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- [00:00]
A
How are things, by the way? How are you doing?
- [00:02]
B
Doing well, thank you. I've been posting much less on Twitter and I'm much happier about it. So it's been a nice New Year's resolution of mine where I was like, I'm just not going to post much unless I have articles to share. And it's been great. I haven't needed to worry at all about, you know, what kind of insane debates are going on. I saw one going on the other day where people were like, arguing about whether Elizabeth Warren was an over performer. And I'm like, all right, that's it. You guys are crazy.
- [00:28]
A
Is this in part a resolution based on the topic that we're going to discuss today?
- [00:35]
B
You know, probably actually.
- [00:49]
A
Hello and welcome to the GD Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Bruch. If you, if you spent time reading think pieces on the Internet during the past handful of years, you might have come across the following ideas. One, that American men are suffering from a loneliness epidemic, and two, that conservatives are generally happier than liberals. If you aren't familiar with these takes, then you probably aren't online enough to experience the sad loneliness of the American male liberal. So please carry on as you were. No, I'm joking, I'm joking. Keep listening either way. In any case, these ideas have caught on enough that friend of the pod, Laksha Jain, machine learning engineer by day and head of political data, at the argument in his spare time that he wanted to do more research into what differences may actually exist across the political spectrum and between men and women. And he is here with me today to talk about what he found. So welcome to the podcast, Laksha.
- [01:41]
B
Hey, thanks for having me, Galen.
- [01:43]
A
We're also going to get into some of your other research on affordability and education challenges in the polling industry. We might even get to your bold accusation that Americans are lying to pollsters about how much they read. But let's begin with your research into the socialization and satisfaction of Americans. So what was the study that you conducted to start with?
- [02:05]
B
Over the course of a few national surveys conducted over the last five, six months, we asked Americans, we, we gave them a variety of statements and we asked them, like, how well does this describe you? And the questions were mostly centered around, you know, your own mental state. Like some of the statements were, I dislike myself, I panic easily, I have a difficult time starting tasks. I'm a worrier. And then how you felt you were socially. And these questions were like, I have a hard time making or keeping friends. I keep others at a distance. I only feel comfortable with friends or family members. I find it difficult to approach others. And what we found through teasing out how people felt each statement described them is, you know, there was a gap between conservatives and liberals. There's a huge gap between people who voted and people who didn't. And then there was, probably the biggest thing was that there was an age based divide, which I think people always talk about the loneliness crisis in terms of there's a unique problem hitting men. It's true that there is a loneliness crisis and it's true that men are very negatively impacted by it, but actually it's hitting all Americans and it's accelerated, the research shows, since the advent of social media and the Internet, and it's actually worst among young women.
- [03:33]
A
Okay, so let's focus on the gender divides first and then we can get into some of the partisan dividends. Divides. So you looked across different age ranges, and then you also looked at gender, and you found that women actually report less psychological well being than men, but that the biggest factor is not actually gender, it's age. So how big of a divider was age?
- [04:01]
B
Age was a very big divider. In fact, age, we analyze cohorts from, you know, 18 to 29, 30 to 44, 45 to 64 and 65 plus. And there is, for each gender, there is literally a linear trend upwards in terms of well being and emotional peace. The older you get, and that is the starkest, most interesting divide that we see, that really it's just the younger you are, the more likely you are to be distressed, antisocial, lonely, on your own. That's the biggest thing that we saw. It was by age. When you drill it down to compare gender within each age cohort, you start seeing that the biggest divide, yes, it's by age. But then once you start looking within each age group, you see that each age group has women actually being hit harder by loneliness than men are. And that's not to say that men are not being hit. I mean, everyone can be impacted by it. But it is to say that maybe we've overlooked one critical angle of this entire phenomenon, that it's more about age
- [05:22]
A
than it is about gender. And I'll post a link so that folks can actually look at the charts themselves. But how did we get to this place where the broad idea of people being impacted by the loneliness epidemic, the worst in America, is maybe like disillusioned young men who listen to podcasts and watch YouTube and get fed ideas that make them even more angry and sad and lonely. Like, that's the stereotype. But it doesn't seem to necessarily match the data. It's like, maybe those. That is what young men are experiencing, but young women are sort of in the same place at the very least.
- [06:00]
B
You know, to me, Galen, I find this the most interesting thing of them all as well. Like, why is it that we're seeing the biggest divide by age and within the age groups, we're seeing that young women are hit significantly harder than young men are. But we spend all our time talking about the young male loneliness crisis when that absolutely exists, and it needs a solution. Well, why are we ignoring the young women who are lonely? And I think, to me, it's because young men, the bane of every society, is what do we do with men between ages 16 to 25? This is one of those things where.
- [06:39]
A
Yeah, what are we gonna do with you?
- [06:41]
B
I'm 29, sir.
- [06:43]
A
Oh, okay. Sorry, sorry. Maybe when I first met you, you were in that age range, and you know how people sort of stay the same age forever as, like, the age that you met them. But actually, that makes me feel better knowing that you're 29.
- [06:56]
B
The stereotype that has come about online is like, what's going on with the young men? For a few reasons, young men who are antisocial, they tend to have more destructive ways of showing that. And young women who are antisocial tend to internalize it a lot more. You know, young women tend to be much more affected by, like, anxiety, depression, and they internalize a lot more of what's going on with them. Young men who fall into the social isolation trap typically start going into conspiracy theories, more gambling, and in this case in 24. I think it's important to note that young men swung towards Donald Trump at some of the highest rates that we've seen. If you look at a demographic to demographic change over the last election. And that to people was alarming because, you know, they think, well, if you voted for Harris, it's fine, right? And then if you voted for Trump, that's something we got to figure out. And I think that's why a lot of the sphere of commentary is obsessed with trying to figure out why people vote for Trump. I think that's the core reason, because people view that as. And look, I'm a liberal. I voted for Harris. People view that as a destructive action. And they're like, we have to figure out why you're taking that action.
- [08:09]
A
Like, pathologize it in some way.
- [08:11]
B
Exactly.
- [08:13]
A
So the first question I had when I looked at this was, was how long has this trend persisted? Which is to say, being young can sometimes feel alienating because you just, you don't know really who you are yet. It feels like there's so much that's unknown and uncertain about the future. And, you know, you haven't gone through the process of maybe having kids and making friends through that experience or, you know, belonging to a number of different civic institutions or churches or what have you, and that this may be a natural lifelong progression. So is dissatisfaction, loneliness, alienation amongst the youth a new phenomenon?
- [08:58]
B
Young people being faced with a crisis or people obsessing over what's going to happen to the future of America if like, you know, young people are like this, that has gone on forever. You can go back even to ancient Greece and you can find Plato and Aristotle complaining about ancient Greece's future being mortgaged on the backs of lazy young people. So it's not new to people to say that there's something wrong with young people. But I did get curious about this, so I looked it up and the face to face time that Americans are spending, that young Americans are spending with each other, has declined by 50% in the last two decades. And at the same time, young people are reporting higher and higher rates of mental disorders, anxiety, social disorders, loneliness. And so there is something to the fact that yes, young people have always had it harder than older people have had, but it's never been this bad in recent memory.
- [09:54]
A
Yeah, I mean, I am familiar also with this U curve when it comes to age based satisfaction, where the youngest people say like 18 to 22 or what have you report, relatively high levels of well being. But there's a decline until you reach middle age. And the nadir of satisfaction between the ages is around 50 or so. But then there's a pretty steep incline from 50 until death, which I don't know if that's counterintuitive or not, but sort of looking at some of those trends, it looks like it actually hasn't over time been the youngest people in society who are the least satisfied or psychologically stable, I guess.
- [10:38]
B
Yeah, there's a lot of important research that shows this and I think that U curve has been well established over time. What I think is most interesting is that when I published this, I got a lot of people saying, like, look, how can you say that young people are suffering from a crisis if they've always done worse in the rest of society? And that's why to me, like, I find it so important to contextualize against what young people Were like before. Yeah, the argument didn't exist in 2002. But you what did? Polls did and we were able to like at least see survey based analysis of how young people were interacting, how they felt, how they were socializing. People always complain, Galen, about like the amount of time young people spend partying. That's the stereotype, right? Except now they're complaining they're not partying enough. Now they're saying, hold on, you guys aren't going out at all. Like what's going on here?
- [11:33]
A
And actually, well, and that's data based, right?
- [11:37]
B
Yeah, that's database. The amount of time they spent partying, going out, drinking, all of that has gone down and like in a vacuum. That is a great thing that you're not drinking as much, you're not getting in trouble as much. The problem is what it's symptomatic of is that they're just not doing anything in general when it comes to socializing.
- [11:56]
A
That is some pretty clear data in terms of how much time young people spend with each other. But I do also wonder, you know, like I want to stress test this a little bit, is like maybe young people understand mental health in a different way than older people. Right. We have more terms to describe mental distress or psychological distress. You know, if you spend much time on the Internet, you see everyone is pathologizing something as anxiety, depression, autism, whatever. Not to say that those things don't exist, but that there's a sort of like obsession with characterizing the quirkiness of being a human as oftentimes there being something wrong with you. So could there be some issue in terms of self reporting that, you know, young people just report distress more because they're more likely to believe that everything is a form of stress to like maybe exaggerated a bit, but that their lived experience. Like if you actually, I don't know if you could do like a, I don't know, you can't do a sort of like body scan or blood test for happiness. But like their actual lived experience isn't so bad. They just pathologize their experience more.
- [13:06]
B
Did you grow up on 2010's Tumblr also? I declined to answer because 2010 is Tumblr 2000s. Like you know that era, the Internet, there was a subculture where you had to have a mental illness, otherwise something was wrong with you. And so like fast forward 12 years, I'm doing a bunch of polling and people are like, yeah, you know, like there is something to the fact that young people are much more likely to say that something is wrong with them. And they're also much more likely to go to therapy. And the punditry will tell you and I, I have no data on this specific part. The pundistry will tell you like going to therapists is a great thing for most people. Some of them use it as an outlet to confirm that something's wrong with them. I don't know. But what I will tell you is this. You can conduct the study a bunch of different ways, but all of them end up finding the same result. Right. We know that spending time with people and socializing on an aggregate level across society tends to help human beings. It makes them happier. There's a lot of research showing this. We also know we can measure this objectively, that the number of socializing young people has plummeted. The amount of time each young person spends socializing has crashed. We also know that in our survey we didn't ask young people to like, just report, like I am a worrier, etc. We also asked them, do you think it's true that like you have a hard time making or keeping friends that you trust, you don't trust people outside friends or family, etc. There are a bunch of different ways of asking these types, types of things. And while we reported the aggregates, I can tell you that in almost every single question we saw these same exact splits break out. So clearly it's something that's going beyond just young people are more likely to say or admit to being depressed. It's actually just, I think it's actually just a material reality difference.
- [15:09]
A
So what is the culprit? I think you teased the Internet, but is that what you settled on?
- [15:14]
B
I think so. I think so. I find it hard to ignore the correlation between the rise of social media and the decline in face to face interaction. I don't think the pandemic helped at all. And I think people are still paying the price for that, socialization wise. But that also comes back down to where did they spend their time during the pandemic? Can you imagine the pandemic galen, in the 2000s? Like I don't even think it would have happened actually because I think like, not that Covid wouldn't have happened. I actually think had Covid hit in the 2000s, our way of dealing with it would have had to be very different because people would not have been able to be stuck inside for three
- [15:54]
A
months at a stretch, working remotely and the like.
- [15:57]
B
Yeah, I think in general, social media to me is the most easily explainable phenomenon for why Young people are feeling more and more lonely because now you have an avenue to speak to people and you think that's the way in which I get my social interaction. But that's actually not very satisfying. It's not very self actualizing. It's not very, it's not very healthy because it turns out we need to talk to people in a way that doesn't just involve a computer screen and shouting at people when they disagree with
- [16:30]
A
you on twitter.com or even, I mean, apart from Twitter, which most people don't actually use.
- [16:36]
B
I'm joking about Twitter.
- [16:38]
A
Yeah, yeah, but I mean like the, the gamification of social interaction where you feel val validation from a red button showing up that says that you have a like or a comment or a view or what have you that it uses. I mean, like I've had conversations on the Forebearer podcast to this one about sort of the gamification of social interaction does the same thing to your brain that sort of gambling can do or other activities or substances that ultimately like, put you into some sort of like addiction spiral where you get an immediate hit of dopamine, but you don't get sustained feelings of satisfaction from engaging. So you'll get like, in that moment where you see that you have a view or a like or whatever, you feel better, but then it sort of crashes down and your, your overall level of satisfaction is lower than if you were to be at a party, be at church, be, I don't know, at an exercise class or what, whatever it may be that people could alternatively engage in as a form of socialization. You know, I also want to talk a little bit about what this means. I mean, we've established that it's not really so much a gender thing, it's more youth thing. What are the potential social consequences to having a bunch of young lonely people?
- [17:52]
B
I think the thing is young people in general, and I'm not the only one who said this, David Shore said it too. Young people in general have a lot of personality flaws. They tend to grow out of as they mature and they see more of the world. But I think the consequences is we've never actually had a generation that has been this antisocial or dissatisfied or discontent. I know people talk about the lost generation with World War II. I know they talk about the silent generation. And like, they're like, look, these people saw hell and then they came back. Those experiences were meaningfully very different. The percentage of people that went to war was actually very low. Everyone was impacted, but the percentage of people that went was very different. You can't look to the 1920s and the 1930s for an explanation of what's about to happen because here everyone is getting impacted by social media. It's a much wider blast radius and I think the consequences, I'm not sure. But you look at South Korea's falling birth rate, you look at the fact that young people in America are dating less and less and you have to wonder like, where are we going with this? Is this going to get any better anytime soon? Because I don't think so.
- [18:59]
A
You bring up South Korea maybe in part because South Korea reports the widest gap in terms of political views amongst young people and also has, I think, one of the or the lowest birth rates. And so people often point to that as, oh, there's a relationship between young men and young women living in different political worlds and whether or not they're interested in dating each other and ultimately procreating with each other. I guess the suggestion there is when people don't interact with each other and instead live in their sort of social media worlds, they start to inhabit different mental lives because they're not spending time with each other. But then also because they develop different worldviews, it makes the likelihood of partnering up and having kids all the less likely.
