who do Americans have the lowest trust in?

Well, Congress and elected officials is probably the bottom of the list and has been for a while. And then when you get beyond that, I think the media has taken a huge hit. What even is the media these days? It's become a more amorphous set of actors than it was 20 years ago. So I think part of it is even in the definition of that institution, so to speak. But it's certainly one of the areas of decline. We've seen it in other areas around religion and religious leaders where public confidence has gone down, again, potentially reflecting events and scandals, but also the secularization of America and doubts about institutional credibility more broadly. That's not as universal today. It's much more contentious. It's become politicized in really troubling ways, if you really believe in the importance of strong system of higher education. Can you put some numbers to what you see is confidence in Congress and the press being down around 10% or so of people saying they really believe that they're

looking after the public interest, that they're doing more good than harm to our society. And then when you get to views about colleges and universities, what you found is it's become very partisan, very polarized. So you're getting in this kind of 50-50 battle where Democrats really see the impact in a favorable light, and right now, at least Republicans, in a very negative light. Is the decline in trust in institutions solely a U.S. phenomenon, or are you seeing it in other countries as well? I would say you see it in other countries, but like partisanship, and in part because I think it's linked to partisanship, it's more acute in the U.S. It's a steeper decline and a steeper

and more sustained sense of mistrust in institutions. So, for example, that politicization around higher education in the U.S. is a very American signal. We're not really seeing a lot as much evidence of that outside the U.S. What are Pew Research's most important findings on the U.S.? Well, I would say there's no question that this whole theme around the partisan division and the abyss between Republicans and Democrats is just the biggest trend of the last 25 years. I've been doing public opinion surveys. I've been at the Pew Research last 25 years. I've been doing public opinion surveys. I've been at the Pew Research for 20 years. I've been doing this for 25 years. Polling used to be really, part of what was really interesting about public opinion polling is you would ask about an issue

and you just couldn't predict where the fissures would be, where would the differences of opinion be. I have to say today, you can pretty much predict, you know, almost any question you ask what the main fissure is going to be that more and more and more issues have fallen into this partisan gap. So that's definitely, I think, the biggest trend. I think the other trend that we really follow a lot is how technology is changing us. It's changing our human relationships, how we engage with people. It's changing how we go through life and grow and maintain relationships over time. But obviously, it's also changing work and opportunities. The question of whether technology is accelerating advantages for those who already have them and creating greater gulfs in opportunity or whether there are ways that technology

can level those playing fields. And then the other side, I would say, is around media and misinformation and how are people navigating what's become a really uncurated information environment where we as citizens have to constantly be making decisions about what information to trust and the information has become morselized and dispersed. And the level of judgment that has to be executed today is very different than a while ago where I would, as a citizen, I would pick up my local newspaper or I would watch an evening news program as my primary source of

information and news. And it was curated and packaged what was important that was set for me. And maybe that's a bad idea. We were really entrusting a lot to the media in that environment and trusting their professional judgment. But today that has almost completely disappeared. And it's a very difficult world of information for individuals to navigate.

So understanding how we as citizens are engaging productively with that mess of information is a really driving question for us. And what are the key findings? The share of Americans who are loyal to a news source and trust that news brand to set the agenda and tell me what I should pay attention to is an important part of the current political dialogue, but it's a minority. And the rest of Americans are getting news and information almost like it's in the air. That's kind of the world we all live in today. And so how we're judging the credibility of that information is hard. The biggest challenge there is that social media in one way, shape or form has become one of the pillars of that information stream.

I'm not even blaming a particular platform. Just social media as a general engine is probably an ill-suited platform for news in that regard. And why is it ill-suited? Well, the thing about social media is since it's generated by the passion of people who are producing information and repeating information, reposting, retweeting, you know, making the effort to put information on there, it really tends to gravitate toward the more extreme voices. So when we've done research on Twitter, just to give one example, because it's a particularly news-oriented social media platform, you find that 90% of the content

on Twitter is coming from less than 10% of people participating in Twitter. And then when you look at that 10%, it's a far more partisan, a far more partisan in that negative way I was describing before of feeling really negatively about the other side and using a tone of language that's very much in that sense of division and conflict. That's what's accelerating in a social media space. And you could say, you could debate whether that's Facebook or Twitter's fault. It's sort of the nature of social media. It's going to be driven by those most impassioned voices. And so it ends up just accelerating that sense of division and conflict. We've been talking mostly about the U.S. so far.

