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cover of episode What Americans Think About Trump's Plans

What Americans Think About Trump's Plans

2025/1/27
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FiveThirtyEight Politics

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Elliot Morris
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Galen Druk
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Ruth Agelnik
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Galen Druk: 我主持了本次关于美国民众对特朗普第二任期计划看法的讨论。特朗普就职时民意支持率低,但许多核心政策却意外地获得了民众支持,这引发了我们对美国民众真正期望的思考。 我们讨论了民调在衡量公众对政策的看法时的局限性,以及提问方式对结果的影响。我们还探讨了特朗普政府在移民问题上的策略,以及民众对这一问题的复杂看法。 Elliot Morris: 我认为,美国民众对特朗普的反应可能并非源于政策本身,而是对现状和执政党的反弹。拜登的移民政策比特朗普更偏离美国民众的平均立场,特朗普的政策更符合民意,因此可能不会引发强烈反弹。然而,民众可能因为其他问题而反对特朗普,即使他们在移民问题上认同他的立场。 此外,我分析了民调中关于DEI政策的问题措辞,认为询问人们的态度比询问具体的行动更好,因为它能揭示美国民众的价值观差异。对整个政策提案进行民调具有挑战性,因为这些提案可能篇幅很长,难以理解。 Ruth Agelnik: 我认为,美国民众对多元化、公平与包容(DEI)政策的看法难以捉摸,因为民调结果取决于提问方式,反映的是人们对行动还是态度的看法。目前关于DEI的民调结果差异很大,因为公众的观点尚未完全形成,这与提问方式有关。 此外,特朗普的移民政策前后矛盾,部分政策受欢迎,部分政策不受欢迎,这可能会导致民众的反弹。如果特朗普在某些不受欢迎的政策上让步,可能会提升其在移民问题上的民意支持率。 最后,我分析了民调结果受提问方式影响,需要谨慎解读,但民调在公共政策方面仍然有用。解读民调时,需关注提问方式是否公平公正,避免出现误导性结论。

Deep Dive

Chapters
The discussion analyzes the challenges in polling public opinion on DEI, highlighting the impact of question wording and the distinction between attitudes and actions. It explores how different question framings yield varying results and emphasizes the complexity of public opinion on this multifaceted issue.
  • Different question wordings on DEI yield significantly different results.
  • Polling on attitudes versus actions reveals different aspects of public opinion.
  • Public opinion on DEI is complex and not fully formed.

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I have no f***ing clue how much eggs cost. You and every other politician. Yeah, exactly. How much does a gallon of milk cost, Galen? I can tell you how much unsweetened vanilla-flavored almond milk costs.

Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. And what do Americans want from President Trump's second term? On one hand, Trump begins earning similar superlatives to his first term. On the cusp of taking office, he was the least popular president-elect in the modern polling era.

On the other hand, unlike in 2017, many of his core policy proposals are popular. So are Americans on board with the agenda, even if they aren't totally on board with the man himself? That's the topic of our good or bad use of polling question for today. Polling Americans' views on policy questions can be tricky, and question wording and context matter a lot.

Given the differing responses you can get on questions about, say, diversity, equity and inclusion policies, what is the best use of polling when asking Americans about policy? And later in the show, we're going to talk about immigration. It's another area where Americans' views are nuanced and context dependent, but overall supportive of Trump. With immigration raids and Twitter diplomacy with Columbia filling the headlines, what do Americans think?

Make of it all. Here with me to discuss is Director of Data Analytics, Elliot Morris. Welcome to the podcast, Elliot. Hey, Galen. Also here with us is polling editor at The New York Times, Ruth Agelnik. Welcome to the podcast and happy new year. Hello, hello, and happy new year. We're going to begin with good or bad use of polling, which we haven't done in a minute. And we're going to start with an excerpt from a piece from my colleagues at 538. And they're writing about Trump's first day in office.

