> 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.
This is concerning and I think what causes casual news readers like myself to worry about people being divided. But as the article says, it’s a hard problem to solve, showing and discussing the real public opinion on topics. Overall this article makes me optimistic that the majority of people aren’t polarized.
It makes sense, if you look at a few concrete examples:
> Among Democrats, the political junkies think the influence of wealthy donors and interest groups is an urgent problems. But less-attentive Democrats are 25 percentage points more likely to name moral decline as an important problem facing the country — a problem partisan Democrats never even mention.
Political "casuals" (if you will) are more likely to be concerned with something broad, amorphous, a big problem that's hard to tackle and hard to blame. Like "moral decline", or "low wages". Whose moral decline, why, and how are we supposed to solve that? Whose low wages, why, and how are we supposed to solve that?
Political junkies are going to name problems that have a specific cause and a specific remedy - money in politics was specifically made worse since the Citizens United ruling, and could be improved with a constitutional amendment (or so the discourse goes).
Personally, my big amorphous problem that I actually care about is "our country is failing at urban growth in top cities on numerous fronts - transit, cost of living, cost of doing business, diversity of business. Our top cities have become monocultures of tech, biotech, finance, and other highly funded ventures." But that's a big, tough problem without a silver bullet, not to mention questions of who are responsible for the various reforms (cities? states? federal government?) and whether the reforms are even wanted (e.g. lots of city quality of life improvements boil down to being less accessible to suburban commuters, but lots of people prefer the suburbs).
> There might be an advantage for politicians who focus less on the demands of partisans and more on tangible issues. Yes, hard partisans are more likely to reward ideological victories, but they are also a minority of the electorate.
I wonder if this is actually true? Even if the hard partisans are the minority, as the article states they are the overwhelming majority of social media posts, opinions offered in news media, etc.
This is concerning and I think what causes casual news readers like myself to worry about people being divided. But as the article says, it’s a hard problem to solve, showing and discussing the real public opinion on topics. Overall this article makes me optimistic that the majority of people aren’t polarized.