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The recent protests against police brutality are some of the largest and most widespread in American history. An estimated 15 million to 26 million Americans have taken to the streets to protest police violence and advocate for Black lives.

The remarkable size and scope of these demonstrations has translated into real policy gains, too. Dozens of state and local police reforms have been enacted since the protests started. And at the federal level, President Trump signed an executive order that outlines his administration’s priorities for police reform, including creating a national database that catalogues police misconduct. The House of Representatives passed an even more ambitious piece of legislation that proposes a series of reforms, like tying federal funding to bans on chokeholds and setting up a task force to address excessive police force, but the GOP-controlled Senate hasn’t taken it up.

Arguably, though, the protests’ impact on public opinion has been even more immediate and wide-ranging. Unfavorable views of the police, acknowledgement of widespread discrimination against African Americans and support for Black Lives Matter all jumped up by at least 10 percentage points, according to tracking polls conducted shortly before and after the protests by both Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape and Civiqs.

These changes in public opinion are being driven in large part by white Americans, who for years have been much less likely than Black Americans to acknowledge that racial inequality remains a real problem. Since the first wave of large-scale Black Lives Matter protests in 2014, white Americans’ racial attitudes have gradually become more liberalized while Black Americans’ views have remained relatively steady.

Trump’s many offensive statements may be contributing to this trend, as they seem to be driving Democrats, particularly white Democrats, to adopt more liberal views on race in response. That’s one reason so many white Democrats showed up at the most recent protests.

But the protests’ impact on public opinion appears to be fading — particularly among white Americans, as you can see in the chart below. Black Americans’ opinions have stayed much steadier, as they have in the past.

Drawing on data from the Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape’s weekly tracking surveys, I found that unfavorable views of the police are trending back down toward their pre-protest levels among white Americans and have dipped among Black Americans. White respondents are also becoming somewhat less likely to say that African Americans face “a lot” or “a great deal” of discrimination, though those numbers remain higher than they were before before George Floyd was killed in May. Black Americans’ views on the discrimination they face have remained essentially unchanged.

The same patterns are evident in tracking surveys from Civiqs and YouGov/The Economist. In the Civiqs data, white respondents’ net support (support minus opposition) for the Black Lives Matter movement surged from -4 shortly before the protests to +10 in early June, but has since dropped to 6 points underwater. Meanwhile, Black Americans’ net support went from +76 in early May to +85 in early June and has remained within a point of that mark ever since. And in the YouGov/The Economist surveys, the share of white Americans who said racism is a big problem decreased from 45 percent in June to 33 percent when the question was last asked in early August. Three-quarters of Black Americans, on the other hand, said racism was a big problem in both surveys.

Why, then, do white Americans’ views on racism and the police seem to be returning to their baseline, but Black Americans’ views remain steady? Well, as media attention turns away from the protests, it may simply be easier for white people to forget about the issue, while the stakes were always greater for Black Americans.

In an analysis of closed captioning data of cable news broadcasts from the TV News Archive,1 we found a huge spike in the number of clips that mentioned “racism” or “Black Lives Matter” as the protests raged during the first two weeks of June. But, as you can see in the chart below, the amount of attention cable news paid to racism and the Black Lives Matter movement has dropped as we’ve moved farther away from peak protest activity. (Coverage of these two issues is still higher than it was prior to Floyd’s death, however.)2

This surge and decline in media attention clearly corresponds to changes in public opinion among white Americans, and it’s possible that some of the historic gains we’ve seen in white views of the Black Lives Matter movement might not last.

This drop is not surprising, since we’ve seen it before in how public opinion changes on school shootings, for example. Because media attention on even the most high-profile mass shootings tends to be fleeting, so are these shootings’ effects on public opinion. And now, white Americans’ opinion of the Black Lives Matter movement may be following the same trajectory. That’s driving a decline in overall public support even as Black Americans continue to back the movement at very high rates.

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The U.S. economy is objectively awful right now. The unemployment rate is at levels not seen since the Great Depression and this quarter’s decline in gross domestic product is expected to be the worst on record. Most economists believe it will take years to recover from this recession.