They write,

They go on to say polls are mixed on whether Americans support such a move, and the result seems to depend quite a bit on the question wording. In a Harvard-Harris poll from January, for example, voters supported, quote, ending hiring for government jobs on the basis of race and returning to merit hiring of government employees 59% to 41%. So that's an 18 percentage point advantage for the position of going to merit-based jobs.

hiring and not considering race. But in a Pew Research poll conducted in October, a majority of voters, 52%, said that, quote, focusing on increasing diversity, equity and inclusion at work is, quote, mainly a good thing, while just 21% said that it's mainly a bad thing.

All right. So we're going to broaden out this question to talk about policy polling in general. But just to begin, Ruth, do we have a clear sense of what Americans think about DEI? Which of those two is the better use of polling? It's a great question, right? It's a great discussion to have. Both of these things are a little bit true, and it gives us a good opportunity to talk about why it's challenging to do public opinion polling around issues.

In this case, those are two really different questions. One is asking about an action doing away with

DEI initiatives in the government. And they kind of, there's a little bit of a biased question in the Harvard-Harris question because they say returning to merit-based hiring, implying that there wasn't some degree of merit-based hiring before. But setting that aside, one is asking about an action. The other is asking about an attitude, which is, is it a good thing or a bad thing? You could fall into both of those buckets, which is why it's so challenging to ask these types of questions. And particularly for an issue like

DEI that's really complicated and Americans don't, most Americans don't really understand it, it brings a really interesting challenge to public opinion polling, where public opinion polling is sort of by necessity a lagging indicator where we're looking at something sort of as a debate is happening or after a debate is happening. In this case, it's a little bit early in the debate to really know how Americans feel about this, which is why you get such different answers depending on how you ask the question.

I guess it's a little bit early in the debate, but we have been talking about this for, I guess, five years at this point, maybe you could say even a little bit longer. I mean, are we at the beginning of potentially a pivot point where people are reacting to now the more conservative position being the sort of rule of the day as opposed to just hearing about DEI from liberals? Yeah.

Well, it's more that I think we're at the beginning of the action stage of this. There's been discussion, there's been debate, but now there are actual actions happening. And what we actually care about is how people feel about those actions. And until we sort of know what those actions are going to be, it's hard to pull on them. And any pull you're doing is subjective and depends on how you ask it because there's not a clear concrete action.

that we know of. Now we're starting to see some of those clear concrete actions and that's when we can pull on them. You know, what Trump is doing specifically with hiring and firing and doing away with certain types of these positions in certain departments. Then I think you can ask sort of a clear concrete question. But short of that, you partially get different answers depending on how you ask because people's views are not fully formed on this. Yeah, I think that actions versus attitudes framing is good. I'll say if you're going to pull...

the action, then you should like pull the entirety of the policy proposal. The executive orders Trump signed are really a lot wider ranging than do you support merit-based or race-based hiring in the federal government. So I would say that the question wording is bad, probably.

And I think the attitudes question is good because I think it allows us to learn something about the values differences between the American people. We just had an election where we saw a lot of value differences in the public, in between the parties, in subsets of demographics. So I think those questions are good too, even if they don't perfectly map onto whatever policy or issue people are indexing on.

But Elliot, reasonably, how do you pull an entire executive order? I mean, these are things that can be like two pages long. That would bring its own challenges of as soon as somebody starts reading it, if it's an online poll or hearing the pollster read it to them over the phone, they're going to be like, wait.

what are you talking about? Like, it's too long to actually listen to the whole thing and then say, oh, I agree with that or I don't. Yeah, you can ask multiple questions. It would be a good place to start. I mean, this is just a really good case in the point that polls are not perfect representations of debates that are going on in government and should probably be like one input into our deliberative process and not like the final say. And I guess I'll leave it at that for now.

