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Last week the attorneys general of 18 states and 126 members of the US House of Representatives — all Republicans — signed on to a lawsuit aimed at disenfranchising millions of voters and overturning the result of a not-all-that-close presidential election. Though the Supreme Court quickly rejected the attempt, it was understandably greeted as another sad landmark in the political polarisation of the US.
The attorneys general of 46 states plus the District of Columbia and Guam teamed up with a bipartisan majority on the Federal Trade Commission (the Republican chairman and two Democrats for, two Republicans against) to demand the breakup of Facebook Inc on antitrust grounds. And on Capitol Hill, the House of Representatives voted 335-78 and the Senate voted 84-13 for a $740.5 billion defense bill, more than enough to override the veto that President Donald Trump has threatened because the legislation includes a provision to remove the names of Confederate leaders from military bases and doesn’t include one to regulate social media companies.
While Trump is capable of getting his fellow Republican elected officials to go to great lengths to express their support for him, he has shown no ability to persuade them to vote his way on policy matters when they don’t want to. But both they and the Facebook action are also indications of a broader phenomenon. The US seems to have entered an age of widespread agreement on some once-contentious policy issues, even if our politics generally don’t reflect that — yet.
To describe the contours of that widespread agreement, everybody’s been dumping on polls in the wake of November’s elections. But as was the case in 2016, the national polls weren’t all that wrong. In fact, they got President-elect Joe Biden’s popular vote share of 51.3% almost exactly right, with the Real Clear Politics average ending at 51.2% and the weighted FiveThirtyEight average at 51.8%.
It was Trump’s vote share they underestimated, by 2.8 percent points in RCP’s case and 3.4 in FiveThirtyEight’s. That was enough of a polling error to turn what would have been embarrassing landslide defeat for the president into a major fundraising opportunity, but it’s not really enough to dent any of the overwhelming majorities.
Also, most of the polling cited is from Gallup, thanks to the wonderful job it does of making historical polling data available to the public. Gallup no longer does horse-race presidential polling but does ask about approval of presidents and candidates. In its last poll before the election, it found Biden and Trump separated by an approval margin roughly equal to Biden’s popular-vote win (5 percentage points in the poll versus 4.5 in the election).
Given how sharply pro-trade sentiment has risen in the past few years, it’s reasonable to suspect this is more about opinion than judgment. According to Gallup both Republicans and Democrats have become more pro-trade, but one can imagine Democrats have been embracing trade because Trump opposes it and Republicans because they think he has made it fairer — neither of which may hold under the next president.
Still, there does seem to be more at work than that. Another Yankelovich theme was the gap between elite opinion and public opinion, which has at times been quite pronounced on trade issues, especially during economic downturns and periods of slow growth. For decades the pro-trade elite mostly got its way, with international trade’s share of US GDP almost tripling from 1970 to 2011.
—Bloomberg