What are the most important findings of your global surveys? The global work is some of our most important, I think, at the Pew Research Center. But American audiences often don't look beyond our shores. I think there are some really important lessons and contexts that we get from the work that we do around the world. One of the things that we track is about how America is viewed in the world, in the sense that America has been a global leader for the whole post-World War II period. And the data in our latest surveys are troubling in that regard, maybe not surprising, but troubling in that not just is the world unhappy with our current

leadership and ratings of Trump are very low, but in the past, whether publics around the world liked or disliked our leader really had a fairly muted effect on how they viewed America and what America stood for in the world. America's image has really started to decline in a way that's at really record lows. And we've been doing this for about a quarter century. And then other data would suggest it goes back farther than that. So the extent to which America is seen in high regard, and even the American public is seen in high regard, is really a big issue and a big change and something that we feel is very consequential to put numbers around, not just muse about.

Another is that there's been this growing, this sense of populism, questioning the motives of elites, this sense that many in various countries feel left behind by globalization, feel threatened by the increasing interconnection of economies, and the gap between those who have the advantages of education and operating in an information economy have in that environment relative to people who maybe have less education and are really working in a physical economy. That's a pervasive feeling around the world. That's not unique to the U.S. or the U.K. around Brexit. That's a broader feeling. And one of the things we really tried to study is, is that leading to a kind of retractionism and isolationism that people really want countries to pull back from global affairs? And our evidence suggests the answer is

no. Those concerns are real ones, but that most publics that we study, even including the U.S., see global engagement as critical. And in some cases, that's because some of the big issues are global, like climate change. But in other cases, it's really just this sense that the solution to those kinds of problems is not building walls and throwing up barriers to engagement for the rest of the world. It still involves global cooperation. When you talked about the image of America plunging in the world, can you put some numbers to that? What's happened to it over the last, say, 20 years?

Yeah, I would say that we've seen views of American leadership. So from George W. Bush to Barack Obama to Donald Trump most recently, flip just almost black and white. When you look at how Europeans viewed those three presidents, it was, you know, 90% negative on George W. Bush, 90% positive for Obama, 90% negative for Trump. And that is what it is. Maybe it's about their policies. Maybe it's about their personal characteristics, be that as it may. But what you saw in the middle of that was views of America brought more broadly. So just a real simple question like favorable, unfavorable view of America, or even deeper questions like how much do you respect American values around democracy

or America's commitment to freedom of expression or things like that. You didn't see those numbers bopping up and down in that big of a way. You saw them holding in positive territory. Foreign affairs people call it American soft power. It's kind of a term that's used this sense that even when there are disagreements over policy positions and leadership, there's this sense that America brings a certain credibility and weight and commitment to the table that resonates with people. Again, when I say it's, you know, we survey in so many countries, it's hard to put a hard number about it. But I would say that that typically is in two to one favorable territory in terms of how people view America. But it'll vary a lot from country to country.

What I'm saying is we've seen that really eroding a bit, not in terms of, you know, being 90% negative, but more like a 50-50 proposition where you're seeing growing shares, even maybe slim majorities in more countries, just not viewing America that favorably, not seeing America as a global leader or model or example when it comes to democracy or civic society. And how has the image of China changed? The image of China has wandered around a lot over the last 20 years, but it's very negative now. There's no question that the way China handled the early information flows around COVID-19 really hurt China's image. China's image is down right now, but there's sort of a grudging respect that their role in global affairs is growing. And how do their approvals and disapprovals compare to America's? I would say at a national level, in terms of the role of the country in global affairs, the image of China is far lower than the U.S. Many people want to see the U.S. play a bigger role in world

