1. Joseph C. Goulden, Truth Is the First Casualty: The Gulf of Tonkin Affair—Illusion and Reality (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1969). Also see Scott Stane, “Vietnam War Intelligence Deliberately Skewed, Secret Study Says,” The New York Times (December 2, 2005), p. A1.
2. All public opinion polls cited in this chapter-opening story are from John E. Mueller, War, Presidents and Public Opinion (New York: Wiley, 1973).
3. U.S. Department of Defense, OASD (Comptroller), Selected Manpower Statistics (Washington, D.C.: Government Publications, June 1976), pp. 59–60.
4. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York: New American Library, 1961; originally published 1787–1788). See Benjamin I. Page and Robert Y. Shapiro, The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans’ Policy Preferences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), chs. 1 and 2.
5. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan, 1922), p. 127.
6. Philip E. Converse, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” in David Apter, ed., Ideology and Discontent (New York: Free Press, 1964), pp. 206–261; Philip E. Converse, “Attitudes and Non-Attitudes: Continuation of a Dialogue,” in Edward R. Tufte, ed., The Quantitative Analysis of Social Problems (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1970), pp. 168–189. Also see Larry M. Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the Gilded Age (New York and Princeton, NJ: Russell Sage Foundation and Princeton University Press, 2008), for an argument that people find it hard to understand whether public policies are consistent with their values and wishes.
7. Bartels, Unequal Democracy.
8. Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
9. Robert S. Erikson and Kent L. Tedin, American Public Opinion: Its Origins, Content, and Impact, 8th ed. (New York: Pearson Longman, 2011), Table 2.1. This book offers an excellent introduction to how surveys are done.
10. Erikson and Tedin, American Public Opinion, p. 42.
11. George F. Bishop, The Illusion of Public Opinion: Fact and Artifact in American Public Opinion Polls (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).
12. For a review of the research literature on political socialization, see Erikson and Tedin, American Public Opinion, ch. 5.
13. M. Kent Jennings, “Political Socialization,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Behavior, ed. Russell Dalton and Hans-Dieter Klingman (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004); M. Kent Jennings, Laura Stoker, and Jake Bowers, “Politics Across Generations: Family Transmission Reexamined,” Journal of Politics 71, no. 3 (July 2009), pp. 782–799; and Laura Stoker and Jackie Bass, “Political Socialization,” in The Oxford Handbook of Public Opinion and the Media, ed. Robert Shapiro and Lawrence R. Jacobs (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011).
14. Doris A. Graber, Mass Media and American Politics, 8th ed. (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2010), pp. 161–166.
15. For data on how the economic prospects of young people have changed for the worse and on how their political attitudes differ from other age cohorts, see Richard Fry, D’Vera Cohn, Gretchen Livingston, and Paul Taylor, “The Rising Age Gap in Economic Well-Being,” Pew Research Social & Demographic Trends, Pew Research Center, November 7, 2011, http:/
16. For articulations on how we are divided, see Henry E. Brady, “The Art of Political Science: Spatial Diagrams as Iconic and Revelatory,” Perspectives on Politics 9, no. 2 (June 2011), pp. 311–331; and Desmond S. King and Rogers M. Smith, Still a House Divided: Race and Politics in Obama’s America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).
17. Paul Sniderman and Thomas Piazza, Black Pride and Black Prejudice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 175–179; and Erikson and Tedin, American Public Opinion, pp. 199–200.
18. Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes: 1987–2009,” news release, May 21, 2009, http:/
19. Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Trends,” pp. 78–79.
20. This and the votes of other groups reported in this section are from the American National Election Study (2012).
21. Fredrick C. Harris, “The Contours of Black Public Opinion,” in Shapiro and Jacobs, Oxford Handbook of American Public Opinion and the Media.
22. Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Trends.”
23. Ibid., sec. 9; and Erikson and Tedin, American Public Opinion, pp. 200–201.
24. Jeffrey M. Jones, “In U.S., Most Reject Considering Race in College Admissions,” Gallup Poll, July 24, 2013, http:/
25. Paul Taylor, Mark Hugo Lopez, Jessica Martínez, and Gabriel Velasco, “When Labels Don’t Fit: Hispanics and Their Views of Identity,” Pew Research Hispanic Trends Project, Pew Research Center, April 4, 2012, http:/
26. S. K. Ramakrishnan, J. S. Wong, T. Lee, and J. Junn, “Race-Based Considerations and the Obama Vote: Evidence from the 2008 National Asian American Survey,” Du Bois Review 6, no. 1 (2009), 219–238.