Not everyone thinks the economy is doing so poorly, though.

In the most recent Quinnipiac University national survey, 69 percent of Republicans described the U.S. economy as “excellent” or “good.” Similarly, nearly two-thirds of Republicans in both Civiqs’s daily tracking polls and in a June 11-15 Associated Press/NORC Poll said that the nation’s current economy is at least leaning toward good. By contrast, only around 10 percent of Democrats thought that the national economy was doing well in those surveys.

In fact, a closer look at Civiqs’ data1 shows that Democrats’ and Republicans’ views of the economy are more polarized now than they’ve been at any point during President Trump’s time in office.

That isn’t to say that Democrats and Republicans have seen eye to eye on the economy at previous points in Trump’s presidency. They haven’t.

As you can see in the chart above, there has been a fairly large — and persistent — gap in how Democrats and Republicans think about the economy. However, that gap did shrink after the pandemic’s dire economic effects became apparent, and by early May, only one-third of Republicans still thought that the economy was in good shape.

Republicans’ economic optimism, however, quickly rebounded in June as states allowed businesses to reopen and the May jobs report was released with better-than-expected news.

Even when Republicans’ outlook on the economy was at its lowest point this year, according to Civiqs data, they still felt more upbeat about the state of the economy than at any point in 2016 before Trump was elected, when the economy was objectively better.

This isn’t necessarily surprising, though, as political science research has found that a strong economy might not benefit a president as much as it once did, in part because voters’ views on whether the economy is healthy tend to be linked to whether their preferred party is in power. That says a lot about how polarized our politics have become, and it also underscores a key point that John Sides, Lynn Vavreck, and I have repeatedly made about the 2016 election: The widespread economic dissatisfaction and anxiety driving much of the media narrative about Trump’s political rise and the 2016 presidential campaign wasn’t a reflection of actual economic realities, it was largely a consequence of partisanship.

Of course, the difficulty is that these attitudes aren’t just partisanship either. After eight years of Obama’s presidency, racial and economic anxiety became increasingly intertwined to the point that racial resentment was a much stronger predictor of economic pessimism under Obama than it had been under George W. Bush. That is, white people — especially white Trump voters — believed that Black people were getting ahead while they were left behind.

Take the 2016 American National Election Studies survey. Before Trump took office, the more racial discrimination white people thought their own group faced, the more likely they were to say that the economy was worse than it had been a year earlier. These voters largely voted for Trump. But under Trump’s presidency, a similar poll found that white voters were less likely to say the economy had gotten worse if they believed white people faced high levels of racial discrimination.

In addition, nearly three-quarters of the 69,000 respondents surveyed for the Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape in the past three months have said that the economy is worse than it was a year ago. But only around half of white respondents who think their racial group faces a lot or a great deal of discrimination shared this economic pessimism. (This was true even after controlling for several other factors, such as partisanship and income.)

In other words, Americans’ political allegiances and views on race influence their views of the economy. That marks a significant departure from the last time there was an economic downturn during a presidential election campaign. Americans, regardless of their partisanship and racial attitudes, universally thought the economy was in terrible shape after the financial collapse in 2008.

But that isn’t the case now. So why is the coronavirus recession so different?

One reason is that even though the national economy is in shambles, it’s also ticking back up. It’s unclear how fast the economy will recover, but this uncertainty opens the door for voters to adopt their own partisan and racialized explanations for the economy’s performance. Additionally, in a presidential election where the incumbent had long planned to base his case for reelection on a strong economy, Americans are all the more motivated to view the economy through political lenses.

Not to mention, Trump has also tried to bend the country’s bleak economic reality to his will. He has said that the economy is springing back from the coronavirus recession like “a rocket ship,” claiming that the economic recovery is “the greatest comeback in American history.” This is very different from 2008, when few Republicans made the case that the economy was in good shape. At the time, GOP presidential nominee John McCain was even widely mocked for saying “the fundamentals of our economy are strong” before quickly reversing his position to say the economy was in “total crisis.”

