What's changed post-conviction?

Democratic Senate survivors, how low trust explains the realignment, the Latino diploma divide, cultural issues in 2024, the myth of youth leftism, the rich are still Republican outside of the coasts

No. 318 | June 7, 2024

🇺🇲 2024

The New York Times/Siena joins Echelon Insights with a recontact survey following the Trump verdict. Their conclusion was much the same as ours: a 2 point shift in the presidential ballot. 

But prediction markets are back to where they were before the verdict. 

Presidential and Senate results have become increasingly correlated in recent elections, but Senate Democrats have still managed to outperform the top of the ticket.

Democrats pivoting their coalition towards college graduates who show high levels of trust in democratic institutions is a trap, writes Eric Levitz. Low-trust voters are pretty numerous and heavily concentrated among Black, Latino, and young voters — the very groups where Biden is losing the most ground. 

But this changed in the Trump era, according to the Democratic data analyst David Shor. Beginning in 2016, social distrust became associated with support for the Republican Party. Which makes some sense. After all, Trump campaigned as an outsider who would take on a rigged system and cleanse America of supposedly untrustable elements through mass deportation. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, explicitly appealed to voters who believed that America was “already great” and that people of all stripes were “stronger together,” sentiments more congenial to Americans who trusted their government and compatriots. 

This trend continued in 2020, according to Shor, when Biden campaigned on, among other themes, the virtues of America’s existing political system and public health authorities. 

If Biden did in fact lose support among distrustful Americans over the past four years, then it would make sense for his share of young and nonwhite voters to decline. This is because young Americans consistently evince less social and political trust than older Americans, while Black and Hispanic voters express less than white ones.

The diploma divide has come for Latino voters.

Split Ticket looks at Native American voters in 2024. 

📊  Public Opinion

Pew takes a look at the cultural gulf between Trump and Biden voters. 

It turns out that young voters aren’t far-left liberals.

There was consensus at the recent AAPOR conference that the future of polling is mixed-mode..

McPhee told me the industry has moved toward agreement that multi-mode approaches are the best way to get a more representative sample. She stressed that it's not that one mode is better, but rather a combination is "better than the sum of its parts." For instance, one SSRS survey experiment saw improved response rates for state-level surveys that recruited respondents by various means, including postcard or SMS text message, and gave respondents six potential access points to respond: URL, QR code (directing them to the survey), text, email, a phone number for respondents to call (inbound dialing) and SSRS reaching out to them by phone (outbound dialing).

👫 Demographics

From me — the partisanship of whites who live in homes valued at more than $1.5M.

Who is the American middle class?

🗺️ Data Visualization

The New York Times visualizes the level of destruction in Ukraine. 

🌎 Global

The Indian election results were a surprise, with Narendra Modi’s dominant NDA coalition winning only a narrow victory. Here’s how his opponents almost won.