A hot thermostat and partisan vaccine backlash 📊 August 1, 2021
Is the public more liberal than when Biden took office? That’s one of two studies, and I also have a few links
This week’s newsletter has my coverage of some hot new political science data and a few links to other things I’ve been reading and working on.
Thing 1: A liberal mood
James Stimson is a political scientist most known for his estimates of the “public mood” — a measure of how liberal or conservative the public is on any given issue area (including all of them in aggregate). I wrote about this in 2017 when his data showed Americans had become more liberal than ever before. Then, we argued the shift left was a reaction to Donald Trump’s presidency, a continued manifestation of a longer-term trend by which the people react in a thermostatic manner against the party in power. The government moves too far to the left or right and the people turn the temperature up or down in search of moderation.
Well, Stimson’s newest numbers show the public drifted even further to the left between 2017 and 2020. Here’s a chart of the data courtesy of Matt Grossmann:
