The Real Divide in America Is Between Political Junkies and Everyone Else

[LAS14]

The Real Divide in America Is Between Political Junkies and Everyone Else
Most Americans view politics as two camps bickering endlessly and fruitlessly over unimportant issues.

By Yanna Krupnikov and John Barry Ryan

Fascinating look at ourselves (DU). I hope it's not paywalled.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/20/opinion/polarization-politics-americans.html

[handmade34]

1. K&R n/t

[JDC]

2. I find this interesting and mostly true:

Pew study finds that 10 percent of Twitter users are responsible for 97 percent of all tweets about politics.

Snip

How can politics better match the opinions of a majority of Americans? The fact is, it’s not an easy problem to solve. We can try to give the hardened partisans less voice in the news. Featuring people who exemplify partisan conflict and extremist ideas elevates their presence in politics (though of course by definition, it is the partisans who are most closely watching the news who are also most likely to give their opinions). This is particularly true of social media: What a vocal minority shares on social media is not the opinion of the public. Yet such political tweets, as the political communication scholar Shannon McGregor finds, are increasingly making their way into news coverage as stand-ins for public opinion.

[Drunken Irishman]

3. And this is why people tolerate Trump.

They're given a filtered view of him. They're not on twitter reading his rantings. They're not watching his rallies. What they see from him are snippets from the press, his rantings where only the focus of their story is shown to the audience. Even FOX News won't cover all of Trump's rallies. It shields the people from him. This is why the first debate was so devastating to Trump. I think it really jarred people how crazy he sounded and how off the rails he was. He hasn't been able to recover even half of the support he lost after that first debate.

So, how does Trump have 41-45% support nationally? Easy. A good chunk of those people, say, 15%, don't experience the real Trump.

The other 30%? They're a problem. They're the true believers. They're the ones who love it.

Hopefully Trump continues to turn off that 15%. If it drops to only 10% support, he's in a tough, tough reelection spot.