The NPR Politics Podcast - Do Voters Want Bipartisanship... Or For Opponents To Agree With Them?

Episode Date: December 15, 2022

A new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll shows that most voters want to see bipartisan compromise in Congress, but the survey also shows that Americans are as entrenched as they have been for years. So what is it that voters really want? And on issues where voters of both parties appear to have overlap — including the idea that American democracy is facing serious threats — are they really talking about the same thing? This episode: political correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben, voting correspondent Miles Parks, and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Peter in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I'm a first year student at Harvard Law School, who is procrastinating studying for final exams by reading about my beloved home state of Iowa and the death of our first in the nation caucus. Oh, well, it's probably for the best. This podcast was recorded at 107 p.m. Eastern on December 15th, 2022. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I'll still be finding ways to waste myleben. I cover politics. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And today we are talking about the latest NPR-PBS NewsHour Marist poll, which shows us that Americans, surprise, have really strong ties to their political identities.

Yet they still say they want to see lawmakers work across the aisle. That is one of the insights we've gleaned. We're going to talk about a whole bunch of them. But, Domenico, let's start by talking about that bipartisanship, because voters got to see a fair amount of that in the last Congress. There was Ukraine aid. There were some gun control measures. And there was spending on American technological manufacturing, a.k.a. the CHIPS Act, and infrastructure. So voters must feel pretty good about that. Well, you know, I mean, they do want compromise, right?

I mean, three quarters of people in this survey said that they want people to work with others across the aisle. You know, they're not very confident that's actually going to happen. Like 58% of people said that they think that they have no confidence that they're going to work across the aisle, which is – in 2008 when we asked that question, it was only 23 percent. So clearly people with good reason have become far more pessimistic about their members of Congress. But the 74 percent is actually the highest we've seen in a decade for people wanting compromise. And, you know, the last Congress maybe gets a little bit of credit because we actually saw the highest number since 1998 in saying that this Congress got more accomplished than recent Congresses. The number was only 24 percent, but it was still higher than we've seen. I have to say, if I'm being realistic slash maybe too cynical, I see something like that.

And one of the places my brain jumps to is, well, what do they mean by compromise? Because, yes, you want to see things get done. But I feel like a lot of voters may want the other party to compromise. They want their own party's priorities to pass and for everybody to just be cool with it. Well, I think that's what's clear here, Danielle, right from this poll is that they have such different priorities about what they want Congress to actually do. I think that the number for me from this poll that stuck out the most was that one, just 1% of Republicans think climate change should be the top priority. And just 1% of Democrats think immigration should be the top priority. So you – yes.

So you say that and Republicans get really angry when they hear that about Democrats and Democrats get really angry when they hear that about Republicans. Yeah, it makes compromise really hard. And when you talk about something like immigration, I mean we've come a long way in the last decade in a bad direction on that subject because 68 senators voted for a comprehensive immigration overhaul, and that did not become law. It became a political lightning rod, and there's been no progress since, and you still have an issue at the border. And of course on climate change, it's only the planet, right? And speaking of compromise, I mean looking ahead, there's certainly no guarantee that compromise is going to happen in the next Congress. I mean it's going to be divided with Republicans taking control of the House in January. So what should we expect? No, I mean I think the incentive is actually in the other direction.

I mean Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader in the House, wants to be speaker and clearly he does. He's probably going to have to make steeper concessions to the far right in his party than he is to the middle. There's just more of them. They've become – both parties have become far more ideologically cohesive. Republicans have seen compromise, as John Boehner said, the former speaker, as a dirty word post Tea Party. I mean one other place that there is agreement that this poll showed is that there is a serious threat to the American democratic system. And Miles, you cover voting. How do you read that? Well, how I read that is usually when you dig underneath that, we go back to,

do these people agree on what the problem is? So everyone agrees there is a problem. But then usually when you ask Republicans, okay, you say that democracy is an issue. What do you mean by that? And they say, well, dead people are voting. Democrats are trying to change the voter laws to favor them. And then Democrats say, well, Republicans are trying to steal elections. Donald Trump tried to steal an election. And so while both parties agree that there is a problem, there is virtually no agreement on what the problem is. We saw that in our survey where 49% said Republicans were the bigger threat to democracy and 45% said Democrats were the bigger threat to democracy, which is really eye-opening in the survey. And it's like a cartoon where you have both sides sort of pointing at the other.

But, I mean, let's be realistic here. The fact is the Capitol riot happened because of supporters of former President Trump who believed lies that he was promulgating about the election being stolen when it wasn't. And there's evidence upon evidence that have shown this over and over again. We've said it on the pod. It's been disproved repeatedly. But because of distrust in the media, because of distrust in independent sources, because of confirmation bias, people are believing what they want to believe. And conservatives have kind of lurched toward conspiracy on this and see Democrats as the bigger threat to democracy. But this is what I don't understand. The biggest thing I don't understand about this poll, Domenico, and I'm hoping you can explain this to me, is independents were more likely to say that Democrats were a bigger threat to democracy than Republicans were, which in light of the Capitol riot really, really shocked me. And also in light of the midterm election results where we saw independents in places like Nevada and Arizona vote for

Democratic secretaries of state over election denying Republicans. So can you just kind of make that piece of data make sense for me, Domenico? Yeah, I saw that and that number jumped out to me and I pushed our pollsters on that a little bit. And, you know, one of the things I think we have to continue to remember when you see breakdowns of Democrat, Republican and independent is that a lot of Republicans have started to identify as independents or former Republicans identifying as independents. In the age of Trump, it's just increased, you know, quite a bit. So you have a lot of center right folks who are clocking in as independents, which is why Republicans generally have to win greater

shares of independents than Democrats do. So I think that's one thing that's playing into that. But I think it does also show you that a lot of even center-right folks are believing some of these lies or just based on whatever their information stream is, reading a la carte social media or Fox News and believing the things that they're seeing and hearing and more dug in on party identification. All right. We're going to take a quick break. We have so much more to talk about. So more in a second. Hey, I'm Elena Moore, a producer on the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm part of a team of people who work behind the scenes to bring you this show each day.

