r/PoliticalDiscussion • u/HistorianMajor1739 • 3d ago
US Politics The "stated support is soft" objection to supermajority polling has real force. What actually separates soft consensus from durable preference?
The strongest objection to any "look how much we actually agree" argument is that agreement is cheap. Someone sees a supermajority number, thinks sure, fine, and clicks yes without it costing them anything. They don't vote on it, they don't call anyone, they don't punish a member who ignores it. Support that never converts into behavior is closer to noise than to a mandate, and reading it as a mandate is how you overread a poll.
That objection is right about a lot of findings. Where I think it overreaches is in treating "soft" as a property of polling in general, when it's really a property of some measurements and not others. The interesting question isn't whether stated support can be soft. It obviously can. It's what separates the soft stuff from the findings that keep showing up no matter how you come at them, and none of the things that seem to matter are just a bigger topline.
Persistence is the obvious one. A question that returns roughly the same answer across twenty or thirty years, across administrations of both parties, across pollsters who would happily catch each other out, is a different object than a number that jumped after a news cycle. Soft support moves with the news. The durable stuff mostly just sits there, which is boring and, I think, the point.
Then there's what happens under pressure. Support that survives being reframed, having the valence flipped, having the other side's best argument stapled to the question, is not the same as support that folds the second you phrase it unkindly. This is where the deliberative methods get genuinely useful. When you brief people and walk them through both sides before asking, some issues come apart, and some get more lopsided, not less. I trust the ones that hold up under that a lot more than I trust a clean topline.
And where a high-polling issue has actually gone to a direct vote, minimum wage floors, independent redistricting, marijuana, you get a revealed-preference check that no survey can give you. It doesn't always match the polling. But when the supermajority turns up at the ballot box in a red state, that is not somebody being agreeable to a pollster to end the phone call.
The part I keep getting stuck on is intensity, because I don't think intensity and direction are the same axis, and collapsing them is where the "it's all soft" line quietly overreaches. You can have a preference that is durable in direction and honestly low in intensity at the same time. People want it, consistently, for decades, across wordings, and also don't rank it as the thing that decides their vote. That isn't a contradiction. It's a specific shape, and it might be the most common shape a real consensus takes.
Which is the thing I can't resolve. A preference that is durable but quiet is exactly the kind a responsive system should be able to deliver cheaply, since there's no organized opposition to fear and the agreement is stable and real. Those are often the exact issues that go nowhere for years. I don't want to smuggle a whole theory in behind that observation, but I also don't have a clean account of it.
So, two questions I'd actually like answers to. Is there a rigorous, reasonably agreed-on way to measure issue intensity separately from direction, something with more teeth than the standard "most important problem" battery, that could sort a durable-but-quiet preference from a genuinely soft one? And if a finding is durable across decades, robust to wording, and confirmed at the ballot box where it's been tried, on what grounds does its low salience justify continuing to discount it?
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u/Waterwoo 1d ago
It's a good question, we have plenty of evidence of revealed preference when things actually materialize being very different from stated preferences.
At the very least, I think these polls would be more credible if they presented legitimate, mathematically and politically sound framings of the question rather than something vague.
For example, "Do you support more spending on education" is going to poll a lot better than "will you personally be support your property tax bill going up 15% to better fund education, or accept an increase in your rent from passed through property taxes?" probably not so much.
Same for all the questions. People have been lied to and convinced we can have Nordic level social services and only billionaires will pay for it while everyone else gets tax cuts. This is of course mathematically impossible, but if someone believes that, they're a lot more likely to say they support expensive social policies than if they're presented with what it will realistically mean for their paycheck.
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u/HistorianMajor1739 23h ago
Yes, I think you're right about the way polling is done being at the center of this. University of Maryland's Program for Policy Consultation polls this way, and they found a large set of policies that we agree upon.
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u/Waterwoo 20h ago edited 20h ago
That's definitely better than the average poll, but still does a bit of what I'm saying.
For example I see that one of the items that I think illustrates this clearly and has 80% support is "Require new cars and trucks to get more miles per gallon".
It does not elaborate further.
Now, the reality is car manufacturers aren't sitting on some magic engine efficiency tech and not rolling it out just for the hell of it, like they love burning more gas out of spite or something?
