Tangle - PREVIEW - INTERVIEW: Will Kaback talks with Stephen Hawkins

Episode Date: February 6, 2025

Today, we’re publishing Editor Will Kaback’s conversation with Stephen Hawkins, director of research at More in Common, a nonprofit that researches political polarization and strategies to build more cohesive communities. The group recently published a report that found Republicans and Democrats have vastly different perceptions of what the other side believes, and we talked with Hawkins about what those findings mean for the future of American politics.This is a preview of today's special edition that is available in full and ad-free for our premium podcast subscribers. If you'd like to complete this episode and receive Sunday editions, exclusive interviews, bonus content, and more, head over to tanglemedia.supercast.com and sign up for a membership. If you are currently a newsletter subscriber, inquiry with us about how to receive a 33% discount on a podcast subscription! Ad-free podcasts are here!Many listeners have been asking for an ad-free version of this podcast that they could subscribe to — and we finally launched it. You can go to tanglemedia.supercast.com to sign up! You can also give the gift of a Tangle podcast subscription by clicking here.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by Jon Lall. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Will Kaback, Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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You know, for texting and stuff. And if you're not getting rewards like extra data and dollars off with your mobile plan, you're not with Fizz. Switch today. Conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking and a little bit of our take.

I am Tangle editor Will Kavak. I'm jumping on the mic today to share a special interview with everyone. And it may be on a topic that you weren't quite expecting us to cover at this point in the year. I know the 2024 election is somewhat in the rear view mirror, but it's also something that we're still thinking a lot about at Tangle. We're thinking about what we learned about the electorate,

what the downstream effects of the results will be, and really where Democrats go from here. I recently read the results of a study that put this last question in particular into perspective. I think it's a study that everyone listening to this podcast would appreciate, especially those of us who are interested in understanding how different groups think about our politics and how different perceptions of the other side influence our elections.

So that study is from a group called More In Common. It's an organization that describes its mission as building more united, inclusive, and resilient societies. And they do a lot of work examining issues like polarization and division in American society. A few weeks after the election, they published an article titled The Priority Gap, which shared insights from a representative sample of US adults and really tried to hone in on this question of whether we truly understand what each other believes about politics. The results were pretty striking. Americans of all demographic groups said the cost of

living and inflation were the top issue to them personally, but when it came to how Republicans and Democrats' priorities were perceived, Americans across the political spectrum were much better at assessing what Republicans care about than what Democrats care about. In particular, the average American thought Democrats cared far more about LGBTQ and transgender policy than Democratic voters actually did, while issues like abortion were also overestimated in their perceived importance. These kind of perception gaps are something that we talk and write about all the time

and tangle, so we thought it would be great to talk to the person who spearheaded this study to learn a little bit more about what they found and what lessons we can glean from the results. That person is Stephen Hawkins, Moren Commons Global Director of Research, and I spoke to him toward the end of December, and we had about a 30-minute conversation that touched on all of the above that I just introduced. No matter where you sit on the political spectrum, I think Stephen's insights will give you a lot to think

about in terms of both our current politics and where we're headed. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Stephen Hawkins. All right, Stephen Hawkins, thanks so much for joining the podcast. Glad to have you here. Hey, thank you for having me. So I want to start by just asking you to walk me through the post-election survey that Morin Common conducted. From my read of it,

you're exploring the perception gap that Americans have broadly about Democrats and Republicans and what they believe. But I wonder if you could just start at a very basic level and talk about how you designed the study, what the core questions were you were trying to answer, and then some of the key takeaways that you found. Yeah, sure. So this was a 5,000 person survey.

We got a representative sample of adults and then made sure that we had good quotas and weights to account for all relevant considerations so it matched the voting public. And then we asked questions that related to a broad set of things that we are curious about with the election. We wanted to know how enthusiastic people were

about the presidential candidates they voted for. We wanted to know if they split the ticket. We wanted to know what issues mattered the most to them. We wanted to know how aligned they felt with their political candidates. But the questions that we ended up analyzing the most seemed to really provide a new angle on what happened in the election were

the questions that you just referred to as the perception gap questions. And what those are are questions which aren't about your opinion, they're about your perception of other people's opinions. And so what we did was we asked people what they thought Republicans' priorities were and what we thought Democrats' priorities were and what we thought Democrats' priorities were. We gave them a list of about two dozen options, and those ended up being the heart of our analysis because they allowed us to understand what it was

that people were perceiving to be their sort of, each of the sides' key agenda as they were going into the polls. So do you want me to go into the findings of it? Yeah, that would be great. I'd be curious just to hear kind of the top line findings and then maybe I'll ask a few follow ups about some of the more nitty gritty elements of those results. Yeah.