But now the fact that most economists disagree with the president’s optimism about a quick rebound may not matter. As we’ve seen with the Civiqs data, more Republicans think the economy is in good shape now than thought so in 2016. And a long line of social science research shows that when political elites are sharply divided — as they are now over the economy — the public follows the lead of the elites. That is, partisan messaging is now so powerful that Americans tend to adopt their party’s standpoint even when that position runs counter to science or objective facts.

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Public opinion is now in favor of the protesters who have spent the last three weeks advocating for police reform in response to the death of George Floyd, a black man killed by a police officer in Minneapolis.

This is notable, because public opinion around the protests was initially split. But as the protests have grown larger and spread to more parts of the country, there’s evidence they have become more popular. For instance, in a Morning Consult survey conducted June 10-12, 64 percent of Americans said they supported the protests, up 10 percentage points from the first time the pollster asked in late May and early June.

In fact, the protests are so popular that they’re now supported by majorities of Democrats and Republicans. But this bipartisan support masks some of the enormous differences that still exist between the two parties on issues of race and discrimination.

For starters, there’s a pretty big gap in just how strongly Democrats and Republicans back the protests. In last week’s Economist/YouGov poll, for instance, 73 percent of Democrats said they strongly approve of the nonviolent protests, compared with just 27 percent of Republicans. And according to the most recent Yahoo News/YouGov poll, Democrats and Republicans are also fairly split on how peaceful the protests have been, how long they should last and what’s driving them. In that poll, Democrats were 40 points more likely than Republicans to say that the protests have been mostly peaceful and three-quarters of Republicans said they wanted the protests to stop now, compared to less than one-quarter of Democrats. Republicans were also 44 points more likely than Democrats to say the protests were primarily motivated by long-standing biases against the police, whereas most Democrats said the protests were motivated by a genuine desire to hold police accountable.

The fact that Democrats and Republicans are so polarized when it comes to the motives driving the protests is important because it conveys just how differently Republicans and Democrats view racism in America.

In its polling, YouGov asked respondents a number of questions on whether systemic racism was a problem or whether police killings signaled a bigger issue within American life. As you can see in the chart below, Democrats and Republicans are divided, with as much as a 60-point gap separating them on some of these issues. Recent surveys by CBS, CNN and Monmouth University have found equally large partisan divides on race and policing as well.

The thing is, public opinion about race hasn’t always been this polarized.

In fact, some attitudes about race were entirely unrelated to partisanship before Barack Obama was elected president in 2008. But after he was elected, racial attitudes and party identification became increasingly intertwined to the extent that by 2012, opposition to interracial relationships or overtly negative views of African Americans predicted whether someone identified as Republican for the first time in decades.

Of course, Donald Trump’s political rise took this growing partisan polarization over race to new heights. Democrats, in particular, quickly consolidated their views in reaction to Trump’s offensive statements about racial and ethnic minorities.

CBS News polls from the last 10 years underscore just how much Democrats have changed their opinion of systemic racism in a relatively short period of time. As you can see in the chart below, it wasn’t that long ago when Democrats and Republicans responded pretty similarly to the question of whether white Americans had an easier time of getting ahead.

Democrats, however, are now much more likely to agree that societal advantages exist for white Americans than they were five years ago. A similar shift has happened on questions of police brutality and institutional racism within the criminal justice system. For instance, the percentage of Democrats who think that the police disproportionately use deadly force against black Americans increased by more than 30 points since CBS News first asked the question in August 2014. Meanwhile, Republicans’ views have remained steady — just 24 percent think the police disproportionately use deadly force against African Americans.

It’s certainly not surprising, then, that Democrats and Republicans are so divided over race and policing after Floyd’s death. The upshot of this growing polarization is that Democrats and Republicans increasingly inhabit separate realities about race in America, worlds apart on everything from the causes of racial inequality to the Confederate flag’s meaning to the N-word’s offensiveness to the value of teaching black history in schools.