Well, but then we get into a place of, well, which polls on policy questions should we trust? You can ask about a policy any which way you want, and eventually you'll get the answer that you want. And people will try to manipulate that. And, you know, liberals will just point to the ones that advantage the progressive position and conservatives will just point to the ones that advantage Trump's position. And, you know, we get into the spiral of, well, there's just no knowing the truth.

where I actually think that public policy polling is useful. What do you say, Ruth? Yeah, I mean, obviously, I think it's incredibly useful. And I think when you get to sort of question wording differences, this is where we have to be. People have to be smart consumers and where organizations like FiveThirtyEight can really help people wrap their heads around it. So you can really pick apart the

question wording. This is where question wording matters more than anything, right? Taking the Harvard-Harris question, they're setting up sort of a false dichotomy that doesn't exist, that it's either merit-based or diversity-based, and we know that that's not true. So you can immediately look at that question and say, well, that's not really a fair and balanced way to word the question. So you need to really pay attention to how the question is worded.

You talk about like liberals pointing to one and conservatives pointing to the other. Well, it's possible that those are biased questions. And so we shouldn't be looking at those at all.

One thing that I think is really valuable that Ariel Edwards-Levy pointed out a couple of years ago, she's the polling editor at CNN, but lots of people know her because she's funny on Twitter. She's really funny. She's really funny. She had a good piece back when she was at HuffPost pollster looking at Trump's original Muslim ban and how no matter how you ask the question, all of these different asks and these non-biased asks,

Public opinion was slightly different. And what that can tell us, what we can learn from that altogether, is that on some of these issues, public opinion isn't fully formed. So, for example, and we'll probably talk about this later, there are different ways you can ask about immigration. But if you're asking about the particular similar sort of slice of the immigration debate, there are lots of different parts of the immigration debate. But if you're looking at a certain slice of the immigration debate, let's say deporting people who have a criminal record, no matter how you ask about it, you get a similar share of the public opinion.

saying that they favor that because it's a slightly more formed opinion. But it seems like so far for these kind of DEI debates, depending on how you ask about it, you really can shift the needle, which tells me that that's not sort of fully set as a public opinion idea, kind of like Jell-O. It's still in its molding stage.

To your point about biased questions or leading questions, for example, I mean, one way you might be able to tell as a consumer of the news whether a question might be biased is by looking at the organization that's doing the polling. You know, we talk about this a lot in terms of good polling practices, how to report on polls and how to consume them.

But, you know, for a lot of folks, it might not be immediately apparent. So I'm curious, what are the best practices for people who are genuinely curious? I want to know what public opinion is. I don't want to try to, you know, mold public opinion to fit my view of the world and then report it as such. You know, what are the best practices?

Well, I mean, like you said, looking at the organization helps. We know there are trustworthy organizations that have been putting out good polls. But even if you close your eyes and you're blind to the organization, if you look at the question and you think somebody who is very far to the left on the political spectrum and very far to the right on the political spectrum, if they would both think that this question is fair, then...

then it's a good question. And you really have to do that exercise. You really have to think about the most politically conservative person you know, whether it's somebody you know or somebody who's out in the media landscape and the most liberal person you know. Would they both think that this is a fair question? If the answer is yes, then it's a fair and trustworthy question. And those are hard questions to craft. It's why we spend so much time working on question wording.

It also strikes me that the attitudes versus actions or specific policy piece is important here. You know, the conventional wisdom about American public opinion is that we're global conservatives and we're detail level liberals.

Which is to say the famous example is everyone will say, you know, I want to reduce the debt and deficit. I want government to play a smaller role in American life. But as soon as you start asking about every individual policy, you know, do you want to keep funding the same, decrease it or increase it for education? Oh, everyone wants to increase it. What about defense? What about, you know, science development and research?

Point after point after point, when you ask about the specifics, Americans say, let's increase funding. When you ask about the whole, Americans say, oh, let's decrease spending. So those are incompatible views in some sense. They also have sort of different values attached to them, one being more conservative, one being more liberal. What do you do when you encounter conflicts or things that cannot coexist in American public opinion?

Which wins out? I mean, there's different parts of public opinion, right? It's not like there's one single answer. If there's this attitudes, actions divide, some sort of

values, policy divide. You know, the questions are going to probe different parts of that public opinion. You know, this is why lots of public opinion writers refer to a body politic, like there's not only one part of your body. So they can coexist. If you're probing different parts of the public opinion, the values part, that can coexist with an actions part. Or maybe you ask question learning that probes different values altogether and then are presented in ways, you know, that they're about the same value. So...

