But one of the president’s biggest challenges has little to do with day-to-day events, his personal character, the debates or even his record in the White House.
Biden is a candidate to be trusted in a time when trust is broken.
Polls from Gallup, Pew Research and others have found that Americans’ trust in everything from federal agencies to the courts, the media and even the military is currently at or near all-time lows.
Biden, who professes faith in public institutions, argues that Americans should come together to “get the job done” by building a fair economy, repairing 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 a decentralized, individual-oriented society, and skepticism of big government and grand social projects, is relatively easy to embrace in the times we live in. While people on the left have traditionally been skeptical of big business and people on the right of big government, the conservative movement has recently directed its ire not only at the public sector but also at the private sector, including big tech companies and proponents of so-called woke capitalism.
So how can Democrats succeed at a time when trust in institutions is at a record low?
The first step is to better understand today’s trends in distrust.
In December, we surveyed 1,000 voters in seven key battleground states by phone and text message about their trust in a variety of public and private institutions. We also asked questions such as whether the government’s approval of vaccines is based on science, whether your money is safe in the bank, whether a college education is worth the money, and whether our government system is broken beyond repair. The margin of error was 3.1 percentage points.
While we find evidence that Americans, overall, have low levels of trust in other people and institutions, we also find that people are deeply divided on where their trust should lie.
Americans’ trust is not only declining, it’s also fragmenting.
People’s trust in government, including public schools, health care providers, federal agencies and similar institutions, is strongly tied to Democratic partisanship and predicts votes for Biden. But it turns out that continuing to rely so heavily on a base of people who genuinely believe in the power of government, which makes up only about a fifth of the electorate, is not an option for Democrats.
Beyond trust in government, we explored a second dimension of trust that hinges on beliefs about fairness. This includes whether the rules are applied equally to everyone, whether elected officials follow the law, and whether large corporations set prices fairly based on the market. While progressives have long emphasized the need to correct structural inequities, we find that people’s distrust of institutions on issues of fairness predicts voting for Donald Trump. This helps explain why Biden struggles to take credit for an economy that is thriving according to macro-level indicators but that many people perceive as still very unfair in their lived experience.
Finally, we find that alienation (the belief that the system is irreparably broken, that the economic and political institutions are rigged against people like you, and that normal, nonviolent political activism is pointless) also contributes to voting for Trump over Biden, but is also associated with voting a third party or not voting at all. This should be a warning to Democrats. We’re talking about people who are deeply skeptical of free-market capitalism, traditional religion, and other conservative institutions.
Using the trust dimensions (trust in government, fairness and alienation), we categorize voters into six different clusters. People with their own views on trust in various institutions. To win, Democrats need to find ways, through both rhetoric and action, to engage people who have fundamentally progressive views on corporate regulation, consumer protection, and social issues, who don’t trust large state institutions, or who no longer believe that politics matters. Democrats also need to engage issues of fairness, for example, more skillfully. He criticized President Trump’s proposal to cut health care costs while extending tax cuts for wealthy corporations and the wealthiest 1 percent as unfair.
But the implications will reach beyond 2024. To address climate change, inequality, structural flaws in our health care system, and other pressing issues, Democrats will need to convince Americans of the need for collective action for the common good.
There are no easy answers. But Democrats need to focus on developing policies and messages that fit the public’s mood. This might mean, for example, more effectively condemning climate change and corruption that undermines medical progress, especially in the wake of Supreme Court decisions that have sharply limited the power of federal agencies.. That might mean identifying policies, including but not limited to antitrust laws, to address the centralization of power. It might mean efforts to redefine voting and political participation not simply as a civic duty but as a way to attack lobbyist power or transform entrenched systems. It might require a more direct acknowledgement that the federal government, including under Democratic administrations, has not been sufficiently accountable to the public. Consider, for example, how Trump’s attacks on the Republican establishment on issues like the Iraq War contributed to his credibility with disaffected voters.
Today, an astonishing 70 percent of respondents say they believe that even if institutions have lost trust, they can be improved with the right leadership. There is reason for hope that Americans may regain their faith in government, science, and a common fact base. But Democrats need to adapt to the spirit of the times.
