The Nonresponse To Donald
Trump
How an obscure quirk of statistics and human nature
explains the liberal crisis of confidence—and why it may finally be lifting.
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Every good survey taker
knows to be aware of tendencies in human nature that can corrupt their
findings, enough sometimes to create a backward impression about the state of
reality. Sometimes it’s because people say things that aren’t true. People who
like to be agreeable create “acquiescence bias.” People who like to fit in
create “social desirability bias.” But sometimes it’s because whole classes of
people make themselves unavailable.
This is called
“nonresponse bias.”
The idea is that bad news or good news or some other ambient factor can
skew survey findings. When Barack Obama lost his first re-election debate to
Mitt Romney, polls briefly inverted, to show a small Romney lead.
Democrats naturally panicked, but… it was almost certainly illusory. It wasn’t
the case that millions of voters who’d planned to vote for Obama became
persuaded by the debate to switch their allegiances. It was that Obama supporters
became demoralized, Romney supporters became energized, and the combination had
a statistically meaningful effect on who was willing to accept calls from
pollsters. Romney voters were pumped. Obama voters went to ground.
In this way, nonresponse
bias can cause people who make decisions and form opinions based on survey data
to badly misread the true state of affairs.
Nonresponse bias may
have helped Donald Trump become president, twice. Polling Trump can be a
challenge, because he and the GOP have trained American conservatives to
distrust all sources of independent authority, including pollsters. It’s hard,
in general, to get them to engage with people and institutions they don’t know
and trust.
In a more direct way, the publication of the Access Hollywood tape depressed his polling much more than his organic support. He surely lost some voters, but
what he lost more than anything is people who were willing to tell pollsters
they intended to vote for him. For most of October 2016, it really seemed like
he was cooked.
That widespread
assumption wasn’t an inert factoid. It affected behavior on a national scale.
Would James Comey have re-entered the fray of the election if it seemed like
Trump was only two points behind instead of six or seven or eight or nine? What
about swing voters who feared Trump but had hated Hillary Clinton on a personal
level for years? Would 80,000 of them in the three Blue Wall states have stayed
home or voted third party if they’d had a more accurate sense of how close the
election was?
Nonresponse bias is
powerful and confounding. And there’s no reason to assume that its effects are
only detectable in poll results. It’s worth asking whether something analogous
to nonresponse bias can help explain the brutal last year of American politics:
why Trump seemed so unstoppable; why the opposition felt so helpless; and
whether we can shake off those doldrums in a lasting and meaningful way, before
it’s too late.
Earlier this week I argued Trump has lost the culture. Not that we can pinpoint the moment when the worm turned, but
that a confluence of recent events wouldn’t have happened to someone truly in
sync with the public: the collapse of Trump’s approval ratings; the slowly
growing willingness of people, in his own party and in the culture at large, to
speak out against him; the failed Republican culture war against the Super
Bowl.
The essay struck a
chord, but one of its shortcomings in hindsight is the implicit conceit that
Trump had won the culture in the first place.
This is a piece of
conventional wisdom that, as far as I am aware, has no prominent dissenters.
When Trump won the election, the political elite interpreted it as a definitive
cultural verdict, which is in part how our institutional leaders ended up treating
a 49.8 plurality in the popular vote as a landslide.
That is to say, it had a profound effect on how we understood our society
and fellow citizens, and—for impressionable people—a motive effect on who they chose
to associate themselves with and why.
Let’s take a step back
for a minute:
What is culture? For these purposes, I’ll define it as the sum total of
things we consume and dwell on, both for personal enjoyment and to shape how we want others to understand us.
Subcultures and
countercultures and cultural rejects may all wish to stand apart from the
prevailing culture, but they’re part of it. The idea is fully inclusive, even
if the term “culture” connotes artsiness and sophistication. Culture isn’t all
high brow, and it isn’t all progressive; moreover not all progressive culture
is high brow, and vice versa.
If you’re a conservative
elite, you may shop at Brooks Brothers and attend the opera and have affinity
for actors and fictional characters who present conservative ideas or
temperament in a flattering light.