- [19:45]
B
Exactly. Young women generally and young men, they don't really understand each other super well at first. You know, this is why in elementary school, middle school, you have to have boys talking to girls. You have to have them like interact with each other to understand the way the other gender thinks. Because without that, you know, they end up on completely different planes a lot of the time. Venus and Mars, quite literally. South Korea has very different political viewpoints with young men and with young women. And I actually think that is a byproduct of the larger social isolation that seems to be happening rather than just a cause. These are interlinked, one fuels the other. But it is not true that one is only dependent on the other. It's not true that just because young men are conservative means young women don't want to talk to them. It's they're not talking partly because of that, but partly because of a lot of other reasons. Then young men tend to self reinforce that cycle. And we know from academic research that people who are interacting only with like minded people and people of the same gender, same cohort, same demographic, tend to reinforce each other's views. That leads into a cycle where it gets harder for young men and young women to relate to each other.
- [21:09]
A
Yeah.
- [21:09]
B
And the Internet has not helped this. South Korea in particular has probably had it accelerated in part due to the political divide between the genders. But that's happening here now too. If you look, the gender gap between young men and young women is the highest that it's ever been.
- [21:26]
A
Today's podcast is brought to you by you, the listeners. Without paid subscribers, GD Politics simply wouldn't exist. Your support means we can continue making an independent podcast that prioritizes curiosity, rigor, and a sense of humor. Paid subscribers get about twice the number of episodes and can join in the paid subscriber chat. Also importantly, you get access to our live shows. You can also connect your personal feed once you become a paid subscriber to wherever you listen to podcasts, so you'll never miss an episode. Join the GD Politics community today and become a paid subscriber at gdpolitics. Com. We got a lot coming up for you in 2026, so now's a great time to join again. That's GDPolitics.com and thank you. I want to talk a little bit about partisanship, which I'm sure will also get people excited if this hasn't already gotten people excited. Were there any limits to this study that you want to look into deeper? I mean, this is a pretty complicated topic. It has potentially really big implications and we can, you know, just like people have gotten carried away with generalizing the loneliness epidemic as being male. This, you know, this can get over extrapolated as well or whatever. Like are there other things that you think are worth digging into deeper?
- [22:46]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a tremendously difficult topic and I would never say that our study is the only basis by which anyone should draw conclusions. That's why I go through so many pains to look at the academic research that exists on this topic across a variety of angles. The existing surveys. What I want to do, I think in the future if I could do it again, I probably would have had a a couple of free response questions where we would then be able to ask people like, hey, summarize your mood in the last X weeks, summarize your mental well being. And I think also just like asking people more about their impressions of the other gender I think would have gone a long way. I wish we could do that. We didn't have the question space too. But asking people about their impressions of the other gender I think would have been really important. And teasing out a little bit more with the why.
- [23:37]
A
I want to also just put this in perspective here. There are clear relative Gaps. But how big are the absolute gaps? Like, are we talking like young people are generally sad and old people are generally happy, or people are generally satisfied or happy, but for young people it's less.
- [23:55]
B
So on balance, people are more happy than not. But at the youngest members of society level, it's actually pretty close. You know, like we're talking about a relatively minor gap. Gap between, if I could be crude for a second, just say happy or unhappy. That's a relatively minor gap. People are still on balance, more happy than not. But that gap is closing very, very rapidly.
- [24:20]
A
Right. So which is to say that you code it as, you know, one is happy, negative one is unhappy. Zero is about neutral.
- [24:31]
B
Yeah.
- [24:31]
A
So for example, 65 plus year old men get the closest to one, they're at 0.57, whereas young women who are the least sort of satisfied or psychologically well off in this study are at negative 0.09. So they're just below the neutral mark, whereas young men are just above the neutral mark. So we're saying that the difference is not between very satisfied and very unhappy. The differences between approaching happiness and kind of middling.
- [25:03]
B
Yeah, yeah, basically.
- [25:04]
A
Okay, let's talk about liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans. This tends to be a hot topic. I have read pieces that suggest that Republicans or conservatives are happier than liberals and Democrats. Some people like to try to, you know, downplay this as again, reporting differences. People understand sort of well, being differently based on their partisanship. What did you find in this study?
- [25:32]
B
You know, I, I see a lot of those arguments too. Some people say that liberals are just more likely to admit to something being wrong with them. But I don't, I don't think that's true. I think in study after study, no matter how you conduct it, conservatives grayed out as, on the whole, happier than liberals. I will say that it wasn't actually as stratified by partisanship. Democrats and Republicans, like, they were pretty close in terms of their overall like wellbeing scores as I like to call them. The wellbeing metrics show they were actually pretty similar. But when you drill down to liberals and conservatives, that's where the difference starts to emerge. And then there's a difference here.
- [26:16]
A
Wait, yeah, can we talk about that for a second? So you asked, did you vote for Harris or did you vote for Trump? And based on voting for Harris or Trump, there were not big differences. But then you ask, are you liberal or conservative? And there were big differences.
- [26:29]
B
That's correct.
- [26:31]
A
Okay, tease that out for us.
- [26:33]
B
Yeah, so it's Generally well accepted that like Kamala Harris is the liberal candidate, Donald Trump is a conservative candidate. You have the Democratic Party, which is a liberal leaning party, and the Republican Party, which is the conservative leaning party. But you have a large chunk of Americans, about a third of Americans who self identify as moderates. They don't think they're too far to the left or too far to the right. And we can argue about what the word moderate really means. But these people largely split evenly across the political parties. Democrats win moderates by a little bit, but on the whole, you know, they're pretty evenly split. That group and the fact that Democrats still win a lot of conservative minority voters, those two groups mask a lot of the differences between Democrats and Republicans. Because when you look at liberals versus conservatives, there is a clear gap in terms of satisfaction and well being. I'm not saying that something is wrong with liberals. I'm not saying like that it's a bad thing. I'm not saying any of these conclusions that people are going to extrapolate for sure. But I am saying that the gap consistently emerges in study after study. It's not just ours. Blue Rose research found the same thing. A bunch of other studies have found conservatives tend to report better mental health, no matter almost how you're asked. Pew actually measures happiness. They measured that in 2010 before Trump, and they found conservatives with an edge. So it's not just us.
- [28:11]
A
Can you explain sort of what areas there were the biggest differences? Like, you asked a bunch of different questions. Where were the biggest differences between conservatives and liberals?
- [28:21]
B
Yeah, absolutely. So to begin with, the biggest gaps were, well, by a demographic angle, it was actually between liberal men and conservative men. Liberal men were actually significantly less satisfied. They were much more likely to be emotionally distressed and they were actually a little bit more likely to be socially isolated. And that was interesting to me because I actually did not expect that at all. And so that was like, oh, wow, okay, what, what's happening here? The gaps between liberals and conservatives were especially striking when it came to the anxiety angle. Liberals were way more likely to be extremely anxious compared to conservatives. Their well being score on the anxiety axis, emotional distress axis, for very liberal voters, it was 0.08. Remember, zero is neutral. For very conservative voters it was 0 34. So there's a very big gap there. Conservatives would call it neurotic, liberals would call it just like aware, but there we are.
- [29:29]
A
Do you have any ideas what is responsible for this divide? Because, you know, the place that my mind goes is participation in like religion is oftentimes a driver of participation in civic society. But that also gets frustrated by current trends because some of the most Trump inclined voters are people who consider themselves religious but don't go to church. And so if you don't go to church, you're not reaping necessarily the benefits of, you know, the socialization, sort of emotional well being benefits of civic participation. So do you have a sense of what's driving the divide?
- [30:05]
B
It's really tough because our study measures the what, but it's kind of hard to get into the why. I do think that some of it is down to a way in which parties select for their voters. Almost, you know, increasingly the liberal project has become, and I'm not saying this is a bad thing. It's about showing people what's wrong with society and trying to fix that. And if you're open to those types of arguments, if you're open to that type of appeal, you're also much more likely to be affected by those types of appeals and those types of metrics. And that's why I think in part, the voters who grade as very liberal also tend to grade as the most anxious. And I think it's telling that the gap was not nearly that big on the socialization axis. We're talking 0.13 for very liberal to 0.18 for very conservatives.
- [31:07]
A
So in terms of how much time you're spending with other people, whether you trust other people, how many friends you have, or what have you, that's not the big driver of the difference. It's more on the psychological wellbeing metrics of whether you're anxious, have difficulty doing things the like.
- [31:24]
B
That's correct. That's correct. That's the really big axis that is actually driving the vast majority of the differences that we observe.
- [31:33]
A
It's really interesting stuff. It still pales in comparison to the difference between the satisfaction levels of voters versus non voters, which is also, you know, maybe runs counter to a lot of the stereotypes, which is that people who pay a lot of attention to politics are kind of pissed off and may fall into some of the similar traps that we talked about with social media where they're always paying attention to cable news or even just political content on social media, spiraling, what have you. But explain to me what you found.
- [32:09]
B
Yes, I think with voters and non voters, that was the most interesting part of the study for me because that that is a gap that people don't really talk about. You know, if you're on Twitter, you've probably heard the stereotype that like, oh, look at these blissful people who are just not at all worried about the election, about politics in general or anything like that. And like, actually what we see is that people who don't interact with politics or in general, like, it's great that you're not getting bombarded by polling news on Twitter or by headlines about ICE or whatever, but it comes at a cost. That is not the only thing that you are missing out on. You are missing out on civic engagement, on community, on participation and ties with your area, with like minded people, on discourse. And these things all tend to add up. People who are not engaged in politics tend to be more anxious, a lot more antisocial, less stable, so to say. And I think it's important to understand that like it's not just that being in politics makes you happy. That's not necessarily the conclusion I would draw. I would actually draw the conclusion that the same things that lead people to be anxious, antisocial, et cetera, also lead them to not engage as much with their community and with the political process. I think that's the main takeaway.
