PREVIEW - INTERVIEW: Will Kaback talks with Stephen Hawkins

Summary

Tangle Podcast – PREVIEW - INTERVIEW: Will Kaback Talks with Stephen Hawkins
Release Date: February 6, 2025

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Introduction

In this insightful episode of Tangle, host Will Kbach engages in an in-depth conversation with Stephen Hawkins, the Global Director of Research at More in Common. The discussion centers around the pivotal study titled "The Priority Gap," which explores the disparities between American voters' perceptions of Republican and Democratic priorities following the 2024 election.

Study Design and Objectives

Stephen Hawkins begins by outlining the methodology behind the "Priority Gap" study. Conducted with a representative sample of 5,000 U.S. adults, the survey aimed to uncover how different demographic groups perceive the priorities of the two major political parties. The core objective was to determine whether Americans accurately understand what each party values most, especially in the aftermath of the 2024 election.

Stephen Hawkins (05:19): "This was a 5,000 person survey. We got a representative sample of adults and then made sure that we had good quotas and weights to account for all relevant considerations."

Key Findings

One of the most striking revelations from the study is the unanimous concern over cost of living and inflation across all demographic segments. These issues emerged as the top personal priorities for Americans, transcending generational, racial, and geographic lines.

Stephen Hawkins (06:44): "Americans of all demographic groups said the cost of living and inflation were the top issue to them personally."

However, a significant "perception gap" was identified in how the priorities of Republicans and Democrats are viewed. While Republicans are perceived to prioritize immigration, the economy, and inflation—aligning closely with the actual Republican agenda—Democrats are often seen as focusing disproportionately on LGBTQ and transgender policies, abortion, and climate change.

Stephen Hawkins (06:54): "When it comes to Democrats, what we found is that inflation and the economy were actually ranked like 4th and 9th in terms of what Americans thought Democrats cared about."

Implications for the Democratic Party

This misalignment suggests that Democrats may not be effectively communicating their true priorities to the electorate. Instead, they are perceived as prioritizing issues that resonate more with their progressive base rather than the broader concerns of the general populace. This disconnect potentially hindered their performance in the 2024 election.

Stephen Hawkins (06:54): "Democrats were seen as really serving or prioritizing an agenda that was more in line with maybe what their progressive activist base cares about or just actually something which Americans in general don't see as a top priority."

Influence of Campaign Strategies

A critical factor contributing to this perception gap was the strategic maneuvers during the campaign. The Trump campaign invested heavily—approximately $450 million—in advertising that framed Kamala Harris as primarily focused on transgender issues. This narrative overshadowed other policy areas and reinforced the skewed perception of Democratic priorities.

Stephen Hawkins (11:58): "The Trump campaign is about addressing these issues that you care about. And Harris is focused on trans issues, which is exactly the perception that we see here."

The decision by the Harris campaign not to aggressively counter these ads further exacerbated the mismatch between perceived and actual Democratic priorities.

Final Stretch of the Campaign

In the concluding days of the election, strategic differences between the two campaigns became apparent. Harris aimed to reach moderates and disenchanted Republicans by featuring bipartisan endorsements, whereas Trump targeted politically disengaged voters through high-visibility stunts aimed at showcasing relatability.

Stephen Hawkins (20:38): "Trump seemed to be going after the disengaged voter. He's doing stunts like this garbage truck thing, working at a McDonald's. Right? These are high visibility things."

This divergence highlights the importance of understanding and targeting the right voter segments during critical moments of a campaign.

Conclusions and Takeaways

The episode underscores the vital role of accurate perception management in political campaigns. For Democrats, bridging the perception gap requires recalibrating messaging strategies to better align with the electorate's primary concerns, such as the economy and inflation, rather than being predominantly associated with niche progressive issues.

Stephen Hawkins (06:54): "Democrats were seen as really serving or prioritizing an agenda that was more in line with maybe what their progressive activist base cares about or just actually something which Americans in general don't see as a top priority."

