Americans Are Moody, and Pollsters Should Pay Attention

By Jennifer Benz

In April 2021 the first media poll to measure a possible 2024 electoral match-up between President Joe Biden and former president Trump was commissioned by Reuters just 100 days after Biden’s inauguration. Another 1,279 Biden/Trump and 521 Harris/Trump national election “horse race” polls followed. With the votes in, and Donald Trump elected to a second term, it’s worth asking whether this was the best use of polling.

Maybe so. Such pre-election horse race polling often captures public attention because of its apparent simplicity: a snapshot of who is winning or losing. When well reported, it helps voters understand the dynamics of the political campaign.

But the news and polling industry’s outsized focus on “the horse race” comes at the expense of surveys that measure the public’s mood. Often that mood can tell us more than the ups and downs of the horse race, as we’ve just seen in the presidential election, seemingly driven by feelings of economic anger among late-breaking, undecided voters.

---

On supporting science journalism

If you’re enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

---

The public mood is a broad term for the shared feeling that emerges from people’s interactions within a political community. At the national level, it includes people’s confidence in democratic processes and political institutions, their engagement with their communities and trust in other Americans, and their outlook on the country’s future. These data points are rarely featured in pre-election coverage because they are nuanced and harder to explain. But when public mood surveys are conducted rigorously and interpreted thoughtfully, they relay important signals that we cannot get from horse race polling alone.

Over the last three decades, political scientists have demonstrated the impact of the public mood on policy and political outcomes. Northwestern University’s Benjamin Page and Columbia’s Robert Shapiro demonstrated that public attitudes are responsive to significant political and social events, and provide a reliable guide for policy makers who want to align laws with peoples’ priorities; examples include slow-moving changes in racial attitudes in response to the Civil Rights Movement, or shifts in economic attitudes with changes in unemployment or inflation. University of North Carolina political scientist James Stimson’s groundbreaking concept of the public’s “policy mood” showed how aggregated public attitudes shift over time, oscillating between liberal and conservative preferences, reflecting the nation’s evolving priorities. Christopher Wlezien, now at the University of Texas at Austin, described this as “thermostatic public opinion.” When government policy overshoots public preferences in one direction, citizens react by expressing preferences and voting to move it back in the other direction. These thermostatic adjustments predict and explain long-term policy trends, such as support for defense spending and investments in environmental protection.

The value of understanding the public’s mood extends beyond policy preferences. Recent research from the American Enterprise Institute’s Karlyn Bowman examined people’s inclination toward nostalgia, or the idea that the country was better off in prior times, in contrast to the public’s general optimism for the future of the country. Through an extensive look at data going back to the 1930s, she finds that the public fluctuates between these viewpoints in logical ways that correspond to the political and economic context of the times. She provides examples of how politicians can garner support when they understand and tap into a nostalgic or optimistic mood.

You might have already guessed where that pendulum is now swinging. Leading into the 2024 presidential election, I and my colleagues at NORC at the University of Chicago and the Louisiana State University Manship School of Mass Communication studied the public’s mood by measuring attitudes about long-standing and systemic issues rather than their temporal reactions to current events. We found that Americans were feeling pervasive distrust and pessimism, with deep-seated cynicism about institutions and democracy, and quite pessimistic views on the country’s future. For example, only a quarter believed the country’s best days were ahead. And when asked a battery of questions about how much trust people have in those who lead the government, the responses were alarming. Only about two in 10 said you can trust people in government to do the right thing. The same number felt politicians were more interested in blocking things than solving problems. Just one in 10 felt the government represented them well.

Many Americans had lost faith in the fundamental principles underlying our democracy, including about 70 percent who were at least somewhat worried we would not have a peaceful transition of power following the presidential election. A full quarter of Americans thought the country required “complete and total upheaval” to get back on track.

We showed that on many of these measures, Americans have become more negative and pessimistic. For example, 20 years ago, less than half of the public thought politicians were only out for themselves. Now that number is 70 percent.

We also found that this cynicism is shared by people across the political spectrum: by those who are highly engaged and those who are not, by people who have positive views of America’s history of diversity, and by those who do not. As the report acknowledges, “In a sense, it is in the deep chords of distrust where Americans seem most united.”

While the 2024 horse race polling could only tell us the race was tight, this study of the public mood revealed the strong headwinds the Harris campaign faced. The campaign tried to project an outlook of political and economic opportunity grounded in America’s core systems and institutions when the electorate had next to zero faith in the system or the future. Understanding the public mood helps explain why Harris’s attempt to differentiate how she would reshape the country was not enough to defeat Trump’s ability to tap into the public’s pessimism and anger that so deeply resonated with Americans across the political spectrum.

Collectively, this body of research emphasizes the importance of public mood in understanding long-term social, political, and economic health. While public opinion toward individual issues and candidates may be volatile, the overall public mood tends to exhibit long-term stability and rationality. This consistency enables public opinion to serve as a reliable guide for understanding the electorate.

To harness its potential, public opinion polling must broaden its focus during election cycles. Horse race polling serves its purpose, but it is only a fragment of what polls can reveal about our democracy. By investing more resources into measuring public mood—tracking shifts in optimism, trust and policy preferences—we can deepen our understanding of the electorate and the forces shaping their decisions. We can help people understand where their fellow voters are coming from and, perhaps, reduce the number of electoral surprises. As media pollsters, we have a responsibility to preserve public opinion research as a tool not just for forecasting elections but for enriching public discourse and informing a more responsive democracy.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American. The author’s opinions are solely her own and don’t represent any organization she is affiliated with.