The current partisan divide over race may be predictable, but it’s still incredibly important — especially considering this is a presidential election year. Race has long been an effective wedge issue for the Republican Party, as demonstrated by the 2016 election, when Republicans split up the Democrats’ diverse coalition of nonwhite voters, white racially liberal voters and racially conservative white voters. But after 12 years of Obama and Trump, racially conservative Democrats have mostly defected or converted. That means Democrats are now united about many of the racial issues that once splintered the party.

Take the Black Lives Matter movement, for example. In a June 2016 Pew Research Center poll, only 64 percent of white Democrats and 20 percent of white Republicans supported the Black Lives Matter movement. Those numbers are now up to 92 percent among white Democrats and 37 percent among white Republicans in the latest Pew survey.

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Abortion

For The First Time In Years, Democrats Are More Concerned About Abortion Than Republicans Are

By Michael Tesler

May 25, 2022, at 6:00 AM

Yasin Ozturk / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Americans have long taken for granted the constitutional right to an abortion, established by the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade.

Throughout most of the fall in 2021, Democrats, and especially Republicans, still thought that Roe would more likely than not remain the law of the land for the foreseeable future — even as the high court refused to block a Texas law from taking effect on Sept. 1 that lawmakers designed to flout Roe by banning abortions once they said cardiac activity was detected, usually about six weeks into a pregnancy.1

Those views started to change in December, though, following oral arguments before the Supreme Court over the constitutionality of Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban. More Americans began doubting Roe would survive after the court’s conservative justices raised the prospect of overturning nearly five decades of legal precedent on abortion rights during the hearing.

As the chart below shows, Democrats have consistently been pessimistic about Roe being overturned since those oral arguments in December, but following the leak of an initial draft Supreme Court opinion in May showing that a majority of conservative justices were ready to overturn Roe, there was a sharp spike in the share saying it “will definitely” or “very likely” be overturned. Even Republicans, who have been less likely than Democrats to think Roe would ever be struck down, now generally think it’s going to happen.

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The reality that Roe might be overturned has also shifted how Americans prioritize abortion as an issue. For decades, those who opposed abortion rights (generally speaking, Republicans) rated the issue as more important than those who supported abortion rights (generally speaking, Democrats), but as the chart below shows, the two parties’ priorities swapped after Texas’s abortion ban went into effect, which I first wrote about in October. 

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In fact, the divide between Democrats and Republicans on the importance of abortion as an issue has only gotten wider, especially after the draft Supreme Court opinion was leaked in May. In the two surveys conducted by YouGov/The Economist since then, a record share of voters who backed President Biden in 2020 have rated abortion as a “very important” issue, by 61 percent and 63 percent, up from an average of about 42 percent in August surveys.2 Compare that with 37 percent and 40 percent of 2020 Trump voters who rated abortion as a “very important” issue in May, down from an average of about 45 percent in August polls.

Not only are Democrats more concerned now, but they're also rating abortion as much more important to their midterm vote for Congress now than they did four years ago, according to polling from Monmouth University. In the 2018 midterms, Republicans were more likely than Democrats to prioritize abortion as their most important issue in choosing whom to vote for in Congress, but in May, 32 percent of Democrats said abortion was the most important issue in determining their vote, compared with 17 percent of Republicans. The share of Democrats who said abortion was an “extremely important” issue in voting for Congress in 2022 (48 percent) is also up from 2018 (31 percent), while the share of Republicans who said the issue was “extremely important” in 2022 (29 percent) is down from 2018 (36 percent).

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The polling data from both YouGov/The Economist and Monmouth is consistent with a long line of political science research showing how threats and anger often motivate people to take political action. When most Democrats considered abortion rights a given, other issues typically overshadowed it. Yet now that the status quo is on the verge of being upended, Democrats are increasingly prioritizing abortion rights and will likely channel their anger over Roe being struck down into various forms of political participation. Meanwhile, now that Republicans look likely to win their long battle to overturn Roe, the issue is unlikely to have the same potency in GOP politics.

