we have to follow the evidence on political change

opinion polls matter; people don't want a revolution

Over the last week, I had two instructive interactions with social science professors on bluesky. My feeling is that many academics in the social sciences are not acquainted with the evidence on politics and political change. There appear to be fairly widespread misconceptions about the American electorate and the path past political changes have taken.

In this post, I’ll go through several of these misconceptions, using my recent interactions as a jumping off point. The two interactions I’ll be pulling from are with Professor Jess Hardie (a sociologist at CUNY, thread here) and Professor Deva Woodly (a political science prof at Brown, thread here). Both of my conversations reinforced my view that many academic social scientists are far outside of the political mainstream (which is not bad by itself) and also not aware of what that mainstream is (which is bad). My view is that if you are doing or studying politics, you have to have a good sense of where voters are and how the normal course of politics works, or you are doomed to do ineffective or counterproductive political action and research. I disagree with both Profs. Hardie and Woodly on the merits, but as always I appreciate the engagement.

misconception 1: public opinion and polls don’t matter

The most foundational misconception we see about politics is that somehow public opinion doesn’t matter. As I wrote in my post “against the labor theory of protest,” if we look at the polling on the pro-Palestine campus protests, it is not pretty. At the time I wrote that, public opinion was sharply against the campus protests, even among the college educated who should be naturally sympathetic to campus protests. Shockingly, the public at that time favored universities calling the cops more on the campus protestors.

In my conversation with Prof. Hardie, I made the case that perhaps there is something to the idea that campus pro-Palestine protests had disrupted life for Jewish students in particular. Recently, the New York City Government has been questioning CUNY officials on the state of antisemitism on campus. Although I do not have any special insight into the state of antisemitism on campus, it seems like there is a problem there—at least something worth taking seriously and looking into.

Prof. Hardie disagreed, claimed Jewish students were safe, that the feelings of Jewish students were being used to stifle free speech.

There is certainly something to the idea that bad faith right-wing actors are trying to shut down campus protests they don’t like. But I personally think it’s reasonable based on non-right-wing accounts to be concerned that there is also something to the idea that Jewish students on campus are being treated unfairly. Some pro-Palestine campus protestors have actually called for universities to defund campus Hillel (Jewish) groups. That’s extremely concerning to me. As I have written several times, I continue to be puzzled as to why pro-Palestine protestors are not calling for peace and instead have become quasi-partisans in a foreign war.

To back up to the main point here—public opinion is a very good guide as to whether your political activism is effective or not. Many issues start off as popular or unpopular, so you need to know the baseline you are starting from, but your activism should be increasing the support numbers. If you are doing activism and you see stats like the public, to the extent they know about what you are doing, wants the cops called on you—you may need to rethink your strategy.

Prof. Hardie points out that past movements have started out as unpopular—this is perfectly true. The gay rights movement was quite unpopular when it started and then over a period of 3 decades activists focused on public opinion shift and the goal of marriage equality—and they were able to convince the American public to see things their way. It’s a great success story.

The American Civil Rights movement is another good example here—although it is again worth noting that activists took a disciplined stance, focused on specific feasible demands, and changed public opinion over time to the point where the Civil Rights act was quite popular when it was passed.

I think we can’t lose sight of that lesson—your movement doesn’t need to start off as popular, but it should become more popular over time. By claiming that public opinion is not a good guide to movement effectiveness, you’re basically dooming yourself to lacking the necessary discipline.

And what is the way to measure public opinion? Polls! They are not perfect, but they are pretty good and serve as a useful guide. We don’t want to be overly fatalistic—your issue being unpopular now does not mean you should despair. But if your issue is unpopular, it does mean your challenge is convincing more people to agree with you.

(I’ll return to the point about the Women’s March below)

misconception 2: politics is not about persuasion

Many people who consider themselves to be doing politics do not believe it is their goal or responsibility to persuade people who disagree with them. I personally believe that if you are not interested in persuading people, you are not really doing politics in a contemporary democracy. There are certainly forms of politics that are not about persuasion, but in modern democracies persuasion is almost always an important part of politics.

