The Nonresponse To Donald Trump
How an obscure quirk of statistics and human nature explains the liberal crisis of confidence—and why it may finally be lifting.
Every good survey taker knows to be aware of tendencies in human nature that can corrupt their findings, enough sometimes to create a backward impression about the state of reality. Sometimes it’s because people say things that aren’t true. People who like to be agreeable create “acquiescence bias.” People who like to fit in create “social desirability bias.” But sometimes it’s because whole classes of people make themselves unavailable.
This is called “nonresponse bias.”
The idea is that bad news or good news or some other ambient factor can skew survey findings. When Barack Obama lost his first re-election debate to Mitt Romney, polls briefly inverted, to show a small Romney lead. Democrats naturally panicked, but… it was almost certainly illusory. It wasn’t the case that millions of voters who’d planned to vote for Obama became persuaded by the debate to switch their allegiances. It was that Obama supporters became demoralized, Romney supporters became energized, and the combination had a statistically meaningful effect on who was willing to accept calls from pollsters. Romney voters were pumped. Obama voters went to ground.
In this way, nonresponse bias can cause people who make decisions and form opinions based on survey data to badly misread the true state of affairs.
Nonresponse bias may have helped Donald Trump become president, twice. Polling Trump can be a challenge, because he and the GOP have trained American conservatives to distrust all sources of independent authority, including pollsters. It’s hard, in general, to get them to engage with people and institutions they don’t know and trust.
In a more direct way, the publication of the Access Hollywood tape depressed his polling much more than his organic support. He surely lost some voters, but what he lost more than anything is people who were willing to tell pollsters they intended to vote for him. For most of October 2016, it really seemed like he was cooked.
That widespread assumption wasn’t an inert factoid. It affected behavior on a national scale. Would James Comey have re-entered the fray of the election if it seemed like Trump was only two points behind instead of six or seven or eight or nine? What about swing voters who feared Trump but had hated Hillary Clinton on a personal level for years? Would 80,000 of them in the three Blue Wall states have stayed home or voted third party if they’d had a more accurate sense of how close the election was?
Nonresponse bias is powerful and confounding. And there’s no reason to assume that its effects are only detectable in poll results. It’s worth asking whether something analogous to nonresponse bias can help explain the brutal last year of American politics: why Trump seemed so unstoppable; why the opposition felt so helpless; and whether we can shake off those doldrums in a lasting and meaningful way, before it’s too late.
Earlier this week I argued Trump has lost the culture. Not that we can pinpoint the moment when the worm turned, but that a confluence of recent events wouldn’t have happened to someone truly in sync with the public: the collapse of Trump’s approval ratings; the slowly growing willingness of people, in his own party and in the culture at large, to speak out against him; the failed Republican culture war against the Super Bowl.
The essay struck a chord, but one of its shortcomings in hindsight is the implicit conceit that Trump had won the culture in the first place.
This is a piece of conventional wisdom that, as far as I am aware, has no prominent dissenters. When Trump won the election, the political elite interpreted it as a definitive cultural verdict, which is in part how our institutional leaders ended up treating a 49.8% plurality in the popular vote as a landslide.
That is to say, it had a profound effect on how we understood our society and fellow citizens, and—for impressionable people—a motive effect on who they chose to associate themselves with and why.
Let’s take a step back for a minute:
What is culture? For these purposes, I’ll define it as the sum total of things we consume and dwell on, both for personal enjoyment and to shape how we want others to understand us.
Subcultures and countercultures and cultural rejects may all wish to stand apart from the prevailing culture, but they’re part of it. The idea is fully inclusive, even if the term “culture” connotes artsiness and sophistication. Culture isn’t all high brow, and it isn’t all progressive; moreover not all progressive culture is high brow, and vice versa.
If you’re a conservative elite, you may shop at Brooks Brothers and attend the opera and have affinity for actors and fictional characters who present conservative ideas or temperament in a flattering light.
If you’re MAGA, your cultural consumption will probably look more like pickup trucks, ultimate fighting, NASCAR, country music.