It remains to be seen, though, how these changes in voters’ priorities will affect future elections. Thus far, the leaked draft Supreme Court opinion has had no discernible impact on which party voters would support in a congressional election in FiveThirtyEight’s generic ballot polling average. But as FiveThirtyEight editor-and-chief Nate Silver tweeted on Thursday, the electoral effects will likely manifest themselves in more nuanced ways — especially after the policy implications of the final ruling become even more apparent during the summer and fall campaign. Nate Cohn, the chief political analyst for The New York Times, concurred, adding that “the effect [of overturning Roe] on individual races may prove to be more important than its effect on the national political environment, if abortion becomes especially salient in places due to extreme candidates or state policy stakes.”

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Marijuana Legalization

Why Do GOP Lawmakers Still Oppose Legalizing Weed?

By Michael Tesler

Apr. 20, 2022, at 6:00 AM

Caroline Brehman / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

Today is 4/20, the holiday for stoners and weed enthusiasts around the world. Legalizing marijuana is no longer a fringe issue championed mainly by those partaking in the day’s festivities either. Over the past two decades, we’ve seen a remarkable rise in support for legalization. Polls over the past year from Civiqs, Quinnipiac and Gallup show that roughly 7 in 10 American adults think the use of cannabis should be legal, double the share who thought so 20 years ago.

In fact, a majority of registered voters in all 50 states now favor making cannabis legal, according to state-level polling data from Civiqs. Support ranges from a low of 52 percent in North Dakota to a high of 81 percent in Vermont and Washington.

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This widespread support is rapidly changing the landscape of marijuana prohibition, too. Just 10 years ago, the use and distribution of cannabis for recreational purposes was illegal across the entire country. But since 2012, 18 states and Washington, D.C., have legalized the recreational use of marijuana, and a handful more are expected to follow soon. This month, meanwhile, the U.S. House passed legislation that would decriminalize marijuana at the federal level.

Not everyone is on board with those policy changes, though. Over 200 House Republicans voted against the legislation, while only three voted for it. (By comparison, over 200 House Democrats voted for the legislation, while only two voted against it.) That partisan opposition means the bill will almost certainly die in the U.S. Senate. After all, Democrats need at least 10 GOP senators to join them in breaking a filibuster. Moreover, even less-controversial marijuana legislation — such as allowing cannabis-related businesses access to the banking system — has repeatedly failed among Republicans in the Senate. With several GOP senators already expressing their disapproval of the bill, this legislation is likely destined to suffer the same fate.

GOP lawmakers’ ongoing opposition to legalization is clearly at odds with the viewpoints of many Americans, as most voters now support legalizing marijuana for recreational use. But congressional Republicans are also increasingly out of step with their own rank-and-file members, as it’s Republicans disproportionately driving the most recent uptick in support for legalizing marijuana, according to polling from Civiqs.

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To be sure, you can see in the chart above that Republicans are still much more likely than Democrats or independents to oppose marijuana legalization. But net support for legalizing marijuana also rose twice as much among Republicans as it did among Democrats and independents over the past four years. Since April 1, 2018, net support for legal cannabis (support for legalization minus opposition to legalization) increased by 11 percentage points and 13 points among Democrats and independents, respectively. Republicans’ net support for legalization, in the meantime, grew from -15 points at the start of April 2018 to a high of +13 points at the end of March. (As of Sunday, net support among Republicans was +12 points.)

Other polling indicates solid GOP support for legalization, too. A 62 percent majority of Republicans surveyed by Quinnipiac in 2021 said that marijuana should be made legal in the U.S., a whopping +30 points in net support. In a Gallup poll conducted the same year, Republicans were split on the issue, with net support for legalization at +1. Statewide polling from Civiqs similarly found that more Republicans favor legal cannabis than oppose it in almost every state.