I think it's just like a good reminder that we're very complex, multifaceted people. Voters don't just have like one opinion on things or only access one part of their brain. They're accessing lots of different information in different contexts, and that can present itself as a very complex picture. And that's cool.

Yeah, we're going to get a lot more into that with the immigration debate in a second. But I want to ask if there are other clear signals in the noise on other hot topics from Trump's first week, whether it's, you know, regarding democracy and norms like January 6th pardons, you know, firing inspector generals and the like.

or some of the energy policy stuff or on prices or whatever it may be, are we getting other clear signals? Are we getting any clear signals on what Americans like and what they don't like? I will maybe make a controversial statement that I think it's a little bit early for us to know. Public opinion sort of is by necessity a lagging indicator. We're

We're still new in this term. We see in many different ways that about a third of Americans just are paying absolutely no attention to any of this. When we ask about it a lot of different ways, we end up with about a third. So just kind of... Bless them. Yeah. Bliss. Probably not listening to this podcast, but... But we know you're out there. We love and respect you. We know you're out there and you might even vote. And a third of people are not paying attention. Having said that, right, we're starting to see some indications that...

I mean, we saw before Trump entered office that people, broad parts of his portfolio, immigration, thoughts about gender and transgender Americans, like these were kind of broadly popular. And I think this gets to what Ali was just talking about. I mean, values versus actions.

People are complex. They might agree broadly with Trump's values and what he's hoping to do, and they might sort of disagree with his specific actions. And I think that's where we might wind up. Some of his specific actions so far are popular, but some of them are seeming to be sort of unpopular. Yeah, the values framing of the DEI questions are, you know, very heavily tilted, depending on who asks the question.

If you're asking people, do you support fairness in hiring and people being hired based off of their intellectual contributions or ability to do the job? Obviously, people are going to say yes to that question. If you ask them about the process, to your point about this operational symbolic divide in liberalism and conservative Galen, then maybe you should expect slightly more liberal answers on the process of hiring. Like, you know,

Do you favor balanced quotas for slates of people to choose from or what have you? Then maybe you'll get... Like recruitment from all walks of American life or something like that. Yeah, instead of relying on the social networks of the hiring manager. But yeah, whatever they would say. So the answer to the fundamental question, putting aside the meta debate for a moment, is that we don't know what Americans think about DEI? Or that their views are complex enough...

Or unformed so far, such that it's understandable that we would get different answers depending on how you ask the different question. People might, I mean, this is sort of a liberal thing to say, but like hold multiple truths at once. Can we get like a wicked reference in here? People might honestly and truly believe both of these things.

Right. They might honestly and truly believe that they want to scale back DEI programs and that they want to make sure that there's a diverse workforce that is sort of made more diverse by special programs. That's a really complicated thing for us to measure from a public opinion perspective.

But it's actually a reasonable thing that a lot of Americans probably feel. And so I think this comes up to a real challenge with public opinion polling, which is to really understand that we probably need to ask like six or seven different questions. And like whoever has the time or space to do that. Yeah. I mean, you even see this in the Republican Party, which their stated position is that this is negative. Right. It sort of deteriorates the quality of.

of business or administration or governance or whatever. But then you see Republicans doing it themselves, right? Elise Stefanik spent a lot of time trying to recruit women to run for office specifically and talking about why it was important that women run for office. So clearly, even folks who say that DEI is bad feel uncomfortable or feel that it's a bad thing to have

you know, a government made up of exclusively white men. Yeah, if I can maybe defend Elise Stefanik, there's a lot of value normatively in democratic theory for having groups be represented in Congress or by their elected leaders. To me, that's just a little bit different than like putting your thumb on the scale for different groups in selection of the hiring pool. Maybe Americans would view that differently as well.

Okay, well, it sounds like we're going to have to wait and see, but let's focus specifically on Trump's biggest priority so far, which is immigration. But first, a break.