These are obviously crude stereotypes, so I should add: It’s a big country, these categories are fluid, and my point isn’t to pigeonhole every last person who claims a political tribe. I personally know UFC-loving libs and opera-loving MAGAs. But I do think it’s valuable to provide a heuristic, so we’re all on the same page about what it means to say that “the culture” is, on the whole, more conservative than liberal or more liberal than conservative.
When Obama won his first presidential election, he “won the culture,” but that wasn’t the shock finding. He was obviously cooler than John McCain. Republicans complained endlessly about his celebrity status. Their party was extremely old, whereas shapers and consumers of culture are disproportionately young. Obama’s big cultural footprint was 100 percent intuitive. The shock finding was that an aging white-majority country would elect a black president.
With Trump it was different. Liberals were unsettled to see Trump win outright, and the hypothesis that he’d won the culture along with the presidency had to be reverse engineered from the fact of his victory. How did he win? Well, in part, by courting alt-cultural influencers and institutions. Like UFC. Like Joe Rogan. Platforms with large, relatively young audiences. He cast an unusual net, and it worked. And because it worked, we told ourselves the culture must have coarsened much more than we’d appreciated.
We reasoned, back of the envelope, that the culture had taken a broadly reactionary turn, leaving MAGA closer to the median than the broad left. The implications were pretty frightening: Young people appeared to be gravitating toward reactionary ideas. Society would become angrier, meaner, more violent over time. Songs and movies would no longer assume decency and tolerance as default values. Several decades ago, “the culture” could depict men backhanding their hysterical wives, or Mickey Rooney portraying a bucktoothed Asian malcontent on the silver screen, and it made few waves, because that was all culturally normal enough not to cause widespread offense. Maybe we were going back to a future like that, or worse.
And there were important reasons to suspect the beginning of a trend.
Box office receipts slowed with the development of the internet, then crashed out during the pandemic, and never fully recovered. Movie stars and movie stardom have lost a fair amount of cultural cachet. So have pop icons, for similar reasons. When people bemoan or celebrate the end of the “monoculture,” they’re referring to this kind of creative destruction. Consumers used to have fewer options, and thus shaped their identities around the same handful of megastars, irrespective of whether they rose to prominence organically or through the hocus pocus of record label, movie studio, and television executives.
Much of that lost prominence flowed to a larger number of smaller celebrities. Influencers, who are more like small-business entrepreneurs than, e.g., MVP athletes or Oscar winning actors, who may get paid through LLCs but still work for the man. Influencers chase money and audience, and these incentives will shape the things they say publicly, but as a class they’re more right-wing than icons of the recent past. It’s no surprise they were less hostile to Trump than their celebrity predecessors in 2008 and 2012, and that their audiences followed suit.
All of that was very real. But does our collective conclusion that Trump had “won the culture,” follow from it? I think the answer is no. He certainly won the election, but he may have done so in a way that warped our sense of what the public meant to convey about itself and its values. By creating and feeding a kind of cultural nonresponse.
Is it any wonder, then, that the broad forces of resistance were so paralyzed for so long after Trump won? Through months of abuses that should have stirred a great rising?
We were all like Obama voters after the passing embarrassment of that debate. And so we let too much bad stuff go unanswered.
If I’m right about what happened, it raises the question of how we misled ourselves so easily? How did our senses fail us?
It isn’t all on Trump.
Democrats and the broad left contributed to their own cultural slippage. Absent his brief renaissance as “Dark Brandon,” Joe Biden poisoned the Democratic Party in the eyes of the youth, simply by being old and out of touch. Long before Israel’s collective punishment of Gaza, when youth opinion of Biden grew downright contemptuous, there was no easier way to build clout as a young person on social media than by making fun of our doddering old president.
“Cancel culture” was a more limited phenomenon than its critics would have us believe, but it did ensnare culturally relevant figures—particularly in comedy and music—who rebelled openly against it, and progressivism more broadly.
In these ways, Democrats found themselves in a weaker spot culturally than either they or we were accustomed to.