So the first thing is that this was really not an election where we saw that Americans had extremely divergent priorities. What we instead saw was that really every group that you might be interested in looking at in terms of generations or racial groups, rural versus urban, et cetera, everybody's top priority was cost of living or inflation. This was just unanimous across the board. And so when we were looking at how Republicans and Democrats' priorities were perceived, the thing that you would want if you're a Republican

or if you're Democrat is for your party to be seen as having prioritized inflation, because it's the number one thing on every major group's minds. And what we found was that Republicans were consistently seen as prioritizing immigration, the economy, and inflation. And those were actually the same top three issues that Americans on average had, right? Republicans care a little bit more about immigration, Democrats cared a bit more about healthcare,

but the economy and inflation were on the list of what Americans thought Republicans cared about. But when it comes to Democrats, what we found is that inflation and the economy were actually ranked like fourth and ninth in terms of what Americans thought Democrats cared about. And what people thought Democrats' priorities were, were abortion and LGBT trans issues and climate change. And so this really helped us to sort of draw a picture of what went wrong for Democrats in this election, which was that rather than being seen as in sync

with the Americans' top priorities, they were seen as really serving or prioritizing an agenda that was more in line with maybe what their progressive activist base cares about, or just actually something which Americans in general don't see as a top priority. We'll be right back after this quick break. FanDuel Casino's exclusive live dealer studio has your chance at the number one feeling, winning, which beats even the 27th best feeling, saying I do. Who wants this last parachute? I do.

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Details at Fizz.ca. Another key finding that was really interesting to us was, of course, there's so much discussion around distrust in the election on the Republican right and among Donald Trump supporters. And with something which we've been monitoring over the past couple of years, and one of the questions which we asked in middle of 2024 was how much people trusted election officials to administer the election fairly.

And among Republicans, we saw that that level was just 24% in the middle of the year. And then right after the election, after Trump's victory, that number had jumped up to half, to 15%. As we see a doubling of trust among Republicans and the election officials, basically allowing them to converge with where much closer the national average, much closer to where independents and Democrats are. So much energy went into this election denialism narrative. And then when Donald Trump won, it seemed like his base kind of dropped the issue, and it basically became a reversion.

The issue reverted back to being what it was several years ago, where there's just basically middling trust in the election system overall. Those are some of the most interesting findings. Let's see if there's one more that I want to mention. Well, I've got a follow-up, and it speaks to something that you wrote actually in a piece in The Atlantic that was about this study when it came out. And that was that part of the issue that Democrats had maybe was that they didn't push back on the way they were being framed by the other side.

I know you brought that up specifically, Kamala Harris, the Kamala's for they, them, Trump is for you ads, and how it wasn't so much that she was embracing trans issues in her campaign, but she failed to offer a response to that criticism. So do you think that that played a big role in creating that perception gap? Like what would you identify as some of the drivers

behind why that existed so much more for Democrats? Yeah, so really I think it only counts, I think there's probably only two mechanisms for driving that false perception. One is that there's a kind of stereotype of what Democrats care about, and that stereotype is heavily shaped by what people see the most in terms of activism and liberalism,

etc. And then the other mechanism would be external efforts by the Trump campaign or by other Republican efforts to try and define the Harris campaign by something which is damaging to her. And so we kind of looked at both of those explanations. The first explanation doesn't really answer it very well. It could have been the case, for instance, that progressive activists like the leftmost flank of Democrats, the trans issues were just number one for them. And they were making a lot of noise about this. And if you asked them, they would see trans issues are our most important thing. And that the country was just kind of conflating Democrats with that group. But that's actually not what we saw when we asked the progressive activists,

group, this leftmost group, how much of a priority was for them. And it kind of fell towards the middle as maybe around six or so. It was did fell behind other issues like abortion, climate change and other issues. And so it really seems like the far more likely explanation, or at least the more dominant factors, what you lay out here, which is the $450 million that the Trump campaign spent hammering home these two ads in the final weeks of the election saying that Harris is for they, them, Donald Trump is for you. And notice that that framing specifically is about prioritization, right?

It's like Trump campaign is about addressing these issues that you care about. And Harris is focused on trans issues, which is exactly the perception that we see here. The Democratic was right, the Harris campaign leadership senior strategists did an interview where they talked about this decision about how to respond to this ad. And basically what it came down to was, according to them, they felt that if they were to address this ad and spend enough money to really cut through, it would basically change the conversation

about from what they wanted it to be about. They wanted to define Harris based on what her issues were. They felt like the country didn't know her well enough, especially compared to Trump. And they also weren't able to find an ad that actually increased how much people liked Harris. All they could do is basically neutralize the attack from Trump. And so they basically decided not to act on it. So it's hard for me to judge that decision and say that they could have made a better decision there not knowing all of the different things that they tried to address it.

But it was a very damning attack because the video that you're referring to that ad features clips of Harris in her own words with you know, in interview on video, expressing these things expressing these viewpoints, including that taxpayers should pay for the gender reassignment surgeries of incarcerated non-citizen people. And so it's very hard to kind of distance yourself from a statement which is on video. We'll be right back after this quick break. Hey, you're a Canadian podcast listener, and that makes you important to us.

