Celinda Lake, a Democratic strategist, was one of two lead pollsters for Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign and is part of the 2024 Biden polling team. Justin Talbot Zorn is a senior adviser for policy and strategy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in DC
There are many explanations for President Biden’s historically low approval ratings and polling numbers: The border, wars overseas, persistent “bad vibes” around inflation and the economy, and — especially now — concerns about age.
But one of the president’s biggest challenges has little to do with day-to-day events, his personal characteristics, the debate or even his record in the White House.
Biden is the candidate of trust in an era when trust is broken.
Research from Gallup, Pew Research and others shows that Americans are now at or near record low levels of trust in institutions that run the gamut from federal agencies to courts to the media and even the military.
A man of avowed faith in public institutions, Biden is making a pitch that Americans should come together to “finish the job” — by building a fair economy, healing the environment, defending democracy globally and upholding the rule of law at home.
But Republicans have a strategic advantage in an age of distrust. The conservative message — of an atomized, individual-oriented society and of skepticism toward big government and grand social projects — is a relatively straightforward sell in the times in which we’re living. Whereas people on the left have traditionally been skeptical of big business and those on the right have been skeptical of big government, conservative movements have, of late, focused their anger on not only the public sector but also the private sector, including Big Tech and proponents of so-called woke capitalism.
So how do Democrats succeed in a time of record-low faith in institutions?
The first step is to better understand today’s dynamics of distrust.
In December, we surveyed 1,000 registered voters in seven key swing states by phone and text about their levels of confidence in a wide variety of public and private institutions. We also posed questions such as whether government approvals for vaccines are driven by science, whether their money was safe in the bank, whether a college education is worth the money and whether our system of government is irreparably broken. The margin error was 3.1 percentage points.
While we found evidence that Americans are, across the board, exhibiting low levels of confidence in other people and institutions, we found — just as important — that people are enormously divided on questions of where to place the confidence that they do have.
Americans’ trust isn’t just declining. It’s also diverging.
People’s trust in government — including public schools, medical authorities, federal agencies and similar institutions — maps strongly to Democratic partisanship and predicts voting for Biden. But we found that it won’t be an option for Democrats to continue to rely heavily on a base of true believers in the power of government, who make up only about one-fifth of the electorate.
Beyond trust in government, we explored a second dimension of trust that hinges on beliefs about fairness, including whether rules apply equally to everyone, whether elected officials follow the law, and whether large corporations set their prices fairly based on markets. While progressives have long emphasized the need to correct structural injustices, we found that people’s distrust of institutions on issues of fairness predicts voting for Donald Trump. This helps to explain why Biden is struggling to win credit for an economy that is thriving according to macro-level indicators but still feels deeply unfair in many people’s lived experiences.
Finally, we found that alienation — the belief that systems are irreparably broken, that the economy and political institutions are stacked against people like oneself, and that ordinary and nonviolent political actions are pointless — also predicts voting for Trump over Biden, although it is also associated with third-party voting and not voting. This should be a warning sign for Democrats. We’re talking about people with deep skepticism of free-market capitalism, traditional religion and other conservative institutions.
Using the trust dimensions — trust in government, fairness, and alienation — we grouped voters into six distinct clusters with their own unique views on trust in various institutions. For Democrats to win, they need to find ways, through both rhetoric and action, to engage people with underlying progressive views on corporate regulation, consumer protection and social issues who don’t trust big national institutions or who have simply stopped believing that politics matters . Democrats also need to engage on issues of fairness — including, for instance, more skillfully calling out the unfairness of Trump’s proposals to cut health care spending while extending tax breaks for wealthy corporations and the wealthiest 1 percent.
But the implications go beyond 2024. To address climate change, inequality, the structural failures of the health-care system and other pressing issues, Democrats need to convince Americans of the case for collective action for the public good.
There are no easy answers here. But Democrats need to focus on developing policies and messages that are in touch with the national mood. This might mean, for example, more effectively calling out the corruption that undermines progress on climate and health care — especially after the Supreme Court’s ruling to sharply limit the power of federal agencies. It might mean identifying policies, including but not limited to antitrust, that seek to address agglomerations of power. It might mean working to redefine voting and political participation as not just civic duties but ways to attack lobbyists’ power or transform entrenched systems. It might require more direct admission that the federal government — including under Democratic administrations — has not been adequately accountable to the public. Consider, for example, how Trump’s attacks on the Republican establishment over issues including the Iraq War have contributed to his report with disaffected voters.
Today, a striking 70 percent of respondents told us that, even if institutions have lost their confidence, they still believe that those institutions can be fixed with the right leaders. There is reason for hope that Americans may regain trust in government, science, and the common fact-base. But Democrats need to adjust to the spirit of the times.