If you want to hear more about how that happens, from editing to producing to, you know, vending machine, binging, check out our upcoming bonus episode. You are, like, a little concerningly into candy. Yeah, I'm pretty constant. I mean, when you publish a podcast every day, you've got to develop routines. That's in our bonus episode out in a few days for NPR Politics

Podcast Plus listeners. And if that's not you, it could be. More info at the link in our episode notes. And also, just to be clear, our daily podcast is always going to be free. This is just extra. Check it out. And we're back. And we talked about this on Monday, but it seems to be worth rehashing now that we have fresh data. What do you guys make of Biden's low approval rating, given Democrats' relatively strong performance in the midterms and his legislative achievements, the sort of slew of often bipartisan legislation that we've seen in the last couple of years. And maybe the bigger question here is, how much does a president's approval rating really

matter in the modern political era? Domenico, you wade through polls. You go first. Yeah, I think you're right as far as the modern political era that they matter a little bit less because people are just so polarized. And look, Biden's approval rating is at 43%. It started to become like a broken record where his approval rating is in the low 40s. Former President Trump's approval rating was in the low 40s. So the differences here start to come at the margins. And there were some notable changes at the margins here. And it came in sort of the negativity or the lessened negativity, because for only the second time in the past year, President Biden's disapproval rating is below 50%. Like, you know, not something to throw a party about necessarily, but it does show that some of the edge, at least in those criticisms of Biden, has been reduced a bit.

Okay, I want to take one more turn here and dig into one demographic group, and that's Gen Z, because we are finally learning quite a bit more about these new voters. And Domenico, tell us what the poll found about these youngest voters that we have. I think it gave us a little bit more texture to what we know about voters under 40, which is, by the way, what Gen Z and millennials are. They're 18 to 39, remarkably, because we get all this conflicting data. You know, the exit polls showed that they voted for Democrats by the widest margin of any age group, which is true. But at the same time, we also hear all these quotes from a lot of younger voters that they're not thrilled with the Democratic Party or either party. And what this poll showed was that one in five Gen Z slash

millennials are unsure of the Democratic Party, only give them a 41% favorable rating, which is not great for the group that votes by the biggest margin for you. They actually gave Republicans a 42% favorable rating, which is statistically about the same. But for the group that's voting by the widest margins for you is saying that they are kind of disaffected. There's something going on there. And I think it's a real warning sign for Democrats that they have to continue a heavy engagement strategy to convince this group to stay with them. Because as we know, as voters get older, they do tend to split off and vote a little bit more Republican than they had previously. Yeah, I think about that story that Barbara Sprunt did a couple weeks ago about the White House using TikTok as a platform to try to get

some of their, which like at the time, it was kind of a funny story. But it does kind of imply that I think there are a lot of people in the Democratic Party who they do still need to kind of meet a lot of these voters where they are and try to win them over actively. Yeah, well, I mean, where they are, though, where, I mean, my takeaway from this, based on having talked to some of these voters, is, yes, they might be voting Democratic, and they might be more liberal in their social views, but they also don't see themselves ever getting a house. They don't see themselves paying off their student debt. I mean, it seems like, not just engagement, what Domenico was saying, but it seems like there might be policy steps that the Democratic Party or Republican Party would actually have to take.

Yeah, I mean, it's either that or, you know, having to convince them that they are taking the steps, you know. And right now, I think you're right that they feel like Democrats at least aren't going as far as they could be, but they're not as bad as Republicans, right? And that's kind of the choice that a lot of people have because we have such a strongly entrenched two-party system. Final question. Speaking of the economy, we saw this in the survey that Americans, despite some positive signs of the economy, people are still really nervous about making big ticket purchases right now. What did we see, Domenico? You know, when we talk about the economy, it's such a big thing. Inflation is obviously top

of mind for a lot of people. And seven in 10 people said that they don't think right now is a good time to buy things like cars or household appliances, things that cost them a lot of money. And, you know, I think that what was notable when I dug into this data is that rural voters, people who lived in rural areas and people who are older, 77 or older in that silent or greatest generation, were most likely to say that now is not a good time to purchase. And we know that older voters, retirees are on fixed incomes and that they can be most affected by these things. And people who might not have access to some of the more thriving aspects of an economy that are less hurt in big cities, for example, are people who are first and most affected by economic downturns. And I know we're two years away from 2024. But I do think it's worth noting that a lot of economic forecasters do not see kind of the current economic climate changing drastically in like in three months or six months, even I know I was just reading, you know, it could be a year or two before there's even any movement on interest rates. And so that has to be worrisome

for some democratic strategists who maybe inflation does cool down over the next few months or the next year. But this interest rate environment is not going away anytime soon. I mean, it might just tighten. And the economy sort of trends closely with culture issues for those same voters. And clearly there's an opening and a continued opening for Republicans to make the case against Democrats as President Biden now says that he wants to run for reelection. These two base groups that, you know, they really need to show up to the polls. All right, we are going to have to leave it there for today. Until next time, I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover politics. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And I'm Domenico Montanaro,

senior political editor and correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.