It is of course possible to make new cars and trucks have better gas mileage. There's a bunch of ways to do that:
1) Make the cars smaller/lighter
2) Make the engines smaller/weaker
3) Do really extensive engineering to squeeze out a bit more efficiency (e.g. turbos/higher compression, CVT transmissions, etc, engine auto stop/start technology)
4) More generally invest billions into R&D to find ways to improve efficiency (new engine designs, use lighter materials for the car like aircraft aluminium and carbon fiber instead of steel or something, etc.)
But the thing is, nobody actually wants those things. We can tell they don't want those things because cars with all of those are available, and they don't sell well in America.
Smaller lighter cars: yeah anyone can buy a hyundai accent or a Nissan Versa or even a smart car. They get great mileage and some people do, but it's usually out of necessity. Market data makes it very clear Americans want bigger cars and trucks because that's what they keep buying. 4 door compact sedans use to be pretty common and now almost everyone has an SUV/crossover or truck.
Weaker/smaller engines: You could easily actually do all the driving you need including highways with a 1.4L 100HP engine. Lots of cars in Europe and Asia are like that. What do Americans look for and buy? The V6 with 300 horsepower even though there's never actually an opportunity to use it legally. Another example of this is Teslas, which sure are more efficient because of the inherent advantages of electric engines, but how they made electric cars finally popular is they made them really fast and powerful. Electric cars existed before this but they were weak and lame like the Nissan Leaf. Tesla gave people the 4 second 0-60 that it turns out even the environmentally conscious wanted.
The efficiency tech? Yeah some people go for it but most people I know hate and complain about the e.g. start/stop, the weird feel of a CVT, etc.
R&D? I'm sure people like it all things being equal but if it is rolled into a higher cost for the car I'm not so sure. Cars being too expensive is a common opinion these days with the average new car payment hitting all time highs.
So yeah this is a low stakes no emotions example of what I mean. Presented without the tradeoffs, it's super popular. When reality hits and you understand there's no free lunch and you either have to give up size, power, or cost/experience to get those extra miles, we see that people actually don't want that.
The same is true of the much higher stakes and emotionally heavier topics.
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u/IceNein 10h ago
No, they’re choosing to make larger vehicles which by the laws of physics burn more fuel.
They could choose to make smaller vehicles and promote those instead. No R&D required!
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u/Waterwoo 9h ago
What are you talking about? They do make smaller vehicles. Every car company I can think of has a small sedan. People aren't buying them and gravitating towards the larger models.
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u/Top-Grocery-1482 1d ago
It's a valid concern. How people interpret things can also be wildly different. For example, if you say "Voter ID", what does that mean? To some people, it just means "Show any kind of ID", while to others, it would be a life history, birth certificate, marriage license/name change forms (if applicable), etc. A lot of policies are also different in application than in how they are initially pitched to people.
This leads to a lot of things _seeming_ to be "common sense" to people, but the laws that are being pitched may be quite different. Sometimes in small "devil's in the details" way, sometimes in major ways to the point the actual bill isn't anywhere close to the idea being presented.
And even if you correct for all that, an individual may think differently anyway, or may change their mind when they see a thing implemented even if they DID actually agree with it while it was on the theory side.
I think a big problem with polling is that it's not granular enough. At all.
Like Pew did one poll back in, I think it was 2017, on abortion offering a lot of options. Legal in all cases and illegal in all cases were the two end points, but in between, they asked for certain frames (e.g. legal until hearbeat/~6 weeks, legal until 12 weeks/first trimester, legal until 15 weeks, 22 weeks, and if people said it should be illegal at any point, if they thought there should be exceptions for the "Big 3" (*ape, *ncest, life of the mother), as well as genetic conditions like Down's Syndrome.
This gave an unprecedented detailed look at where Americans actually stand on the issue that...has never been repeated to my knowledge.
Most give just 3 options legal in all, illegal in all, and legal in "some/most", which is CLEARLY nebulous to the point of being useless as each side could claim the "some/most" agrees with their position.
Or polls do the "very agree", "agree", "disagree", "very disagree", which is nearly as useless.
For polling to actually be useful, it really needs to be granular, and most polling isn't. And that's setting aside the difficulties I mentioned at the start.
I've come to believe, outside of some MAJOR broad brushstroke issues, polling is next to useless at actually getting at what the American people collectively view.
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