10 Comments

You got a shout out from The Dispatch: "You may have seen a Wall Street Journal/NORC poll in recent days purporting to show the percentage of Americans who value patriotism, religion, having children, and community involvement has plummeted in recent years. Don’t jump to conclusions. “If these numbers had been produced by my firm, I would immediately assume we had made a mistake and send them back to an analyst to double check,” Patrick Ruffini—co-founder of the polling firm Echelon Insights—writes on Substack. “Surprising numbers and big shifts garner outsized attention—when best practice is simply to average the polls and be skeptical of outliers. That’s never more true than when these big shifts appear to confirm pre-existing media narratives. Reality is almost always a lot more boring. We know that patriotism and religion have been on the decline for quite some time, but the rate of decline did not quintuple in the last four years—a fact that the Journal’s chart obscures by treating the latest four year increment the same as the previous 21-year one on the x-axis.”

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I don't know much about polls, but your analysis raises some other questions.

First, most telephone polls I encounter are carried out by machines. How has this affected social desirability bias, and how has that affected current polls' comparability with earlier telephone polls? Does Gallup, for instance, still use old-school polls involving actual human interviewers?

Second, isn't the group of people who will answer an online poll very different from the group of people who will answer a telephone call from an unknown number? Has anybody done a study contacting the exact same people and giving them the same poll in the two different platforms?

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The drop in Patriotism doesn't come as a shock ... we may still love our nation collectively, but w/ the porous SW border, the impervious, multi-layered malfeasance in the Public Health sphere throughout COVID, the oozing corruption from the Lunch Pail Joe "Xi-ndicate", many of us love The Dream, but now face the reality that the levers of power are exercised by an assemblage of duplicitous, venal reprobates that really hate the Nation.

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" it’s declined by more than half in just four years without any clear inciting event explaining why." Well, there was a pseudo pandemic and everything that that implied. Churches were closed. Authorities were revealed as fraudulent. Then, our cities were trashed. Maybe it affected more than +$6 trillion in national debt.

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Mar 29, 2023·edited Mar 29, 2023

The WSJ/NORC poll has Patriotism at 73% (very/somewhat important), with 38% as VERY important. This tracks with the Gallup poll you cited. This is not a cratering of American values.

Similar for all the other data points WSJ highlighted.

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This was helpful. Thanks.

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Superb, thank you so much for this.

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