If you’re MAGA, your
cultural consumption will probably look more like pickup trucks, ultimate
fighting, NASCAR, country music.
These are obviously
crude stereotypes, so I should add: It’s a big country, these categories are
fluid, and my point isn’t to pigeonhole every last person who claims a
political tribe. I personally know UFC-loving libs and opera-loving MAGAs. But
I do think it’s valuable to provide a heuristic, so we’re all on the same page
about what it means to say that “the culture” is, on the whole, more
conservative than liberal or more liberal than conservative.
When Obama won his first presidential election, he “won the culture,” but
that wasn’t the shock finding. He was obviously cooler than John McCain. Republicans complained endlessly about his
celebrity status. Their party was extremely old, whereas shapers and consumers
of culture are disproportionately young. Obama’s big cultural footprint was 100
percent intuitive. The shock finding was that an aging white-majority country
would elect a black president.
With Trump it was different. Liberals were unsettled to see Trump win
outright, and the hypothesis that he’d won the culture along with the presidency had to be
reverse engineered from the fact of his victory. How did he win? Well, in part,
by courting alt-cultural influencers and institutions. Like UFC. Like Joe
Rogan. Platforms with large, relatively young audiences. He cast an unusual
net, and it worked. And because it worked, we told ourselves the culture must have coarsened much more
than we’d appreciated.
We reasoned, back of the envelope, that the culture had taken a broadly
reactionary turn, leaving MAGA closer to the median than the broad left. The
implications were pretty frightening: Young people appeared to be gravitating
toward reactionary ideas. Society would become angrier, meaner, more violent
over time. Songs and movies would no longer assume decency and tolerance as
default values. Several decades ago, “the culture” could depict men backhanding
their hysterical wives, or Mickey Rooney portraying a bucktoothed Asian malcontent on the silver screen, and it made few waves, because that
was all culturally normal enough not to cause widespread offense. Maybe we were
going back to a future like that, or worse.
And there were important
reasons to suspect the beginning of a trend.
Box office receipts slowed with the
development of the internet, then crashed out during the pandemic, and never
fully recovered. Movie stars and movie stardom have lost a fair amount of
cultural cachet. So have pop icons, for similar reasons. When people bemoan or
celebrate the end of the “monoculture,” they’re referring to this kind of
creative destruction. Consumers used to have fewer options, and thus shaped
their identities around the same handful of megastars, irrespective of whether
they rose to prominence organically or through the hocus pocus of record label,
movie studio, and television executives.
Much of that lost
prominence flowed to a larger number of smaller celebrities. Influencers, who
are more like small-business entrepreneurs than, e.g., MVP athletes or Oscar
winning actors, who may get paid through LLCs but still work for the man.
Influencers chase money and audience, and these incentives will shape the
things they say publicly, but as a class they’re more right-wing than icons of
the recent past. It’s no surprise they were less hostile to Trump than their
celebrity predecessors in 2008 and 2012, and that their audiences followed
suit.
All of that was very
real. But does our collective conclusion that Trump had “won the culture,”
follow from it? I think the answer is no. He certainly won the election, but he
may have done so in a way that warped our sense of what the public meant to convey
about itself and its values. By creating and feeding a kind of cultural
nonresponse.
Is it any wonder, then,
that the broad forces of resistance were so paralyzed for so long after Trump
won? Through months of abuses that should have stirred a great rising?
We were all like Obama
voters after the passing embarrassment of that debate. And so we let too much
bad stuff go unanswered.
If I’m right about what
happened, it raises the question of how we misled ourselves so easily? How did
our senses fail us?
It isn’t all on Trump.
Democrats and the broad left contributed to their own cultural slippage.
Absent his brief renaissance as “Dark Brandon,” Joe Biden poisoned the
Democratic Party in the eyes of the youth, simply by being old and out of
touch. Long before Israel’s collective punishment of Gaza, when youth opinion of Biden grew downright contemptuous, there was no easier way to build clout as a young person on
social media than by making fun of our doddering old president.
“Cancel culture” was a
more limited phenomenon than its critics would have us believe, but it did
ensnare culturally relevant figures—particularly in comedy and music—who
rebelled openly against it, and progressivism more broadly.