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Last week, YouGov asked Americans if their opinion of Trump had improved in the last year. 31% said it had, 31% had said it stayed the same, and 35% said it got worse. Of the people whose opinion had improved, the most common explanation they cited was immigration. 64% said immigration was why more than the economy or inflation or whatever else was asked.

Also last week, Echelon Insights found that Americans approve of Trump's handling of immigration more than any other issue. 55% said they approved of his handling, whereas his overall approval is 51%, his handling of the economy is 50%, and it goes on down.

In recent days, we've seen ice raids in American cities with an operation underway in Chicago starting on Sunday. Also on Sunday, Trump had a blowup with Columbia's president over whether American military planes could return Colombian nationals who are in the U.S. illegally. TLDR, it appears Columbia has acquiesced. We'll see. Now that Trump's policy is taking shape and playing out in the real world, what should we expect from the public?

Is this going to be a case of thermostatic public opinion where Americans turn on Trump once they see his hawkish policies in action? Or is Trump's credibility on the issue likely to persist? A case of promise made, promise kept.

gets at some of what we were just talking about. But are either of you ready to take a position on how you expect this to unfold? Yeah, I will. I think that like the typical thermostatic cycle might be interrupted. I don't know if Americans are really in the mood of moving to the left or to the right as much as they are as moving against the status quo and the incumbent party.

If that's the case, you should expect backlash, but maybe not for the reason that public policy is moving farther away from the median American. Because in this case, it's probably moving closer to them, at least if Gallup's data on the share of Americans who want less immigration is to be believed.

I guess I'm planting my flag firmly in the I don't necessarily expect movement in either direction for the typical reasons camp, which will be satisfying to maybe five people. Wait, wait, wait. So to sum that up for a second, though, is to say that Biden was further away from the median American on immigration than Trump is.

And that Trump is sort of bringing it more into line with where Americans are. And as a result, there should be less negativity about immigration policy under Trump than there was under Biden. Yes, on this particular issue. But if we're talking about a thermostatic backlash affecting like a basket of issues or overall orientation to Trump.

I'm not sure that moving closer to Americans on immigration policy will necessarily map onto Trump, the person Trump, the president and job approval or whatever other metric because of the other underlying issues and interruption in the thermostatic cycle from the last couple of elections. Wait, let me I just want to get this totally straight. You think that Americans might reject Trump?

but it will have nothing to do with this issue. They could like him on this issue, but still reject him because other things go poorly. Yeah, I mean, adding some nuance into whether or not certain parts of the policy are overreach. We'll talk about birthright citizenship, for example, maybe an exception there. But yes, that's a good summary. Yeah, and so actually, that was kind of exactly what I was going to say, which is to say, I think...

I agree with you, Elliot, except and for a normal politician, I would say I completely agree, except that, you know, how Trump is handling immigration is insane.

He's not just proposing policies that fall closest to where the average American is on immigration. He's proposing immigration policies that fall there and then very far to the right of that. It's really a scattershot of immigration policies. So I think what we're going to get is a bit of a mixed bag. A lot of Americans are very much in favor of some of the sort of

right-leaning policies that he's proposing that five or 10 years ago would have been pretty far to the right now or closer to sort of the median voter in a lot of Americans' favor. You get these policies like removing protections for birthright citizenship and removing protections for people who are here, dreamers who are here under the DACA program that are very unpopular. And so some things he's proposing are going to be deeply unpopular and remain deeply unpopular and won't become more popular just because he's proposing them.

And I think backlash among the public is also maybe predictable in this regard. Like in 2017, 2018, backlash to Trump on immigration, you know, while the border wall was unpopular, backlash was really centered on family separation, for example, which was a policy that existed somewhat predated Trump and only really hit its peak for like a week. And that backlash lasted for months. So I expect if like Trump backs down on...

birthright citizenship or the court just like solves the issue for him, then he'll probably gain some favorability for resolving overall tension with immigrants, at least

in a performative way, saying nothing about the underlying tension in real life. And it is worth remembering, you know, it's been a while for all of us who are in this space covering Trump. It's been four years since we remembered the kind of classic Trump cycle, which is that he proposes a lot of things. Many of them are very extreme. When he backs down from those policies, as Elliot said...

gets credit for backing down from more extreme policies. But the first attempt is kind of scattershot, throw spaghetti at the wall, you got the Muslim ban, things like that. And so I think we're just in a little bit of a cycle of that where some of these less popular policies, particularly like removing birthright citizenship, birthright citizenship is in the Constitution, it's unlikely to change. And so that's one of those ones where Trump might propose something more extreme and make his other proposals seem a little bit more moderate.