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And if you're not getting rewards like extra data and dollars off with your mobile plan, you're not with Fizz. Switch today. Conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. Well, I think that leads to an interesting follow-up, which is if you're a Republican looking at the results of the survey that you did, I feel like you feel pretty good. Obviously, you won the election, but you also saw that Americans' perception of what you

stood for was pretty much in lockstep with what the defining issues of the election were. So I'm thinking more about takeaways on the Democratic side. And if you were to put on your strategist cap and look at this survey, where do Democrats go from here? Is it a matter of, oh, maybe we just had either a weak candidate or a candidate who didn't have enough time

to define herself because of the unique nature of the campaign, or is this an issue that you think is permeating the entire party and they need to do like a harder re-evaluation about how they're messaging on these issues across the board? Great question. I think what the strategists missed was this data that we have is not that hard to capture and the amount of money that goes into a presidential campaign, they're collecting data every day in different ways, qualitatively through focus groups, they're

doing state polling, they're doing national polling, they're doing social media analysis. If they had been asking these questions, what do you think defines the Harris campaign? What do you think it is that Democrats care about? They would have caught that in the final month in October and early November of this year, people were saying, I think abortion and trans issues are what the Harris campaign are about. From there, the decision really is, can you counter that perception? Because part of it is based on what Harris did from July through November, and part of it is based on the last 10 years of politics in the country and I think that if I could offer one piece of strategic advice that I think was a mistake it would have been not going on for instance the Joe Rogan

podcast which got tens of millions of views and in particular this is something we haven't talked about yet it particularly appeals to younger male audiences and younger men who are non-white. And those are groups that she really needed to win over. What's interesting about this analysis too that we did was that we looked at how people who made their decision about which presidential candidate to vote for, we looked at how that broke down among the people who decided who to vote for. We looked at how that broke down

among the people who decided who to vote for in the last days of the election. And it's not a small number of people. For those of us who are more politically engaged and have kind of decided which team we're on or whatever, for, you know, we might have known six months in advance or even years in advance who we're going to vote for. But 16% of the electorate in our poll said, no, I decided the week of the election or even the day of the election. And among those people, three out of five went for Trump. And among that group, we see the same trend,

where they also misperceive those priorities. And so the things you're doing in those last 10 days, you might think, if you're somebody like us who's very politically engaged, that they don't matter because you're basically like everything has been said, everybody's mind had been made up. That's absolutely wrong because there's the big contention of politically disengaged Americans who find politics boring, who find it frustrating, who find it emotionally exhausting, who don't trust the people that are operating in the system, but who do want to vote and

do their part, but they're only tuning in at the very last minute and they're going to, they don't have a huge amount of information that they're sorting through and they might just take the cues that they're getting in those last few days and act on them. And it looks like that's what happened here. And so whether you decide to intentionally try and reach those voters five days before the election, 10 days before the election, by going on the biggest podcast in the world and doing a two-hour interview with, you know, that's going to get seen by 20, 30, 40 million people, like that's a very big decision.

Because it would have given her a platform to talk about these issues at length and define herself to a group of people that ended up breaking away from her in those last days. Yeah, the one thing I do think about when you raise that point about the importance of the very final stretch of the campaign is that, you know, I don't think that Trump necessarily did a great job with the final days of his campaign. Either I'm specifically thinking about the Madison Square Garden rally that he had, you know, within two weeks of election day, which maybe wasn't universally condemned, but I think drew a lot of blowback from voters and communities that Trump was working to win over. So I don't know, is there a way to kind of like square that circle and think

about how the direction of the mistakes or the the lack of strategy one way or another like hurt Harris more than it hurt Trump when both were kind of making those errors down the stretch? Yeah, well, it's interesting to compare the two the the final stretch there because we have and more in common we've we have our own typology. We talk about the hidden tribes of America. These are seven categories of Americans, progressive activists, traditional liberals, passive liberals, politically disengaged moderates,

traditional conservatives, and devoted conservatives. They overlap, they overlay rather, onto the American electorate. And what it looked like was happening in those final two days, the strategies between the two presidential campaigns, is that it looked like Harris was really trying to go after moderates, people who were maybe leaned conservative, maybe

have a history of voting Republican. You know, one of her final campaign rallies was here in Washington DC. She had Republicans come on stage, Republican voters who talked about switching to voting for her for the first time, or voting for Biden for the first time as a Democrat. And so she, and then she did that work with Liz Cheney. And so here she's not going after people who are politically disengaged.

She's not going after people who don't have a lot of political information. She's going after people who have an ambivalence because they lean conservative and only like Democrats, but they might be able to just maybe a little bit more of a nudge will convince them they shouldn't vote for Trump. Now, Trump seems to be going after the disengaged voter. He's doing stunts like this garbage truck thing, working at a McDonald's, right? These are high visibility things. They're not about bringing some insider Washington DC person

like Liz Cheney. They're things that appeal to the average American, especially young, average person who's like McDonald's. They're not about bringing some insider Washington DC person like Liz Cheney. They're things that appeal to the average American, especially young, average person who's like McDonald's. Hey everybody, this is John, executive producer of YouTube and podcast content and co-host of The Daily Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this exclusive preview episode.

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Peace. Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul, and edited and engineered by John Wall. The script is edited by our managing editor, Ari Weitzman, Will Kedak, Bailey Saul, and Sean Brady. The logo for our podcast was designed by Magdalena Bacopa, who is also our social media manager. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. If you're looking for more from Tangle,

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