One of my frustrations with the pro-Palestine movement is that they do not appear to care about persuading people. Another snippet of my convo with Prof. Hardie hints at this. My suggestion for the pro-Palestine movement is to transition from being quasi-partisans in a foreign war to being peace protestors based on universal values. Protest for a permanent settlement to the Israel-Palestine conflict, create sympathy for Gazans based on appeals to human rights.

But the pro-Palestine protestors are blinded by hatred for Israel and are are unable to engage in persuasion to advance their cause. Such persuasion would have to involve convincing the public that a settlement would ensure peace and prosperity for both Israelis and Palestinians. So the pro-Palestine protestors would also have to adopt in a sense pro-Israeli stances, while arguing that Israeli military policy is bad. This is perfectly feasible, but I have seen zero people do it so far.

You can see this mentality in this exchange: I am arguing for doing persuasive politics to minimize harm to Gazans (and secure a state, but perhaps not a maximalist state that some people want), and that is somehow not good enough. OK, so we’re holding out for all or nothing, and getting nothing, while real actual people die.

If we skip ahead in the convo, we can see another snippet. It is not clear how anyone is advocating for Gazans if they are not engaging in persuasion to end the war.

Note the statement that a peace protest would be unrealistic. Why?!

If you have an issue that is unpopular, and you are not interested in persuading people to take your side, and not interested in measuring that success via polling—what are you doing? You may feel like you are doing politics… but are you?

misconception 2: protest should be disruptive and radicalism is effective

In the course of our conversation on antisemitism and safety of students on campus, I suggested the following to Prof. Hardie—that because universities have a teaching and housing function, that we don’t allow protests to disrupt dorms or classrooms.

The retort is “Protest is inherently disruptive. That’s the whole point.” I disagree with this. The purpose of protest is to convince people to take your side, not mess up their morning commute or favorite piece of art.

As I quoted above, Prof. Hardie also claimed the Women’s March was ineffective. In the conversation (but not quoted here to limit the number of quotes), Prof. Hardie also took the position that it was “innovative” activism which she participated in that was responsible for the strong performance of Dems in the 2018 midterms, rather than things like the Women’s March.

I think this is wrong—the Women’s March was really effective, “anodyne” as it was. There is research on this! Some Women’s Marches were rained out, and if you compare the rain-outs to the non-rain-outs, you conclude that the Women’s March increased the share of women and non-white people elected in 2018. Seems good!

There is another idea here which I call the “labor theory of protest.” That for a protest to work, it must be difficult and personally costly and feel radical. This is wrong! Candlelight vigils are effective, friendly rallies like the Women’s March are effective. People hate blocked highways and throwing soup on art. A good protest is inclusive, brings people in, and persuades them.

As always, it’s important to admit what you don’t know. So I’m happy to look at evidence that alternative and more radical forms of protest are effective. I don’t doubt that some are in some cases. But overall, my feeling is that boring old marches and persuasion and flags on lawns are effective.

misconception 3: all criticism is bad faith and from “the right”

We also see a charge in the quoted conversations above that concerns about safety on Jewish students on campus are basically a right-wing ploy. Well, I guess both me and the New York City Council have been ensnared in a right-wing ploy. Or maybe I am a right winger—a guy with a PhD in sociology who works professionally in liberal politics.

These charges seem silly to me—there is certainly a bad-faith right wing element but there are also lots of normal people who want reassurance that like, their kids have a safe and stable environment to learn in.

That brings me to my next point.

misconception 4: responding to critics is giving in to them

There will always be bad faith critics. And sometimes those bad faith critics will convince normal people about their bad faith criticism. Sometimes to do politics and persuade people, you need to have answers for the bad faith ideas.

So let’s say you care about Gaza, and you are doing activism for Gaza. And some people are worried that your pro-Gaza activism is making Jewish students on campus uncomfortable or unsafe. Well, a thing you could do is to include in your messaging that you do not think disrupting Jewish students in class in or in their dorms is a reasonable form of protest. Or you could say that we do not want to defund the campus Hillel, and that we fully support the goal of peace, security, and prosperity for all Jewish students and all Israelis, just as we do for Palestinians.