Notable Quotes

• Stephen Hawkins on Study Design:
  "We wanted to know how enthusiastic people were about the presidential candidates they voted for... what we were really curious about"
  (05:19)

• On Perception Gaps:
  "When it comes to Democrats, what we found is that inflation and the economy were actually ranked like 4th and 9th in terms of what Americans thought Democrats cared about."
  (06:54)

• On Campaign Strategies:
  "The Trump campaign is about addressing these issues that you care about. And Harris is focused on trans issues, which is exactly the perception that we see here."
  (11:58)

• On Election Trust Among Republicans:
  "Among Republicans, we saw that that level was just 24% in the middle of the year. And then right after the election, it had jumped up to half."
  (10:06)

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This episode of Tangle offers a nuanced exploration of the factors influencing voter perceptions and underscores the complexities political parties face in aligning their public image with the electorate's true priorities. Stephen Hawkins's expertise provides valuable insights for strategists aiming to navigate the ever-evolving political landscape.

Transcript

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[Isaac Saul]

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tang.

[Will Kbach]

Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of our take. I am Tangle Editor Will Kbach. I'm jumping on the mic today to share a special interview with everyone, and it may be on a topic that you weren't quite expecting us to cover at this point in the year. I know the 2024 election is somewhat in the rearview mirror, but it's also something that we're still thinking a lot about at Tangle. We're thinking about what we learned about the electorate, what the downstream effects of the results will be, and really where Democrats go from here. I recently read the results of a study that put this last question in particular into perspective, and I think it's a study that everyone, everyone listening to.

[Stephen Hawkins]

This podcast would appreciate, especially those of.

[Will Kbach]

Us who are interested in understanding how different groups think about our politics and how different perceptions of the other side influence our elections. So that study is from a group called More in Common. It's an organization that describes its mission as building more united, inclusive, and resilient societies. And they do a lot of work examining issues like polarization and division in American society. A few weeks after the election, they published an article titled the Priority Gap, which shared insights from a representative sample of U.S. adults and really tried to hone in on this question of whether we truly understand what each other believes about politics. The results were pretty striking. Americans of all demographic groups said the cost of living and inflation were the top issue to them personally. But when it came to how Republicans and Democrats priorities were perceived, Americans across the political spectrum were much better at assessing what Republicans care about than what Democrats care about. In particular, the average American thought Democrats cared far more about LGBTQ and transgender policy than Democratic voters actually did, while issues like abortion were also overestimated in their perceived importance. These kind of perception gaps are something that we talk and write about all the time in Tangle. So we thought it would be great to talk to the person who spearheaded this study to learn a little bit more about what they found and what lessons we can glean from the results. That person is Stephen Hawkins, More in Commons Global Director of Research, and I spoke to him toward the end of December and we had about a 30 minute conversation that touched on all of the above that I just introduced. So no matter where you sit on the political spectrum, I think Stephen's insights will give you a lot to think about in terms of both our current politics and where we're headed. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Stephen Hawkins.

[Stephen Hawkins]

All right, Stephen Hawkins, thanks so much for joining the podcast. Glad to have you here.

[Isaac Saul]

Hey, thank you for having me.

[Stephen Hawkins]

So I want to start by just asking you to walk me through the post election survey that More in Common conducted. From my read of it, you're exploring the perception gap that Americans have broadly about Democrats and Republicans and what they believe. But I wonder if you could just start at a very basic level and talk about how you designed the study, what the core questions were you were trying to answer, and then some of the key key takeaways that you found.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah, sure. So this was a 5,000 person survey. We got a representative sample of adults and then made sure that we had good quotas and weights to account for all relevant considerations. So it matched the voting public. And then we asked questions that related to a broad set of things that we are curious about with the election. We wanted to know how enthusiastic people were about the presidential candidates they voted for. We wanted to know if they split the ticket. We wanted to know what issues mattered the most of them. We wanted to know how aligned they felt with their political candidates. But the questions that we ended up analyzing the most that seemed to really provide a new angle on what happened in the election were the questions that you just referred to as the perception gap questions. And what those are are questions which aren't about your opinion, they're about your perception of other people's opinions. And so what we did was we asked people what they thought Republicans priorities were and what we thought Democrats priorities were. We gave them a list of about two dozen options. And those ended up being the heart of our analysis because they allowed us to understand what it was that people were perceiving to be their sort of each of the side's key agenda as they were going into the polls. So do you want me to go into the findings of it?