- [33:40]
A
Yeah, I think people are somewhat conflating what's going on, which is that, you know, I've talked on the four Bearer podcast to this about studies that show that it's like 20% of Americans who pay a lot of attention to the news and that there's a real divide between those 20% and the 80% of Americans who don't pay an awful lot of attention to it aren't reading the headlines every day. But that's not the same difference as voting versus not voting. The majority of that 80% is still voting. Right. And that's indicative of the fact that they are engaged in their community in some way or they do participate in civic life. Like there's a big difference between serving your community in some way, going to local meetings or church or volunteering or what have you, and reading every headline that comes across your transom on social media or in your notifications, on your phone, on your smartphone. And I think that's a little bit what is getting conflated. People who participate, participate in civic life are likelier to vote. I mean, just think about all of the organizations that exist around voting, like the Women's League of Voters or the Rotary Club or the Lions Club or what all of these different things or for, I mean, you know, souls to the polls in the black church. There's a lot of overlap between civic participation and incentives or you know, drivers to go to go vote. Whereas People who opt out of civic life altogether, you know, have. Have fewer, I don't know, push factors pushing them to the polls. Is that. Does that make sense?
- [35:20]
B
Yeah. And that. That is exactly what I would say as well. Right. Like, the people who participate in civic life are just much more likely to be part of a community. The people who don't, they're not likely to vote. And it manifests in many ways, one of which is increased anxiety, increased rates of antisocial behavior, loneliness, and one of which is just they don't vote. And those two things are very correlated. But it's a mistake to, as you said, it's a mistake to draw a strictly cause on a causal analysis in that we do have research that suggests that participating in civic engagement, forms of politics does help with mental health. But that's not saying that posting on Twitter is going to help you with your mental health. That is saying that participating in activism with people, you know, like going to protest together or like forming a community, volunteering, canvassing, that type of thing, that is much more positively correlated with mental health.
- [36:25]
A
Okay, I want to move on and talk about some of the other research you've been doing. Do you have any more thoughts on the study that you did, the polling that you conducted? Before we do that?
- [36:35]
B
I just think if we took a step back and stopped trying to understand just why did people vote for Trump and more about why are people the way that they are, we would have understood a lot more about American society in general. And I think it's a shame that we've spent all of our time just trying to understand how people switch their vote to one party or another, because in that process, you lose out on understanding so many different things that actually reveal more about why people vote the way they do.
- [37:07]
A
Yeah. Okay, let's move to a somewhat lighter note, and then we'll get into some maybe hard policy topics. But you encountered some research from Pew that suggested that 77% of Americans say they read a book in totality or in part over the past year. And you thought, this can't be true. So what did you do and what did you find?
- [37:29]
B
Yeah, I saw, like, almost 80% of people said they read a book over the last year. And I'm like, you guys are lying. There's no way this can be squared with the fact that literacy rates have gone down over the last decade or two. So at some point that would have shown up in the data. Right. There's no way to square that. Being completely frank with some of the metrics that we see on how people are spending less and less time reading, they have lower attention spans, etc. So I just. A poll. I'm like, okay, did you read a book over the last year? And guess what we found? 75% of people, or 74% said, yeah, I read a book. And I was like, okay, so the same as Pierre. Okay, interesting. So then I. I was like, all right. I wonder, are we really just in a nation of people that now read and don't take away anything from that? I mean, well, I've had a lot of experience with that in my Twitter post. So, like, maybe, you know, being able to read is not the same thing as reading. But no, Then I said, okay, what book did you read? Did you read a book? And if so, what book did you read? And you could only respond, yes, if you told us which book you read, you named a book in a text response. You could even say, I'm not telling you, but, like, you had to give us a reply.
- [38:49]
A
And you could say, it could be anything. You could even make the book up.
- [38:52]
B
Presumably you could make it up, but you had to tell us which book.
- [38:55]
A
You could say, my journal, you know, anything.
- [38:59]
B
We found that 58% of people said that they actually read a book and could name the book. So the rate went down from 74% of people saying, yeah, I read, to 58%. And that was just straight up by asking people, okay, which book did you read? And that actually squares much more with the data that we see from other rigorous methods of studying this that don't just go beyond that don't just ask people, did you read a book? Like, if you look at other studies on this, you'll find that, like, roughly half of Americans read a book over the last year. And if you look at that, then it's very believable to think 58% of voters read a book because voters tend to be more literate than the population as a whole.
- [39:45]
A
Does this make you think about polling more broadly or methods that you might introduce into the polling that you conduct? This idea that when it comes to political questions, the horse race. The problem with polling is not so much that people lie to pollsters, it's just that pollsters have a difficult time reaching all Americans and that people don't usually go out of their way to actually lie to pollsters. It seems like you're saying here that sometimes people do actually lie based on, I don't know, social expectations or what have you. So what do you take away from this in terms of applying it to polling more broadly.
