And how politicians from Abraham Lincoln to Katie Porter manage(d) to be different
Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) said something important this week. “Too often, Congress recognizes issues too late,” she told Sarah Ferris of Politico after giving an emotional speech to her fellow Democratic House members about how inflation was affecting her family. Porter is a single mother of three who commutes back and forth from California to DC every week, and despite her congressional salary she’s feeling the pinch. She added, referring to inflation worries, “I had a colleague mention to me, ‘We’re not seeing it in the polls’ … Well, you don’t know what to ask,” she replied.
“We’re not seeing it in the polls.” The fact that most Members of Congress are addicted to polling and use survey data to decide, well, almost everything they do is one of the dirty little secrets of modern politics. And the problem isn’t just that polls only show what a pollster chooses to ask about. Or that the way a question is phrased, or where it falls in a list of questions, can twist results.
It’s that polls themselves are not proof of anything. Public opinion is more fluid than most pollsters like to admit. And rather than slavishly following public opinion, people with big megaphones (like politicians, or Supreme Court Justices) can shift it.
Take the abortion issue. A month ago, asked about their position, 58% of Americans said they were strongly or somewhat pro-choice, compared to 37% who said they were strongly or somewhat pro-life. Now, just a few weeks later but after the explosive leak of a highly controversial draft Supreme Court majority opinion that would overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v Wade decision, the gap between those two groups has widened from 21% to 30%. Now 62% of Americans identify as either strongly or somewhat pro-choice and just 32% as strongly or somewhat pro-life. Even more interestingly, the intensity of identification has shifted, with 44% (up from 38%) saying they are strongly pro-choice and just 20% (down from 24%) saying they are pro-life. (Sourcing here.)
What this means is that roughly one-in-ten Americans have shifted how they feel about the issue of abortion in just a matter of days. Looking closely at the data, which is from Navigator Research and is drawn from surveys of 1,000 registered voters each time, the shift is quite clear. Men and women have both become more pro-choice overall, along with Democrats, independents, Blacks, Hispanics and whites. Republicans, who tilted pro-life by a net 21 points in April now only tilt that way by 12 points. Sorted by religion, Protestants have gotten ten points more pro-choice, while Catholics have gotten about 6 points less and evangelical Christians, the one group that was already mostly pro-life has also become about 10 points less so. Justice Sam Alito’s radical draft court opinion, which is making an abstract idea — the possibility that a longstanding basic right would be stripped away — into something very real, has pushed a lot of Americans into rethinking their opinion.
Let’s go back to our feckless Members of Congress who always have their fingers in the wind. If polls are this fluid, why do they treat them with such importance? I think part of the answer is because polls are a crutch that save today’s politicians vital time, which they almost all use to spend hours a day sitting in a little cubicle calling wealthy people to ask them for campaign contributions. (Both parties tell newly elected Members of Congress that they should spent 30 hours a week in the Republican and Democratic call centers across the street from the Capitol, on the phone, dialing for dollars, 60 Minutes reported not long ago.) Only those Members who have built big bases of small donors, like Porter, who gets more than half her money from people giving $200 or less and refuses to take any corporate PAC or lobbyist money, are free from this treadmill.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Consider how one of our greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln, tried to understand what voters wanted. “Public sentiment is everything,” he said to Stephen Douglas during their famous 1858 debates. “Whoever can change public opinion can change the government.” Lincoln actually devoted a fair amount of his time to meeting with large groups of men and women, “representing all ranks and classes,” who would come to the White House and stand in a grand waiting room hoping to talk with him. In 1862, he told a reporter from New York, Charles Halpine, who suggested that he screen the crowd in advance in order to manage them more effectively, that, “though the tax on my time is heavy, no hours of my day are better employed than those which thus bring me again within the direct contact and atmosphere of the average of our whole people.”
Lincoln didn’t know what polling was, but he instinctively understood the danger in becoming too distant from the people he was supposed to serve. As he told Halpine, “Men moving only in an official circle are apt to become merely official — not to say arbitrary — in their ideas, and are apter and apter, with each passing day, to forget that they only hold power in a representative capacity.” He went on, “Many of the matters brought to my notice are utterly frivolous, but others are of more or less importance, and all serve to renew in me a clearer and more vivid image of that great popular assemblage out of which I sprung, and to which at the end of two years I must return. … I call these receptions my ‘public opinion baths,’ for I have but little time to read the papers and gather public opinion that way; and though they may not be pleasant in all their particulars, the effect, as a whole, is renovating and invigorating to my perceptions of responsibility and duty.”
Translated to modern idiom: Lincoln was keeping it real. He didn’t want to become walled off from the general public and so he consistently made time to mix it up with us. There’s an echo of that commitment in President Barack Obama’s nightly practice of reading a select packet of letters to him from the public. President Donald Trump read the public via his ratings and his Twitter retweets, which was good for his hyper-narcissistic ego but bad for the impulses and prejudices it amplified.
Porter’s knack for understanding public feelings has been on display since her first days as a newly elected Member of Congress, when she grilled one corporate CEO after another during committee hearings that showed she knew how to make complex issues understandable. And her career before Congress, first as a consumer advocate and then acting as an independent monitor overseeing a multibillion bank settlement, which put her in close touch with thousands of working-class borrowers, also prepared her to be a good listener.
Unfortunately, too many Members of Congress get their main one-on-one time with the public sitting in little cubicles 30 hours a week dialing for dollars. Which means their world view is warped constantly by the concerns of the donor class, a tiny sliver of society that is overwhelmingly older, richer, whiter, more conservative and more male than the whole of us. So if you wonder how so many congresscritters can be out of touch, and what we can do about it: the problem is that most of them are totally dependent on private money. Give them another source: a big pool of small donors or public funding (or both), and they’ll be freer to connect with what their voters really care about.