[Stephen Hawkins]

Yeah, that would be great. I'd be curious just to hear kind of the top line findings and then maybe I'll ask a few follow ups about some of the more nitty gritty elements of those results.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah. So the first thing is that this was really not an election where we saw that Americans had extremely divergent priorities. What we instead saw was that really every group that you might be interested in looking at in terms of generations or racial groups, rural versus urban, et cetera, everybody's top priority was cost of living or inflation. This was just unanimous across the board. And so when we were looking at how Republicans and Democrats priorities were perceived, the thing that you would want if you're a Republican or if you're a Democrat, is for your party to be seen as having prioritized inflation, because it's the number one thing on every major group's minds. And what we found was that Republicans were consistently seen as prioritizing immigration, the economy and inflation. And those were actually the same top three issues that Americans on average had, right? Republicans care a little bit more about immigration, Democrats cared a bit more about health care. But the economy and inflation were on the list of what Americans thought Republicans cared about. But when it comes to Democrats, what we found is that inflation and the economy were actually ranked like 4th and 9th in terms of what Americans thought Democrats cared about and what people thought Democrats priorities were were abortion and LGBT trans issues. And climate change. And so this really helped us to sort of draw a picture of what went wrong for Democrats in this election, which was that rather than being seen as in sync with the Americans top priorities, they were seen as really serving or prioritizing an agenda that was more in line with maybe what their progressive activist base cares about or just actually something which Americans in general don't see as a top priority.

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We'll be right back after this quick break.

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[Isaac Saul]

Another key finding that was really interesting to us was of course, there's so much discussion around distrust in the election on the Republican right and among Donald Trump supporters and with something which we've been monitoring over the past couple years. And one of the questions which we asked in middle of 2024 was how much people trusted election officials to administer the election fairly. And among Republicans, we saw that that level was just 24% in the middle of the year. And then right after the election, after Trump's victory, that number had jumped up to half to 15%. And so we see a doubling of trust among Republicans in the election officials, basically allowing them to converge with where much closer to the national average, much closer to where independents and Democrats are. So much energy went into this election denialism narrative. And then when Donald Trump won, it seemed like his base kind of dropped the issue and it basically became a reversion. The issue reverted back to being what it was several years ago, where there's just basically middling trust in the election system overall. Those are Some of the most interesting findings. Let's see if there's one more that I want to mention.

[Stephen Hawkins]

Well, I've got a follow up, and it speaks to something that you wrote, actually, in a piece in the Atlantic that was about this study when it came out. And that was that part of the issue that Democrats had maybe was that they didn't push back on the way they were being framed by the other side. I know you brought that up specifically Kamala Harris, the Kamala is for they them, Trump is for you ads and how it wasn't so much that she was embracing trans issues in her campaign, but she failed to offer a response to that criticism. So do you think that that played a big role in creating that perception gap? Like, what would you identify as some of the drivers behind why that existed so much more for Democrats?