- [40:22]
B
Yeah, I think social desirability bias really again took on this whole Trump anti Trump thing when it's actually much deeper than that and it has far ranging consequences that we really need to understand. One of those is the fact that people start saying social desirability bias is not a thing. Look at the fact that like Trump voters are not very shy about who they are actually voting for. If you just ever talk to one of them and I'm like, guys, stop looking at everything through Republican versus Democrat lens. Start thinking about the fact that people can, maybe it's not true with Trump, but it is true in other things. People are much less likely to accurately report their sexual behavior. Their behavior when it comes to over.
- [41:05]
A
They overestimate their sexual behavior or they underestimate their sexual behavior.
- [41:10]
B
It's less about an over underestimation though I think historically in the past it's, it's been different response patterns by gender, I think.
- [41:20]
A
Okay, interesting.
- [41:21]
B
But it's actually more about like their habits and risky habits, their proclivities may be misreported. So to say, when it comes to their drug use, people are much more likely to under report it to pollsters. And there's just a whole bunch of things where social desirability bias does come into play. It's we, you know, the studies have found that it doesn't really tell you much about presidentially which way polls are going to be biased because the shy Trump voter thing isn't really a thing. People aren't lying about voting for Trump. But it is a thing when you're trying to measure like other things related to your personal behavior that does come into play. And I think for me, if you're trying to do a study on, let's say on sexual behavior or on drug use or something like that, you have really got to use some more sophisticated methods. Even if it's just a low pass filter that like does a basic check for sincerity, you will get much better responses and much more high quality responses that tend to align more with sincere data. If you can just ask those basic questions.
- [42:35]
A
Okay, let's move on to a slightly different challenge when it comes to polling. You had the argument faced some challenges when it came to polling Hispanic voters in that you found that your sample of Hispanic voters said that they backed Kamala Harris by 20 percentage points in 2024. Research suggests that Harris beat Trump amongst Latino voters by more like 10 percentage points or even potentially less. Oftentimes you'll get these differences in terms of, you know, the subgroups in a poll. And you know, we say just look at the top line, you know, don't get too carried away with crosstab diving because you know there are going to be errors here and there and you can't sort of just like discredit all polls or what, you know, freak out over these little differences. You, in this instance said, no, I am going to freak out. What did you do?
- [43:30]
B
I think no one has nailed the perfect cross tabs issue in general. We changed the way that we were waiting in part because we think that it's led to overweighting liberal Hispanics in the survey. So we stopped waiting by modeled party ID on race. That's just like a super wonky way of me as a pollster just saying that, like there are certain challenges when it comes to modeling voters historical partisanship, that if you rely on traditional techniques, you will downweigh or underrepresent low propensity minority voters or overstate their Democratic lean. That's the challenge that we faced. And you know, I haven't solved it. I think that the tricks and techniques that we've used have gotten us closer to reality. But I will never say that we've solved the issue. What I will say that we've done is that we've been super careful about how we analyze votes for exactly this reason. I don't like when pollsters say, oh, in our survey Democrats are winning 61% of Hispanic voters. And I'm like, well, that doesn't mean anything if your survey also said they were winning 65% of Hispanic voters in 2024. Right. Like we know that didn't happen. But also you're showing a decline. You're showing a dip of 4% in vote share. That's actually more important. So what we do and what I think more pollsters should be doing is you should be looking at the comparison to 2024 vote, because that gives you a baseline. Then you're more insulating yourself from the noise problem. Then you can say, look, 65% of our sample says they're voting for, you know, 65% of our Hispanic sample says that they're voting for the Democrat. In our sample, 60% of people said of Hispanics said that they voted for Kamala Harris in 24. So you're getting a 5% shift in vote share. That's the important way to look at this. And I think that's the more accurate way to look at this.
- [45:36]
A
So in some ways you're waiting to recalled vote as some pollsters started doing
- [45:45]
B
in 2024 in some ways. But we're not waiting to recall the vote by demographic. We're waiting to recall the vote overall. And it doesn't really fix everything. But I would. I can't wait to recall vote by demographic because we don't actually know how each demographic voted. We have estimates, but we don't really know how each demographic voted. So what I do, though, is I'm like, okay, I'll wait by recalled vote overall, so I have the right number of overall Harris and Trump voters, period. And then I'll say, within each subgroup, how does the actual vote share compare to the recalled vote share?
- [46:24]
A
Do you think that other pollsters are maybe not looking at this as closely and that shifts amongst Latino voters are being overstated at the moment?
- [46:35]
B
No, I think it's real. I think it's very real. I think even in our survey, like, we evaluate shifts against the 2024 baseline, and we find the Democrats are gaining a lot with Hispanic voters. Like, a lot, a lot. And that is. That is really critical to know that. And this shows up, by the way, in the New Jersey and Virginia results as well. Like, specifically in New Jersey, you'll find the Democrats gained a lot with Hispanic voters. So this is borne out in the election results.
- [47:04]
A
I do think that even amongst Hispanic voters who said they voted for Trump.
