A bigger government vs. a bigger life
Trump is who you thought he was, mapping ideology in all 50 states, the MAHA curious, how parents manage screen time, campaign vendor Survivor, where trust in ChatGPT > trust in news
No. 377 | October 10th, 2025
📊 Public Opinion
New polling from the brand-new Searchlight Institute asks what the political parties want for your life. And Republicans lead Democrats on virtually everything — from getting a good job, to owning a car, to marrying and having kids.
Part of this is that a happy, abundant life has become Republican-coded. That’s long been true for marriage — and it’s also true about all aspects of material well-being and upward mobility.
It also reveals that for many voters, politics isn’t about policies or programs — but about who is most likely to produce good things in your own personal economy or family life that don’t necessarily have any connection to a government program.
When you ask voters, it’s no contest whose position they prefer on expanding the safety net to help lower and middle class Americans: the Democrats. The reason that they still lose working class voters, though, is that government programs only have a small impact either way on people’s pocketbooks compared to larger forces like the economy, cost of living, and jobs.
And Republicans have a brand advantage as the party best able to manage these macro forces.
It’s not just about good jobs — but a good life.
More than the leftward drift of its policies, Democrats have become a party that’s downbeat and critical of how things are going in society, that doesn’t know how to have fun. And that shines through in this data. Democrats don’t seem optimistic about the ability to achieve big things — often associated as the party of people living a single, cramped, city-dwelling apartment-bound life — so people who aspire to bigger things don’t think they can deliver them.
It’s the contrast between wanting a bigger government and wanting people to have a bigger life. And the latter vision turns out to be much more appealing than the former.
For all the talk of a dramatic shift in public opinion, most voters believe that Trump has delivered on his promises and the generic ballot has barely moved from last year.
Morning Consult maps political ideology in all 50 states, with conservatives outnumbering liberals in 38 states and in all the presidential battleground states.
Navigator segments Americans on MAHA. While the hardcore MAHA loyalists are a small segment of the electorate, a majority are either MAHA loyalists or MAHA-curious.
A new look by Pew at how parents are managing screen time.
At least some use of a smart phone is happening among a majority of 2-4 year olds.
📈 Data Science
Fascinating look by Jordan Lieberman at which political consulting firms survive and which don’t. This is a must-read for anyone in the game.
Certain categories — like print shops or polling firms — are much more likely to survive from cycle to cycle. Digital is a killing field, but you’re six times as likely to survive if you have alumni of campaign committees on your team. And he calculates how much business you need to have to have a chance at survival the next cycle or to establish a foothold in a state.
And then there’s this new paper on a little-known part of the influence industry: corporate policy teams who vastly outnumber lobbyists.
“While lobbyists are overwhelmingly likely to have political experience, reflecting how important their relationships and political capital are, corporate policy team members often don’t, suggesting they are more focused on delivering expertise, internal counsel, and managing other types of stakeholders.
Navigating politics is getting more and more complex for companies today. For the most part, they haven’t reacted to this complexity by hiring more lobbyists; instead, they’ve grown their internal policy teams.”
🤖 Artificial Intelligence
A sweeping report on public opinion on AI shows that trust in ChatGPT has eclipsed trust in news in certain countries.
📰 Media Habits
Republicans are now 10 points more likely to use social media for news than Democrats, and there’s been a 51 point swing in the partisan makeup of who uses Twitter/X since 2021.
🏀 Sports
How quants ruined the NBA: They figured out how to maximize shot efficiency — at the expense of creating an interesting game people want to watch on TV.