So why exactly, then, aren’t more congressional Republicans representing their own voters’ views on this issue? One possibility is that many of these lawmakers simply don’t know how much Republicans’ opinions have changed. Political science research shows that politicians tend to overestimate their constituents’ support for conservative policies, with Republican lawmakers driving much of this phenomenon. Some congressional Republicans may therefore oppose federal legalization because they mistakenly believe they’re representing their own voters’ views.       

Other members, however, are likely voting based on their own personal opposition to marijuana legalization. Compared with most Americans, congressional Republicans tend to be older and more religious, two demographic groups that are far more averse to legalization than younger and religiously unaffiliated Americans. Indeed, GOP politicians often oppose drug legalization on behalf of conservative principles like morality, order and family values.

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Nearly 25 years before the NBA shut down for several days to protest racial injustice, before LeBron James tweeted, “FUCK THIS MAN!!!! WE DEMAND CHANGE. SICK OF IT,” and before the Milwaukee Bucks left the court in support of Jacob Blake, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf made a protest of his own.

During the 1995-96 season, Abdul-Rauf, the Denver Nuggets’ leading scorer, refused to stand with his teammates for the pregame playing of the national anthem — saying the flag was a symbol of racism and oppression.

But Abdul-Rauf’s protest was met with scorn, not support. He was suspended by the league until he agreed to stand for the anthem and was traded after the season to the Sacramento Kings, where his NBA career effectively ended in 1998. And in a perfect encapsulation of partisan politics on race in the 1990s, the GOP’s 1996 presidential nominee, Bob Dole, criticized Abdul-Rauf’s anthem protest while his Democratic opponent, President Clinton, stayed silent on the issue.

Abdul-Rauf’s plight says a lot about how far the NBA and the general public have shifted on political activism, race and the role athletes should play in these issues.

The NBA of the 1990s was dominated by Michael Jordan and his adamantly apolitical persona. Jordan — who infamously joked that he wouldn’t get involved in the racially polarized 1990 U.S. Senate campaign in his home state of North Carolina because “Republicans buy sneakers, too”— exemplified an era in professional sports when profits were clearly prioritized over politics. In this environment, neither Jordan nor any other NBA All-Star came to Abdul-Rauf’s defense. Some even openly criticized him.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that most white people were also against Abdul-Rauf’s actions. The one national opinion survey on the subject, a March 1996 ABC/Washington Post poll, showed that 76 percent of white people thought the NBA made the right decision by suspending Abdul-Rauf for refusing to stand during the national anthem. In contrast to the huge partisan divides in public opinion about racial controversies today, 72 percent of white Democrats and 86 percent of white Republicans supported the suspension.

The country has come a long way since then in support of protesting athletes, though.

When NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick first knelt during the national anthem four years ago, public opinion was still largely against him. Only about one-third of Americans approved and thought that kneeling during the anthem was an appropriate form of protest. But as the country’s racial attitudes liberalized in response to President Trump’s administration and the Black Lives Matter movement, so has public opinion about athlete protests.

Support for athletes kneeling during the national anthem has steadily increased over the past four years. For example, the share in Fox News Polls who thought that kneeling during the anthem was appropriate increased from 32 percent in September 2016 to 41 percent in September 2017 to 48 percent in July 2020. Recent polls from NBC/Wall Street Journal and YouGov-Yahoo found that a majority of Americans now either support kneeling or think it’s appropriate to kneel during the national anthem.

In keeping with those trends, polling shows that most Americans support the NBA players’ decision last week to strike during the playoffs after a Kenosha, Wisconsin, police officer shot Blake seven times in the back. Online pollster YouGov found that 57 percent of adults supported the NBA boycott, compared to only 28 percent who opposed it, while a live-caller poll of registered voters conducted Aug. 28-31 by Suffolk University/USA Today found 54 percent support and 35 percent opposition.