In this way, you can take a charge leveled against you and flip it into a positive. The critic says “you do not care about Jewish students” and you say “look how much I care, and because I care about them, I also care about Palestinians and you should to. Everyone deserves these rights.”

misconception 5: paring back asks in a movement is giving up

All of these add up to an unwillingness to make strategic choices. If you don’t have to convince anyone, if all criticism is bad faith, if answering criticism is giving in, if polls don’t matter—you can just do whatever you want and call it true radical organizing or whatever.

This, unfortunately, is a path to irrelevance. If we look at successful movements, they refine their asks to what they think are feasible, and work on persuading people to support those—and only those. Because as soon as you start advocating for other things, supporters start flaking off and you weaken your coalition. As an example, you can get a broad range of Republicans and Democrats to come together on manufacturing microchips in the USA—but there is a reason the microchip bill did not have provisions for climate change or health care costs. Because that weakens the coalition for that specific bill. If Democrats had required climate change provisions to go in the microchips bill, they would have gotten neither.

To bring it back to the discussion here, one of the asks from the pro-Palestine activists is for a right of return for Palestinians. If you are holding out for this, there will never be a settlement and an end to the conflict, because it’s something Israel would never accept. So—what are a feasible set of demands here? I don’t know, but people advocating for Palestinians should figure it out and focus on those!

misconception 6: there is a secret public

Let’s pivot to a different conversation I had, this time with Prof. Deva Woodly. This was a conversation in response to a piece by Elad Nehorai into the “deeper” reasons for Harris’ loss to Trump in the 2024 election. This piece recycles myths such as that “Democratic turnout disappeared” as opposed to the actual story of Trump persuading people (with some turnout changes on the margin for sure), and if you read Nehorai’s piece I would urge skepticism.

Prof Woodly used the Nehorai piece to claim that people want “revolutionary” change, which I objected to.

As evidence, Prof. Woodly linked a NYT poll where 70% of voters said that the US political and economic systems need major changes or to be torn down. My feeling is that such a question is not super informative—it definitely registers some discontent, but as soon as you get into specifics the idea that there is some kind of secret support for revolution is… wrong—unless we define revolution to mean something fundamentally different than the plain meaning of the word of overthrowing the government by violent means.

We see that Prof. Woodly believes that a vote for Trump is a vote for “revolutionary change,” a claim that I completely disagree with. Trump was perceived as more moderate than Harris and voters rated Trump as closer to their own self-described moderate ideological preferences than Harris.

Prof. Woodly’s view falls into the same type of myth-making that we saw in the Obama years about the liberalism or radicalism of people who didn’t vote. A secret public that has extremely large and fairly coherent demands like “tearing institutions down” or “electing socialists” that are simply unvoiced by our current political system.

In reality, non-voters are just loosely tied to politics and have much less consistent ideological preferences than regular voters. I think Prof. Woodly is doing the same “reading in” except in this case with Trump voters, and I think she’s reading in something that’s not really there—a desire for destructive revolution.

For her claim to be true, you’d have to believe that like Asian shopkeepers in Queens and Hispanic dads in Perth Amboy are really itching for a revolution, rather than voting for a candidate they perceived as less extreme. I find this to be a hard sell. Are people registering general discontent with the last few years of Covid and inflation? Sure, absolutely. But are they itching to overthrow the government? Probably not.

if we want the liberal project to succeed, we have to embrace what we know

I believe in liberal democracy and human rights and fighting climate change. I believe that these things are under threat in the world today, and that we need to advocate for them and defend them. But to get there, we have to let go of approaches that may feel good or satisfying but are ultimately ineffective or counterproductive. It may feel good to respond to the frustration over injustice in Gaza or Trump’s election by embracing totally new ideas and throwing everything old out the window. But those totally new ideas are likely wrong, and most of what we thought before these events is still true.

That means the way to do politics is still by persuading people and getting votes. Boring old opinion polls are useful. The public is not itching for destruction or revolution. People are still generally good even if they casted a vote we disagree with. We can understand each other treat people with dignity and respect. We are going to get some of what we want but not all of what we want. And so on.

I do continue to fear for the academy—and the social sciences+humanities in particular, as professors view themselves as activists and *also* embrace ineffective activism. Here’s hoping we get a course correction soon.