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah. So really, I think it only counts probably only 2, 2 mechanisms for driving that false perception. One is that there's a kind of stereotype of what Democrats care about. And that stereotype is heavily shaped by what people see the most in terms of activism and liberalism, et cetera. And then the other mechanism would be external efforts by the Trump campaign or by other Republican efforts to try and define the Harris campaign by something which is damaging to her. And so we kind of looked at both of those explanations. The first explanation doesn't really answer it very well. It could have been the case, for instance, that progressive activists like the leftmost flank of Democrats, like the trans issues were just number one for them. And they were making a lot of noise about this. And if you ask them, they would say trans issues are our most important thing and that the country was just kind of conflating Democrats with that group. But that's actually not what we saw when we asked the progressive activist group, this leftmost group, how much of a priority was for them. And it kind of fell towards the middle as maybe around 6th or so it was, fell behind other issues like abortion, climate change and other issues. And so it really seems like the far more likely explanation, or at least the more dominant factor is what you lay out here, which is the $450 million the Trump campaign spent hammering home these two ads in the final weeks of the election saying that Harris is for they them, Donald Trump is for you. And notice that that framing specifically is about prioritization. Right. It's like Trump campaign is about addressing these issues that you care about. And Harris is focused on trans issues, which is exactly the perception that we see here. The Democratic, sorry, the Harris campaign leadership Senior strategists did an interview where they talked about this decision about how to respond to this ad. And basically what it came down to was according to them, they felt that if they were to address this ad and spend enough money to really cut through, it would basically change the conversation about from what they wanted it to be about. They wanted to define Harris based on what her issues were. They felt like the country didn't know her well enough, especially compared to Trump. And they also weren't able to find an ad that actually increased how much people liked Harris. All they could do is basically neutralize the attack from Trump. And so they basically decided not to act on it. So it's hard for me to judge that decision and say that they could have made a better decision there, not knowing all of the different things that they tried to address it. But it was a very damning attack because the video that you're referring to, that ad features clips of Harris in her own words with, you know, in interview on video, expressing these things, expressing these viewpoints, including that taxpayers should pay for the gender reassignment surgeries of incarcerated non citizen people. And so it's very hard to kind of distance yourself from a statement which is on video.

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We'll be right back after this quick break.

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[Stephen Hawkins]

Well, I think that leads to an interesting follow up, which is if you're a Republican, looking at the results of the survey that you did, I feel like you feel pretty good. Obviously you won the election, but you also saw that American's perception of what you stood for was pretty much in lockstep with what the defining issues of the election were. So I'm thinking more about takeaways on the Democratic side. And if you want were to put on your strategist cap and look at this survey, you know, where do Democrats go from here? Is it a matter of, oh, maybe we just had either a weak candidate or a candidate who didn't have enough time to define herself because of the unique nature of the campaign, or is this an issue that you think is permeating the entire party and they need to do like a harder reevaluation about how their messaging on these issues across the board.

[Isaac Saul]

Great question. I think what the strategists missed was this data that we have is not that hard to capture. And the amount of money that goes into a presidential campaign, they're collecting data every day in different ways, qualitatively, through focus groups. They're doing state polling, they're doing national polling, they're doing social media analysis. If they had been asking these questions, what do you think defines the Aris campaign? What do you think it is that Democrats care about? They would have caught that in the final month in October and early November of this year, people were saying, I think abortion and trans issues are what the Harris campaign are about. From there, the decision really is, can you, can you counter that perception? Because part of it is based on what in Harris did from July through November, and part of it is based on the last 10 years of politics in the country. And I think that if I could offer one piece of strategic advice that I think was a mistake, it would have been not going on, for instance, the Joe Rogan podcast, which got tens of millions of views. And in particular, this is something we haven't talked about yet. It particularly appeals to younger male audiences and younger men who are non white. And those are groups that she really needed to win over. What's interesting about this analysis, too, that we did was that we looked at how people who made their decision about which presidential candidate to vote for, we looked at how that broke down among the people who decided who to vote for in the last days of the election. And it's not a small number of people, for those of us who are more politically engaged and have kind of decided which team we're on or whatever, we might have known six months in advance or even years in advance who we're going to vote for. But 16% of the electorate in our poll said no. I decided the week of the election or even the day of the election. And among those people, three out of five went for Trump. And among that group, we see the same trend where they also misperceive those priorities. And so the things you're doing in those last 10 days, you might think if you're somebody like us who's very politically engaged, that they don't matter because you're basically like, everything has been said, everybody's mind had been made up. That's absolutely wrong. Because there's the big contention of politically disengaged Americans who find politics boring, who find it frustrating, who find it emotionally exhausting, who don't trust the people who are operating in the system, but who do want to vote and do their part, but they're only tuning in at the very last minute, and they're going to. They don't have a huge amount of information that they're sorting through. And there might. They might just take the cues that they're getting in those last few days and act on them. And it looks like that's what happened here. And so whether you decide to intentionally try and reach those voters five days before the election, 10 days before the election, by going on the biggest podcast in the world and doing a two hour interview with, you know, that's gonna get seen by 20, 30, 40 million people, that's a very big decision because it would've given her a platform to talk about these issues at length and define herself to a group of people that ended up breaking away from her in those last days.

[Stephen Hawkins]

Yeah. The one thing I do think about when you raise that point about the importance of the very final stretch of the campaign is that I don't think that Trump necessarily did a great job with the final days of his campaign either. I'm specifically thinking about the Madison Square Garden rally that he had within two weeks of day, which maybe wasn't universally condemned, but I think drew a lot of blowback from voters and communities that Trump was working to win over. So, I don't know, is there a way to kind of like square that circle and think about how the direction of the mistakes or the lack of strategy one way or another hurt Harris more than it hurt Trump when both were kind of making those errors down the stretch?

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah, well, it's interesting to compare the two, the final stretch there, because we have and more in common. We have our own typology. We talk about the hidden tribes of America. These are seven categories of Americans. Progressive activists, traditional liberals, passive liberals, politically disengaged moderates, traditional Conservatives and devoted conservatives. And they overlap on. They overlay rather onto the American electorate. And what it looked like was happening in those final two days, the strategies between the two presidential campaigns, is that it looked like Harris was really trying to go after moderates, people who were maybe lean conservative, maybe have a history of voting Republican. One of her final campaign rallies was here in Washington D.C. she had Republicans come on stage, Republican voters who talked about switching to voting for her for the first time or voting for Biden for the first time as a democr. And so she. And then she did that work with Liz Cheney. And so here she's not going after people who are politically disengaged. She's not going after people who don't have a lot of political information. She's going after people who have an ambivalence because they lean conservative, they don't really like Democrats, but they might be able to just maybe a little bit more of a nudge will convince them they shouldn't vote for Trump. Now, Trump seemed to be going after the disengaged voter. He's doing stunts like this garbage truck thing, working at a McDonald's. Right? These are high visibility things. They're not about bringing Some insider Washington D.C. person like Liz Cheney. They're things that, you know, appeal to the average American, especially young person.

[John Mull]

Hey everybody, this is John, executive producer of YouTube and podcast content and co host of the daily podcast. I hope you enjoyed this exclusive preview episode. We are now offering this podcast exclusively to our premium podcast members along with our ad. Free daily podcasts, Friday editions, in depth interviews, upcoming new podcast series, bonus content, and much more. If you want to receive all that and give your support to help us grow Tangle Media, please head over to tanglemedia.supercast.com and sign up for a membership. If it's not the right time for you to sign up, please don't worry. Our ad supported daily podcast isn't going anywhere. But if it is in your ability to support by signing up for a membership, we would greatly appreciate it and we're really excited to share all of our premium offerings with you.

[Stephen Hawkins]

You.

[John Mull]

We'll be right back here tomorrow. For Isaac and the rest of the crew, this is John Mull signing off. Have a great day, y'all. Peace.

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Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by John Wall. The script is edited by our managing editor, Ari Weitzman, Will K Back, Bailey Saul and Sean Brady. The logo for our podcast was designed by Magdalena Bova, who is also our social media manager, Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. If you're looking for more from Tangle, Please go to readtangle.com and check out our website.

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[Isaac Saul]

Raj Panjabi from HuffPost.

[Raj Panjabi]

And I'm Noah Michelson, also from HuffPost.

[Isaac Saul]

And we're the hosts of Am I Doing It Wrong? A new podcast that explores the all too human anxieties we have about trying to get our lives right.

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Each week on the podcast, Raj and I pick a new topic that we want to understand better and bring a guest expert on to talk us through how to get it right.

[Isaac Saul]

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