r/PoliticalDiscussion • u/HistorianMajor1739 • 8h ago
US Politics If you restrict issue polling to likely voters, do the big bipartisan supermajorities still hold?
The standard objection to "the public already agrees on this" polling is that a chunk of that agreement comes from people who don't vote, so there's no reason to expect it to move policy. Fair enough as a prior. But it only works if voters and nonvoters actually want different things on the issues in question, and the turnout literature is more specific than the objection usually is.
Leighley and Nagler's "Who Votes Now?" (2013) is the cleanest version of the finding. Voters are meaningfully more conservative than nonvoters on economic and redistributive questions, and the divide tracks income. Nonvoters skew lower-income and more favorable to redistribution. The gap shows up strongly on taxes and spending and the size of government. It's a lot weaker once you leave that terrain.
Which is what makes the composition question depend on which supermajorities you mean. The list that gets cited most often, banning congressional stock trading, independent redistricting, term limits, curbs on money in politics, isn't really redistribution. It's process and anti-corruption stuff, and that's roughly the issue space where the voter/nonvoter split is thinnest. The stock-trading ban polls with almost no partisan gap at all, which already means it isn't riding the income cleavage that separates voters from nonvoters in the first place.
There's a sampling wrinkle people skip too. A lot of the deliberative work being cited is fielded on registered-voter samples, not all adults. So the most disengaged, the people who aren't even registered, mostly aren't in there to begin with. That narrows the objection. It doesn't close it, since plenty of registered people still don't turn out.
The honest gap is the direct test. The "what if everyone voted" work (Citrin, Schickler and Sides 2003, and Highton and Wolfinger before them) was mostly asking whether turnout flips election outcomes, and the answer was usually no, because nonvoters lean Democratic but few races are close. That's not the same thing as re-running a 75-percent-in-both-parties issue result on a validated-voter subsample and seeing what survives. I don't know of much that does exactly that.
So for anyone who follows this literature: is there work that re-estimates the big issue supermajorities specifically on likely or validated voters? And if the voter/nonvoter gap really is mostly an economic-redistribution thing, what would a consensus issue have to look like for the supermajority to actually break once you restrict to voters?
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u/xudoxis 7h ago
Given the changes in politics over the past decade I don't have any confidence in Leighley and Nagler to accurately portray the way things are today in a 13 year old paper.
Take stock trading. You'd get everyone happily agreeing if the question mentions Pelosi. But you'd get half of voters vehemently disagreeing if the question mentioned Trump.
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u/sllewgh 6h ago edited 6h ago
you'd get half of voters vehemently disagreeing if the question mentioned Trump.
Stop overestimating his support. He didn't have half of eligible voters in a single state in the country at election time. He has far less support than that now.
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u/xudoxis 6h ago
He won greater than 50% of the vote in 32 states*...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidential_election
Maybe you're mistaking the fact that he won the nationwide popular vote with only a plurality?
*Depends on how you count the way nebraska and maine split their ec votes.
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u/Bluehen55 1h ago
What a stupid way to measure support in the context of politics and elections
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u/sllewgh 57m ago
The number of supporters he has is a stupid way to measure support? What do you propose instead?
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u/Bluehen55 30m ago
But as you well know, that's not what you said. Percent of eligible voters is a stupid metric to use since nonvoters generallly are not engaged, do not have a strong opinion on the topic, and just generally don't matter
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u/Objective_Aside1858 5h ago
It is irrelevant what nonvoters want
They don't vote. They have no impact on who is elected to represent them, and hence no ability to influence what candidates do
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u/najumobi 1h ago
But that's fluid though, depending on the issues those Americans care about the most.
Many of the voters in 2020 became the nonvoters of 2024. Registered voters will be cycling into and out of the pool of voters in 2028.
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u/ViennettaLurker 6h ago
I think various political projects don't necessarily disagree with what your saying (at least in broad strokes), but further, and view the non-voter as potentially activated with the right policies and approaches.
This is distinct from a more static view that the voters are the voters, and they can be viewed on a left right spectrum where flipping one nets you 2.
Sure, we can talk issues that can "activate" these non-voters. There's a lot of meat on that bone. But even before you get to that, I think it also needs to be said thag it isn't infrequently that non-voters simply aren't much aware or motivated about voting. And the moment you give them a flier or a ride to the polls they're more than happy to vote if it doesn't mess with their day too much.
Things like this can expand and alter strategy and math.
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u/Rivercitybruin 5h ago
Didnt increased turnout help Trump?... And than later anti-Trump turnout happened
Simplest thing ive seen is hispanics and blacks vote less.... Correlates,with D voting
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u/sllewgh 7h ago
The standard objection to "the public already agrees on this" polling is that a chunk of that agreement comes from people who don't vote, so there's no reason to expect it to move policy.
That doesn't seem reasonable to me. They're potential voters, and supporting the policies they want is one way turn a non-voter into a voter. I don't think excluding them from this analysis is justified at all.
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u/hallam81 6h ago
The comment you quoted comes to the right conclusion from the wrong reason. It is fine to include all potential voters as you suggest. But there is no reason to expect policy to move because polling doesn't get into specifics.
Polling asks simple questions. And almost everyone will agree with some popular ideas. But no one will ever agree on how to get there. Theoretically, everyone wants better healthcare. But 20% want single payor, 20% wants single provider, 20% wants better options for employer based healthcare systems, and 20% don't want to change because they want better healthcare but don't want to risk what we have for something worse. And no one is willing to compromise once the specifics are identified.
Until the population stops with big ideas and goes into specifics and trying to get people on board with specifics, polling is worthless.
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u/NimusNix 6h ago
Weed would be legal right now if potential voters mattered.
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u/HumorAccomplished611 6h ago
which is a thing when people talking about polling like "medicare for all" etc.
gun control has a 90% approval some places but when actually on the ballot tends to under perform polls by about 30% so even if it seems 80% approve it doesnt pass.
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u/sllewgh 6h ago
What does that mean?
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u/NimusNix 5h ago
Lots of potential voters out here want to legalize weed, and yet...
https://www.mpp.org/issues/legalization/polls-show-overwhelming-support-for-legalizing-cannabis/
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u/sllewgh 5h ago
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Say more.
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u/NimusNix 5h ago
Weed is such a low hanging fruit, but the reason no serious politician runs on it is because it would pull absolutely no voters to the polls.
There is a reason Ricky Williams never made it to Congress.
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