- [47:08]
B
Yeah, yeah. They won something like 18% of Hispanic Trump 2024 voters, which is actually bonkers. Democrats have made serious gains with. With that group. I do think that some of these polls showing Trump at, like, negative 50 with Hispanic voters are going a little bit overboard. I'd say he's closer to, like, negative 35, but, like, it's, you know, he's unpopular, so there's that. And I guess at the extremes, we tend to magnify the middle, and we tend to compress the extremes. And I always think I'm like, would I have reacted the same way if, like, Hispanics were voting 75, 25 Democrat or 70, 30 Democrat, like they did in 2016? And I had him at, like, 74, 26 instead of 70, 30, even though that's the same difference. People wouldn't pay attention to that big of a gap. Right. So I think we tend to magnify the middle, compress the extremes. And I. I think that's an analytical shortcoming that we all have to be aware of.
- [48:11]
A
Yeah. Okay. I want to wrap up on the word du jour before I let you go, which is affordability. You asked Americans to list their top two most important issue. No surprise there. It was affordability. 60% of respondents said that it was either their number one or number two issue. Nothing else even crosses the majority of threshold. But perhaps what you found more interesting is that while Trump does terribly on the issue of affordability in voters eyes, when you ask that 60%, you know, amongst respondents who said that affordability was their number one or number two issue, they actually only split 5050 between Democrats and Republicans despite the fact that they were very negative on Trump on the issue. And you cast this forward to suggest that, you know, this may be a limiting factor for Democrats in terms of how much they may, may be able to, you know, optimize for voters dissatisfaction with Trump. What is going on here?
- [49:21]
B
The Democratic Party has a trust issue on the economy. It's largely been wiped by the fact that Trump has done some of the most unpopular economic policy that I've ever seen any president do. And don't get me wrong, 5050 for the Democratic Party now is actually considerably better than what you might think considering where they started from. Right when they entered the 2025 year, they were getting battered economically. Like people were so mad at Joe Biden that getting to 5050 in and of itself is an accomplishment. But yeah, there's still a lasting effect from the fact that people are really mad about Joe Biden and they may not trust Donald Trump on the economy. He has a terrible approval rating there. But they're not ready to hand the keys to Democrats just yet. Now, I don't know if you want, if you want to see that as a limiting factor for Democrats or a potential high ceiling, room for growth type of thing. I think it could be either. I think what you're going to see is that there's going to be certain Democratic candidates who are able to harness that very well and put up massive over performances and there's going to be some others who just overplay their hand and aren't able to take advantage of the fact that there's a lot of people who dislike Trump on the economy. Because Galen, if you look at the actual splits among people and how they feel when it comes to, you know, affordability, look at the ideology, look at the fact that there's a lot of white non college voters who are dissatisfied with Trump and especially moderate and conservative voters who are not voting for Democrats. And that to me suggests there's a little bit of ground that needs to be made up by Democrats among the cultural or moderate voter, the culturally conservative or the culturally moderate voters, how they do that. I don't know, maybe those voters become more liberal from the news headlines. We've seen that happen in Trump's first term and Biden's first term. Who knows? But something has to change there.
- [51:30]
A
So you're basically saying that unless Democratic candidates are able to capitalize on more moderate and conservative voters who are dissatisfied with the economy, there will, they may do well, but they, there will still be a ceiling on how well they can do based on dissatisfaction with Trump's economic performance.
- [51:50]
B
Exactly.
- [51:51]
A
That's, that's. I don't know if that's like a profound thing to say so much, but I guess, like, like when you put it in those terms, when you show exactly sort of affordability, voters split 50, 50. It does sort of like maybe resonate in a different way.
- [52:07]
B
Yeah, exactly. Right. Because it shows you, yeah, anti Trump will only go so far. But the limit of saying anti Trump will only go so far is people will say, well, then nothing is going to go so far. Look at Trump. Look at everything he's done. If that doesn't sway you, what will? And I, and I can tell you there is stuff that will sway people. Even if anti Trump messaging doesn't sway them, there is stuff that will sway them. And it's based around the economy. It's based around finding a message that works on the economy. And then it's based around getting closer to those voters on at least a couple of axes. Social, cultural, whatever you want to call it, maybe it's guns, I don't know. But getting closer to them on that and then establishing some trust based on the economy, you're going to have to bridge that gap and then you could really win those voters.
- [52:57]
A
Interesting. All right, well, we'll see if Democrats try it and if they do, if they're successful. Lacha, thank you so much for joining me today.
- [53:05]
B
Thanks for having me, Galen.
- [53:07]
A
My name is Galen Drouck. Remember to become a subscriber to this podcast@gdpolitics.com and wherever you listen to podcasts. Paid subscribers get about twice the number of episodes and can join in our paid subscriber chats and pass along questions for us to discuss on the show. Most importantly, you ensure that we can keep making a podcast that prioritizes curiosity, rigor, and a sense of humor. Also, be a friend of the POD and go give us a five star rating wherever you listen to podcasts, maybe even tell a friend about us. Thanks for listening and we will see you soon.