affairs. And while the image of America's values and leadership has declined, it's still seen far more favorably than China. We've talked generally about the U.S. now and about global issues. Let's talk about some specific issues. In the U.S., one huge issue right now is racial justice and systematic racism following the killing of George Floyd earlier this summer. Has America changed? It's a great question. My answer will feel a little bit dodgy in the sense that we often want change faster than it actually happens. And while this, for many Americans, feels like a really pivotal moment, understanding whether this is a tipping point in the American conversation about racial justice, and particularly related to Black Americans and the history of

systemic racism, and whether we're going to pivot on that as a country. I'd have to say that even though we've done some survey work on that, and we've been trying to follow it as an issue, my ability to project whether this is a sustained shift in those values is hard to say. I think that it has changed the language people are using to talk about race and racial justice issues, even using a term like systemic racism, which has now become a part of the common conversation. Not everybody agrees with it, but it is a term that people are grappling with. Their views on issues of racial justice and equity are very, very lopsided on this, very, very positive. And it is a very motivating and important issue, not only because those populations have more non-white membership to them, but even among whites, there's more of a passion about the importance of this issue.

And you're seeing it in terms of these divides over political correctness and even some of those negative feelings I was describing before about higher education are rooted in the sense that higher education is not really treating these issues in a universal way. They're taking one side on these kinds of issues in a way that is alienating to many Americans. So my big picture is I do think this is the direction we're going. I think this could be an accelerant because it's changing the conversation. I'd leave you with one other example, public views about homosexuality and acceptance of gay marriage and gay love and gay relationships. That moved remarkably quickly from a public opinion perspective over the last 15 years. That was a deeply divisive issue within the Democratic Party and a uniformly, you know, opposition to things like

gay marriage among Republicans not that long ago. And what happened in the meantime wasn't just a generation rising that had different values. That was a part of it. But a part of it was the language of that conversation changed. It changed from a conversation about behaviors and morality and religion and faith to a conversation about love and commitment and family. That language shift that happened partly through advocacy, but partly just through the way people talked and thought about these issues led to a really rapid shift in public opinion on an issue that seemed intractable not that long ago, it could be that we're seeing the front edge of that same kind of language shift around systemic racism and racial justice. Interesting comparison. Is there anything else you'd like to discuss that you haven't already

touched upon? I think we've touched on a lot. I think the only thing that we've been thinking a lot about is how the pandemic is shaping a lot of the trajectories right now. We've sort of seen it as something that's accelerating a lot of changes that are already happening. And then obviously linked to racial justice, the addition of the killings this summer and the mobilization around that has sort of even added to what feels like the pace of change in that space. But really interested in the way that the pandemic is changing family structures and lives, the way people are engaging and interacting. All of these young people moving back and living with their parents was already a trend. That's a trend that's accelerated over the last six months and probably has lasting

consequences and something we really want to study. It's also changed the nature of work and kind of the future of work and work relationships and even the divide, not just between haves and have-nots, those who have a cushion to ride out an economic disruption and those who don't, but really that kind of white collar, blue collar divide, which was already a tension point, people who are operating in the information economy versus the physical economy, that's become a much starker divide now. If you work in the physical economy, working from home is not a possibility, right? You've had to already be out there. And that divide between you and the life you have to live, and a lot of people who have the option of working from home for a long time, that's a new divide in the way people

think about themselves and identify. So I'm really interested in seeing the ways in which this pandemic is even potentially changing not only economic disparities and the well-being of different segments of our society, but even the way we think about ourselves and identify our roles in the economy and our society. And unfortunately, the ways that could accelerate some of the partisan divide that we've been talking about here. What are the three key takeaways or insights that you'd like to leave the audience with?