With the players united and public opinion on their side, the unprecedented wave of sports activism following the Blake shooting and the police killings this year of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd was met with a much different response from sports and political leaders than Abdul-Rauf and Kaepernick’s earlier protests. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver penned a letter to league employees after last week’s strike that said, “I wholeheartedly support NBA and WNBA players and their commitment to shining a light on important issues of social justice.” The Democratic Party’s most prominent voices — including Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton — took to Twitter to applaud the players. Even Michael Jordan, now the only Black majority owner of an NBA team, is taking strong positions in support of racial equality and player protests. And NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell apologized in June “for not listening to NFL players earlier,” and he encouraged “all players to speak out and peacefully protest.”

That doesn’t mean there isn’t still division on the issue. Trump has been a vocal critic throughout his presidency of athletes who protest, and he said the NBA players’ protests were going to “destroy basketball.” Most Republicans seemed to share his opinion. While 82 percent of Democrats surveyed by YouGov supported the NBA’s protest, just 21 percent of Republicans did.

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

The Trump campaign has found its silver lining in an avalanche of awful polling numbers: Voters who support Donald Trump are enthusiastic about his candidacy.

Polls consistently show that Trump’s supporters are more excited to vote for him than presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s supporters are to vote for him. For example, half of Trump supporters in a recent USA Today/Suffolk University poll said they were “very excited” about their candidate, compared to just 27 percent of Biden backers. Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale even described their enthusiasm advantage over Biden as “the most important factor in the campaign.”

But the significance of this “enthusiasm gap” is exaggerated. Enthusiastic votes count just as much as unenthusiastic ones, meaning an enthusiasm gap would only really matter in a close election. And right now, it isn’t a close election: Biden leads Trump in national polls by nearly 9 points. No enthusiasm advantage — no matter how big — could possibly make up for that kind of a gap.

Let’s pretend, though, that voter enthusiasm is an important metric for understanding Trump and Biden’s candidacies. The Trump campaign would still have a problem, and that’s because the 2020 enthusiasm gap is mostly a myth.

First, while Biden voters may not be all that excited about voting for Biden, they’re very enthusiastic about voting against Trump. And that gives Biden a pretty strong edge, because Trump supporters don’t despise Biden the way they despised Hillary Clinton in 2016. In fact, according to survey data from the Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape project, the share of Trump voters who rate Biden unfavorably is consistently much lower than the share of Biden voters who rate Trump negatively — nearly 30 percentage points lower as of the last survey conducted at the end of June.

Second, because Trump voters don’t dislike Biden as much as Biden voters dislike Trump, Biden actually has an advantage in net enthusiasm (calculated as the difference between a candidate’s “very favorable” and “very unfavorable” rating). The gap on this metric has widened between the two in the past month, too.

What’s especially notable here is that Biden’s net enthusiasm rating is near zero, which is similar to most major-party presidential candidates’ ratings from 1980 to 2012. Trump’s current score of around -20, on the other hand, has only one historical comparison other than his own campaign four years ago: Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Trump should know better than anyone that this isn’t good. After all, he won in 2016 in part because the record number of voters who had negative opinions of both major candidates broke decisively in his favor.

But right now, Trump can’t count on the “haters” to swing the election for him again. Registered voters with negative opinions of both Trump and Biden preferred Biden to Trump by a whopping 23-point margin in the polling Nationscape conducted in June. They also rated Biden less negatively overall, with only 33 percent of this group saying they had a very unfavorable opinion of Biden compared to 62 percent who said the same of Trump.

These results, especially when combined with recent political science research on the power of negative partisanship, suggest that the public’s stronger dislike of Trump is probably the more consequential enthusiasm gap in 2020.

To be sure, that negative enthusiasm gap will almost certainly narrow as Trump ratchets up his attacks on Biden. But it’s unlikely Biden will engender the same level of hatred that Clinton did. Even though she’s spent four years out of the political limelight, Republicans are still more hostile to Clinton than Biden. A Fox News poll from last month found that 76 percent had a “strongly unfavorable” opinion of Clinton, compared to 64 percent of Republicans who held the same opinion of Biden.

Additionally, social science research suggests that antipathy toward the other side is driven in large part by racial and cultural differences between the parties — differences that Clinton and former President Barack Obama exemplify in ways that a 77-year-old white moderate male Democrat doesn’t.