In these ways, Democrats
found themselves in a weaker spot culturally than either they or we were
accustomed to.
But whatever ground they
lost, it’s easy to see how we might have overestimated the strides Trump made.
Some of that is about
old expectations getting outmoded by new ones. Taylor Swift is a Bigger Deal
than every popular podcaster in America. But in terms of how we perceive the
culture reflecting politics, there’s much more to it than which party has the most
famous endorsers. Where Swift posted her Harris-Walz endorsement on Instagram,
one and done, Republicans nurtured influencers (less well known, but much more
numerous) who drowned the Internet in pro-Trump content every day. Joe Rogan
turned the question of his endorsement into a LeBron-esque will-he/won’t-he
contest that gripped politics, gripped his audience, and almost surely had a
greater persuasive effect on them than if he’d simply tossed off a tepid Trump
endorsement and spent the rest of the election gabbing about fitness
supplements.
While TikTok was a
rolling avalanche of doomerism and anti-Biden memes, Twitter—the country’s
political nerve center—fell into the hands of Trump’s top donor, the celebrity
industrialist Elon Musk, who transformed the platform into a cultural fun house
where white nationalists loom much larger than they do in real life.
Trump is more reviled today than he was a year ago, and it’s detectable
on every platform, but Twitter stands out as a place where he remains popular, because of how Musk has
warped the environment. You can surely spend a lot of time on Twitter and still
hate Donald Trump, and hate ICE, and hate white nationalists. But you will
likely develop a blinkered, demoralizing view of how popular all of those
things are. And that in turn will create a cultural response bias. In how
reporters report news. In how confident liberals are in the viability of their
worldview. In who gets granted access to places of prestige. In who votes.
At the very least, we
know this was all temporary.
Trump has bled off all
of the youth support he pulled to win the election.
The Super Bowl half-time
show was a stirring reminder that mega-celebrities are not extinct, and command
much, much larger audiences than all political podcasters and washed up
musicians combined.
Trump and MAGA have also
undermined themselves.
They are racing to
control as much media as they possibly can, and the fact that Democrats and
progressives have abandoned that field of play reflects an incredibly
disturbing failure of imagination. But for now, at least, the people hoping to
immerse the country in MAGA propaganda have misread what voters who took a
gamble on Trump want to see. What would reassure them that they made the right
decision.
Trump might fool some of
them some of the time with his promiscuous lies, but his administration is a
content factory for genres most people hate. MAGA gets its rocks off watching
immigrants and black people and progressive protesters be brutalized, and generating
white-nationalist memes to sell regime policy. But the rest of us, including
the decisive subset of independent voters, find it all repulsive.
And, of course, Trump does things like condone the murder of admirable citizen protesters and post videos depicting
the Obamas as apes, and thereby makes it harder and harder for the people who
own the means of cultural production to continue kowtowing to him.
Right-wing errors have
rebalance things, and the rebalancing has helped us shake off our cultural
nonresponse. The decent and tolerant majority has found its footing. Trump is
enduringly unpopular, but we can also see that his sliver of the culture is just
that: a sliver. It took Bad Bunny to remind us that the only thing more
powerful than hate is love, but we remember now.
There are still dangers.
We could end up back
where we were twice before, underweighting Trump’s strength. He may not own the
culture, but he has not become irrelevant, either.
And the bigger danger from complacency may be that we overestimate
ourselves, even fool ourselves into assuming triumph is inevitable. MAGA is
relentless, like an invasive species, and Trump has strong survival
instincts. He and his loyalists will seize more media platforms, and doing a
better job exploiting them. They will respond to their recent setbacks by
inundating our phones and televisions with more and more depravities and
insults that make us feel outmatched. Their existing control of social-media
platforms has already perverted our sense of how right wing American culture
is—and how threatened it is by leftists and invading hordes—and they will turn
those dials ever higher.
God forbid that if, in
doing so, Trump regains an increment of popularity or outperforms expectations
in one more election. The last of our confidence will be sapped. Our state of
nonresponse will return for the long haul.
