Philip Bump
There’s a fable to be written about a group of sailors who learn that their boat is taking on water. The crew divides into factions, each insistent that they understand the reason that the boat is sinking: One blames cracks in the hull, another broken bilge pumps. Instead of fixing the problem, their time is consumed with arguing over it. Eventually they’re just swimming there, sharks circling, fighting about who was right.
It’s been clear for some time that Americans see the country’s political system as endangered. Polling released this week by the New York Times and Siena College reinforces that point: 7 in 10 Americans believe it is. In fact, there’s an unusual bipartisanship to the issue: 7 in 10 Democrats, Republicans and independents all share that conclusion.
Of course, it’s easy to tell when the boat is taking on water; you need only check the moisture level of your shoes. What’s trickier is figuring out why and whether the problem can effectively be addressed. And there our expected partisan divide reemerges.
The pollsters asked respondents to summarize the threat in one or two words. Answers varied, but the most popular responses included government (including things like corruption and politicians in general), Republicans (including Donald Trump), Democrats (including President Biden) and societal or political divisions (including polarization). There’s irony to 1 in 12 respondents pointing to political divisions, of course, given that those divisions are on immediate display in the other answers.
A quarter of Democrats, for example, identified Trump or the GOP. A quarter of Republicans identified Biden or Democrats. The most common answer from independents was government and politicians more generally.
Then the pollsters asked about specific issues: Did, say, the mainstream media pose a threat to American democracy? If so, was that threat major or minor?
As it turns out, 84 percent of respondents said yes, the mainstream media posed a threat to democracy, including 6 in 10 who said it posed a major threat. That was the highest percentage of any of the 10 options the pollsters presented — in part because it was one of the few options for which there was bipartisan support.
In general, there were wide differences in what partisans viewed as a threat to democracy. Republicans were more likely to point to voting systems (vote by mail or voting machines), and Democrats were more likely to point to institutions like the Supreme Court or the electoral college.
If we rank the options by the percentage of respondents who said it was a major threat to democracy, that pattern is more stark. Among Democrats, it’s Trump at 84 percent. About 4 in 5 Republicans said both the media and Biden were major threats to democracy.
It’s impossible here not to point out how some of the answers work hand-in-hand. The mainstream media, for example, has been assiduous in pointing out that voting by mail is safe and unaffected by significant examples of fraud — something that runs contrary to Trump’s presentations of the 2020 presidential contest. Perhaps the argument is that voting by mail slows down vote-counting, leaving the system open to challenges from bad-faith actors like Trump who want to sow doubt about the legality of those ballots. But that seems unlikely. It seems more likely that the media’s insistence on the reality of what happened in 2020 is at odds with what Republicans want to believe, which then increases skepticism about the media. (In the Times-Siena poll, 6 in 10 Republicans identified Trump as the “legitimate winner” in 2020.*)
Not all of the reasons proffered to explain the sinking boat are actually possible causes.
Regardless, this helps explain why addressing the threat to democracy doesn’t translate into political energy. Yes, most people think the country is at risk, but there’s so little agreement on the cause that there’s no route to actually addressing the problem. If half the country thinks we need to end mail-in voting and vote Republican, and the other half thinks we need to overhaul the Supreme Court and elect Democrats, there’s no possible agreed-upon solution for the agreed-upon problem.
Our best hope, then, is that somehow the boat isn’t sinking at all. Otherwise? Here come the hammerheads.
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