I want to talk about mass deportations specifically, because as it's pulled today, the question of, you know, should we deport all immigrants living in the United States illegally? You either get full on majority support or plurality support, depending on the poll. This is not one of those. I mean, it's a relatively straightforward question, but you don't get wide variations on that specific aspect.

aspect of the question. But it is a little bit like the debt and deficit versus funding individual agencies conundrum. Because as soon as you start asking about what it would take or potentially take to deport all of the immigrants living in the United States illegally, you're

opposition starts to rise. So I'm just going to cite an AP poll for these purposes, but this is repeated throughout the polling landscape. So 43% support deporting all immigrants living in the United States illegally versus 37% who oppose, 20% abstaining. Now you go to deporting all immigrants living in the United States illegally, even if that means they will be separated from their children who are citizens. A majority opposed that, 55% opposed, only 28% support.

Arresting people who are in the country illegally while they are in the hospital, only 27% support, 52% oppose. Arresting children who are in the country illegally while they are at school, 18% support, 64% oppose. Arresting people who are in the country illegally while they are at church, 20% support, 57% oppose. So you're all getting nearly a 40 percentage point gap.

when you start talking about deporting people when they're in situations where they are interacting with civil life.

Right. Schools, churches, hospitals. At a certain point, you have to have a system where you try to find people at the points where they interact with society. And if Americans are saying, yes, we want to deport everyone who's in the country illegally, but we don't want to deport them when they interact with public life. Like, how do you want everyone to be deported? How do we resolve that tension?

You pass a policy, and if there's backlash to the way it's implemented, you change course. The you, in this case, being the executive. I think this is one of those cases where they're going to enact the policy however they want because they have this values argument that's very popular, or at least broadly popular. And on this sort of specific policy proposal, remove people who are here illegally, which

They can just do it, and they'll just start, and if backlash is too high on the implementation, they'll either figure out a new way to implement it, figure out a way to hide the unpopular parts, or stop. Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. Recently, I asked Mint Mobile's legal team if big wireless companies are allowed to raise prices due to inflation. They said yes. And then when I asked if raising prices technically violates those onerous two-year contracts, they said, what the f*** are you talking about, you insane Hollywood a**hole?

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I think that he's not motivated by public opinion and that he often we've historically seen that he does what he wants. But he does kind of feel those boundaries of public opinion and he kind of tries to bump up against them and see if he can push them. And when you get backlash, you know, he does respond to that. So I think on the one hand, he's not motivated by that. He's going to pass the policies that he wants, that he thinks are best.

But he does feel that backlash of public opinion. He sees it. He's a reader of polls like everybody else, maybe more than most other people. And he does pull back when there's strong pushback against certain aspects of the policies, right? And that's what we're getting to is like,

Like, polling each of the sort of nuanced aspects of the policies may be more popular and less popular. And he's kind of trying to feel where the cracks are. Yeah, I mean, I think all political leaders are affected by public opinion in some way. Some are more sensitive to it. Even dictators, people would argue. Yeah. I mean, they have to have...

public support or a lack of violent opposition, I guess. And I'm not like virtue signaling to liberals that I think Trump is a dictator. That's not what I intended by that comment. I mean that quite literally the political science research will suggest that even Xi Jinping is reacting to public opinion because he needs a

supportive and responsive public to whatever his edicts are. Yeah, and there's like a selective definition of what the public is to lots of these people, so they might not be reacting to the public opinion or the opinion of the majority, if that's what you're calling the public, like the numerical majority of adults or adult citizens, nonsense, whatever. Sometimes they'll like

the public in this case to be their constituency or the people that they're hearing from. And in that case, they'll react to opinions from those people. So they might not be 100% reactive to what we think of as the public opinion as people who study it and write about it, but they're typically reacting to something. There's like some way to check these people, at least, you know, hopefully across most issues on average over time. Well, and I think there's a real difference between strongly held opinions and weakly held opinions. We