I would say one is what I call think locally, that one of the factors in all this is sort of the hollowing out of civic connection. I think back in the 70s and 80s, Speaker Tip O'Neill always had this mantra that all politics is local. And that became this reference point for Congress. And you have to think that's a laughable concept today. All politics is national. And that's not just in the behavior and actions of elected officials. It's how we all are thinking. We have

very little connection with local civic engagement anymore. In part, that's the hollowing out of local media, where getting information about what's happening in our communities and our states is difficult today. And the information flows are all centered around national politics, which is almost by nature, fractious and divisive and warlike. And it's put us all in that mindset from the moment we wake up in the morning to go to bed at night. And so how we flip our lens to more of a local civic engagement orientation, where we can work with each other to solve community problems rather than being caught up in that divide is one of the big challenges I think that we face. And we hear it in our polling,

we ask people open-endedly, how can we stop this cycle of mistrust and partisanship? And we know it. We know that it's because we're kind of sucked into this national political battlefield vortex, rather than being able to engage with people at a local level where not everything falls into those partisan battlefields. The second takeaway I'd say is recognizing what I call the politics of grievance, which is that one thing we find in our polling is almost universally, we feel like our side is losing right now. Everybody can't be losing at the same time here, right? But you talk to Democrats and they feel like Republicans are winning everything and then therefore we have to

hold the line. We can't give any more ground. They're pushing and pushing and pushing. If you're a Democrat, you're telling your political leaders to hold firm, no compromise. And the Republicans are feeling the same way. This is not just the behavior of Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell. This is what they're hearing from their voters and their citizens that they should hold the line and that they shouldn't give an inch. And that's just pathological. When we did polling 20 years ago, one of the most esteemed characteristics in a leader was a willingness to compromise in order to get things done. That is not held in esteem today. That's a problem. This sense of grievance and this sense of loss is something we have to come to grips with as citizens, or the pressure we put on the system is just going to keep replicating what we're experiencing. And then my third takeaway is

that we have to grapple with the doubts we have about the very roots of our democracy, is that we've not only come to distrust institutions, we've started to distrust ourselves. One of the questions we ask in our surveys is, how much trust and confidence do you have in the wisdom of the American people when it comes to making political decisions? At root, the public may not always be right, but are we right more often than we're not, right? And that is the root principle of democracy. We may make short-term mistakes,

but in the long haul of things, we believe that the public voice is the voice that should drive the direction of our country. When we first asked that question 25 years ago, it was almost two to one confident. Yeah, at the end of the day, we trust the people to exercise wisdom.

That's inverted today. In our latest study, it was 59%. No, I don't trust the wisdom of the American people. And only 39% saying that they do. That's pretty problematic. And it's driven by what we've talked about here, the partisanship, this sense that people no longer feel a common sense of identity and purpose with their own fellow citizens, and that there's another bunch of us in this country who we not

only dislike or disagree with, but actively think are out to hurt the country, that's pretty extreme view to hold, but that's how a lot of us feel today. And it's compounded by this fracturing of the information environment where misinformation has become something we're really worried about. And one of the really interesting things about misinformation is when we ask people in surveys, well, how confident are you that you can tell the difference between truthful information and misinformation online? Most of us are like, oh yeah, I can tell. But when we say, how confident are you that your fellow citizens can? Uh-uh. We think that the rest of us are really susceptible to being misinformed and misled. So those two factors, that partisan divide and

this growing unease and concern around misinformation, which are legitimate trends, have really undermined our confidence in democracy itself, the very principles of it. And we're here talking on the eve of the 2020 election. Not only are there doubts about the mechanics and logistics of our election, but the American public's going into it with deeper doubts about really the qualifications of the voters in the first place. Mike, thank you for your really interesting insights on the issues, attitudes, and trends shaping the U.S. and the world.

This has been fascinating. Well, thank you so much, Lynn. If you enjoyed today's episode, you can listen or subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. If you would like to receive information on upcoming episodes, be sure to sign up for our newsletter at 3takeaways.com. Or follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Note that 3takeaways.com is with the number 3. Three is not spelled out. For all social media and podcast links, go to threetakeaways.com.