But whatever ground they lost, it’s easy to see how we might have overestimated the strides Trump made.
Some of that is about old expectations getting outmoded by new ones. Taylor Swift is a Bigger Deal than every popular podcaster in America. But in terms of how we perceive the culture reflecting politics, there’s much more to it than which party has the most famous endorsers. Where Swift posted her Harris-Walz endorsement on Instagram, one and done, Republicans nurtured influencers (less well known, but much more numerous) who drowned the Internet in pro-Trump content every day. Joe Rogan turned the question of his endorsement into a LeBron-esque will-he/won’t-he contest that gripped politics, gripped his audience, and almost surely had a greater persuasive effect on them than if he’d simply tossed off a tepid Trump endorsement and spent the rest of the election gabbing about fitness supplements.
While TikTok was a rolling avalanche of doomerism and anti-Biden memes, Twitter—the country’s political nerve center—fell into the hands of Trump’s top donor, the celebrity industrialist Elon Musk, who transformed the platform into a cultural fun house where white nationalists loom much larger than they do in real life.
Trump is more reviled today than he was a year ago, and it’s detectable on every platform, but Twitter stands out as a place where he remains popular, because of how Musk has warped the environment. You can surely spend a lot of time on Twitter and still hate Donald Trump, and hate ICE, and hate white nationalists. But you will likely develop a blinkered, demoralizing view of how popular all of those things are. And that in turn will create a cultural response bias. In how reporters report news. In how confident liberals are in the viability of their worldview. In who gets granted access to places of prestige. In who votes.
At the very least, we know this was all temporary.
Trump has bled off all of the youth support he pulled to win the election.
The Super Bowl half-time show was a stirring reminder that mega-celebrities are not extinct, and command much, much larger audiences than all political podcasters and washed up musicians combined.
Trump and MAGA have also undermined themselves.
They are racing to control as much media as they possibly can, and the fact that Democrats and progressives have abandoned that field of play reflects an incredibly disturbing failure of imagination. But for now, at least, the people hoping to immerse the country in MAGA propaganda have misread what voters who took a gamble on Trump want to see. What would reassure them that they made the right decision.
Trump might fool some of them some of the time with his promiscuous lies, but his administration is a content factory for genres most people hate. MAGA gets its rocks off watching immigrants and black people and progressive protesters be brutalized, and generating white-nationalist memes to sell regime policy. But the rest of us, including the decisive subset of independent voters, find it all repulsive.
And, of course, Trump does things like condone the murder of admirable citizen protesters and post videos depicting the Obamas as apes, and thereby makes it harder and harder for the people who own the means of cultural production to continue kowtowing to him.
Right-wing errors have rebalance things, and the rebalancing has helped us shake off our cultural nonresponse. The decent and tolerant majority has found its footing. Trump is enduringly unpopular, but we can also see that his sliver of the culture is just that: a sliver. It took Bad Bunny to remind us that the only thing more powerful than hate is love, but we remember now.
There are still dangers.
We could end up back where we were twice before, underweighting Trump’s strength. He may not own the culture, but he has not become irrelevant, either.
And the bigger danger from complacency may be that we overestimate ourselves, even fool ourselves into assuming triumph is inevitable. MAGA is relentless, like an invasive species, and Trump has strong survival instincts. He and his loyalists will seize more media platforms, and doing a better job exploiting them. They will respond to their recent setbacks by inundating our phones and televisions with more and more depravities and insults that make us feel outmatched. Their existing control of social-media platforms has already perverted our sense of how right wing American culture is—and how threatened it is by leftists and invading hordes—and they will turn those dials ever higher.
God forbid that if, in doing so, Trump regains an increment of popularity or outperforms expectations in one more election. The last of our confidence will be sapped. Our state of nonresponse will return for the long haul.
Superb! The good, the bad and the ugly, yet you left me with hope. Brian, I am going to read this essay again after I've had a chance for it to sink in. Well Done
I love that so many Olympic athletes feel comfortable speaking out.