We can measure some of that with public opinion and we try to. But what you see and how Trump responds to it might be that some of these opinions are very strongly held and then you hear vocal backlash. And some of these opinions are very weakly held. Maybe people feel very strongly about family separation. And so you see that backlash and they respond to that. And they sort of are weakly opposed to.

to, I'm looking at some of the options, right, whether it's hospitals, churches, or schools, maybe one of those is more weakly held opinion. And there's not strong backlash against that. And so that's the other thing he's sort of responding to is which of these are strong and which of these are coming out in force and which are these sort of like weakly held opposition where like, ideally we wouldn't do that, but maybe if I don't know what's happening, I won't be that upset about it.

Yeah, there's lots of testimony from people in past White Houses about how the president's near-leadership were reacting to public opinion. Nothing really comes to the top of my mind for Trump, but one potential...

piece of directional evidence is that he basically dropped all healthcare reform after the failure to pass Obamacare repeal in 2017 and like Medicare, slight defunding. So that could be directional evidence for us if we're figuring out how reactive he is. And he seemed to be reactive to public opinion on some of that stuff from the jump in that he jettisoned Republicans' least popular opinions on, you know, social security and

Medicare, you know, reforms or even privatization or whatnot. I mean, we don't even talk about that anymore. Yeah, and I think the people around him have actually gotten pretty smart about this. I mean, it just seems like it. I don't have any direct evidence of this. But in taking the parts of the policy proposals that are most popular, especially in value-based arguments and not operational process grounds, and trying to sell that to the American people, and they've done so successfully on DEI, immigration, certainly,

I mean, you could make an argument that it was very successful on its economic messaging in 2024, and it doesn't seem like the policy proposal in 2025 will be popular at all if it's just tariffs that increase price of goods. We'll see. Ruth, you mentioned something that I did want to come back to, which is you do things and you'll see sort of how the public reacts, whether it's a strongly held or a loosely held view. Back in 2017, going by that measurement,

It seemed like Americans had strongly held opinions about literally everything. I mean, the backlash to every single thing that Trump did was enormous. Headline making, the TV news companies were doing great business, people were just watching, and it seemed like the salience was high for just about everything he did.

You know, you could argue that the speaker has been blown out since then. But if you're going by backlash or reaction or whatever this time around, Americans, the salience of a lot of this stuff must be low, whereas the salience must have been really high back then. Is it that simple? Like what's what's changed? You know, I mean, it's really hard to measure. It's something I would love to be able to measure accurately.

accurately what's the appetite for this kind of resistance now versus then. And I think you have a couple things that are at play. There was a sense in 2017 that there wasn't a sort of majority public support for these policies, which may have sort of emboldened those who were opposed to them to really fight loud and be loud voices because they felt like they were speaking for the public. Now,

we can measure that there is a shift in public opinion on a lot of these issues, whether it's immigration or on gender or just every kind of culture war issue that Trump is really picking at. There is a public opinion shift. And so it's possible that the people who are sort of the resistance warriors feel like they don't have the public behind them to make those kind of fights. I also think

I also think, and again, this is challenging to measure, that there's just, there's a little less, like people just don't have the kind of like verve that they did then. Maybe people are just exhausted from, you know, doing it for four years. I don't know. I'd love to be able to measure that difference. But it does feel like the people who were those kind of resistance fighters are just kind of not here. And whether it's that they themselves are exhausted or they feel like they're not able to speak for the will of the public anymore, it's really hard to disentangle.

All right. Well, like I suggested, we're going to get to that in the future, but we're going to leave things there for today. So thank you so much for joining me, Ruth and Elliot. Thanks for having me. Thanks, Galen. My name is Galen Druk. Our producers are Shane McKean and Cameron Trotavian. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon.

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