27. Rich Morin, “Rising Share of Americans See Conflicts Between Rich and Poor,” Pew Research Social & Demographic Trends, Pew Research Center, January 11, 2012, http:/
28. Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), p. 107; and Larry M. Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (New York: Russel Sage Foundation, 2008).
29. See Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Trends,” p. 24. For pre-2009 data, see Erikson and Tedin, American Public Opinion, pp. 191–199, using overtime reports from the National Election Study surveys; and McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal, Polarized America.
30. Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Trends,” sec. 2.
31. Leslie McCall and Jeff Manza, “Class Differences in Social and Political Attitudes in the United States,” in Shapiro and Jacobs, Oxford Handbook of American Public Opinion and the Media.
32. Earl Black and Merle Black, The Rise of Southern Republicans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); and Earl Black and Merle Black, Divided America: The Ferocious Power Struggle in American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007).
33. General Social Survey, 2008.
34. Ibid.
35. Larry J. Sabato, Pendulum Swing (New York: Pearson Education, 2011).
36. General Social Survey, 2008; and Erikson and Tedin, American Public Opinion, pp. 213–218.
37. Morris P. Fiorina, Culture War: The Myth of a Polarized America (New York: Pearson Longman, 2005); and Morris P. Fiorina and Samuel J. Abrams, “Political Polarization in the American Public,” Annual Review of Political Science 11 (2008), pp. 563–588; and Erikson and Tedin, American Public Opinion, pp. 214–215.
38. Erikson and Tedin, American Public Opinion, p. 195.
39. Ibid., pp. 196–197.
40. Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Trends,” p. 21. See also Julie Dolan, Melissa Deckman, and Michele L. Swers, Women and Politics: Paths to Power and Influence (New York: Longman, 2011), pp. 59–62.
41. Data on voting behavior and partisanship drawn from the American National Election Study 2012; Fiorina, Culture War, pp. 34–35, 66–76; and Karen M. Kaufman, “The Gender Gap,” PS: Political Science and Politics 39, no. 3 (2006), pp. 447–453. For a contrary view, see Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier, Suzanna De Boef, and Tse-Min Lin, “The Dynamics of the Partisan Gender Gap,” American Political Science Review 98, no. 3 (August 2004), pp. 515–528.
42. Mark Schlesinger and Caroline Heldman, “Gender Gap or Gender Gaps?” Journal of Politics 63, no. 1 (February 2001), pp. 59–92; Erikson and Tedin, American Public Opinion, pp. 219–223; General Social Survey, 2008; and Leonie Huddy and Erin Cassese, “On the Complex and Varied Political Effects of Gender,” in Shapiro and Jacobs, Oxford Handbook of American Public Opinion and the Media.
43. Fiorina, Culture War, pp. 66–69.
44. Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Trends.”
45. ABC News/Washington Post poll, March 2011.
46. Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Trends,” sec. 4; and Nicholas L. Danigelis, Melissa Hardy, and Stephen J. Cutler, “Population Aging, Intracohort Aging, and Sociopolitical Attitudes,” American Sociological Review 72 (2007), pp. 812–830.
47. For detailed information on the size, beliefs, and political attitudes of various religious denominations in the United States, see Pew Research Religion & Public Life Project, “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey,” Pew Research Center, November 9, 2009. All of the survey data in this section, unless otherwise noted, comes from this source.
48. Black and Black, Divided America.
49. Pew, “The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey.”
50. Toni Johnson, “Muslims in the United States,” (New York: The Council on Foreign Relations, September 19, 2011).
51. The data in this section is from Trends, 2005 (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2005), http:/
52. Fiorina, Culture War; Fiorina and Abrams, “Political Polarization.”
53. King and Smith, Still a House Divided.
54. Erikson and Tedin, American Public Opinion, pp. 83–84.
55. Michael X. Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter, What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matters (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); and Alan Wolfe, Does American Democracy Still Work? (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006).
56. For full details, see Erikson and Tedin, American Public Opinion, Table 3.1. See also Page and Shapiro, Rational Public, pp. 9–14; Wolfe, Does American Democracy Still Work?, pp. 24–30.
57. Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, Omnibus Final Topline Survey, September 25-28, 2014, p. 8, http:/
58. Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), pp. 154–155; and Bartels, Unequal Democracy.
59. Suzanne Mettler, The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011).
60. Ibid.
61. Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Public Knowledge of Current Affairs: Little Changed by News and Information Revolutions,” Pew Research Center, April 15, 2007, http:/
62. Paul M. Sniderman, Richard A. Brody, and Philip E. Tetlock, Reasoning and Choice: Explorations in Political Psychology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). See also Carpini and Keeter, What Americans Know About Politics; and Samuel Popkin, The Reasoning Voter (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991). For the view that it matters a great deal that Americans don’t know many of the details about what is going on in Washington, see Bartels, Unequal Democracy; Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); and Wolfe, Does American Democracy Still Work?.
63. Robert E. Lane, Political Ideology: Why the American Common Man Believes What He Does (New York: Free Press, 1962); Jennifer L. Hochschild, What’s Fair? American Beliefs about Distributive Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); and Carroll J. Glynn, Susan Herbst, Garrett O’Keefe, and Robert Y. Shapiro, Public Opinion (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), ch. 8.
64. Binyamin Appelbaum and Robert Gebeloff, “Even Critics of Safety Net Increasingly Depend on It,” New York Times, February 11, 2012.
65. Page and Shapiro, Rational Public. See also Doris A. Graber, “Re-Measuring the Civic IQ: Decline, Stability, or Advance?” (paper prepared for presentation at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Boston, August 28–31, 2008); Taeku Lee, Mobilizing Public Opinion: Black Insurgency and Racial Attitudes in the Civil Rights Era (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002); and Erikson and Tedin, American Public Opinion, pp. 93–94. This view is strongly rejected by Caplan, Myth of the Rational Voter, who believes that, at least on issues related to economic policies, errors by the public are systematic rather than random, so they do not balance out.
66. Robert Y. Shapiro and Lawrence R. Jacobs, “The Democratic Paradox,” in Shapiro and Jacobs, Oxford Handbook of American Public Opinion and the Media, pp. 720–722.
67. Frank Newport, “Most in U.S. Still Proud to Be an American,” Gallup Poll, July 4, 2013, http:/
68. Harris Poll, June 2004.
69. Pew Research Global Attitudes Project, “The American-Western European Values Gap,” Pew Research Center, November 17, 2011, updated February 29, 2011, http:/
70. Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Trends,” p. 78.
71. Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Public Trust in Government: 1958–2013,” Pew Research Center, October 18, 2013, http:/
72. Gallup Poll, March 6–9, 2014.
73. Gallup Poll, December 2013.
74. “Congress Less Popular Than Cockroaches, Traffic Jams,” Public Policy Polling, January 8, 2013, http:/
75. “Gallup Daily: Obama Job Approval,” Gallup Poll, http:/
76. Vanessa Williamson, Theda Skocpol, and John Coggin, “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism,” Perspectives on Politics 9, no. 1 (2011), pp. 25–43.
77. Steven Kull, Americans and Foreign Aid: A Study of American Public Attitudes (Washington, DC: Program on International Policy Attitudes, 1995).
78. Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Trust.”
79. Pew Research Center poll, February12–26, 2014 (N=3,338 adults nationwide, margin of error ± 2); Bloomberg National poll, conducted by Selzer & Company, March 7-10, 2014 (N=1,001 adults nationwide, margin of error ± 3.1.)
80. Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Broad Approval for New Arizona Immigration Law,” Pew Research Center, May 12, 2010, http:/
81. Scott Bittle, Jonathan Rochkind, with Amber Ott, “Confidence in U.S. Foreign Policy Index,” PublicAgenda.org and Foreign Affairs 7 (Spring 2010), http:/
82. William Caspary, “The ‘Mood Theory’: A Study of Public Opinion and Foreign Policy,” American Political Science Review 64 (1970), pp. 536–547; John E. Reilly, ed., American Public Opinion and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1995 (Chicago: Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, 1995), p. 13; Lydia Saad, “Growing Minority Wants Minimal U.S. Role in World Affairs” The Gallup Poll, February 21, 2011, http:/
83. Survey by Time, Cable News Network. Methodology: Conducted by Yankelovich Partners on April 21, 1994 and based on 600 telephone interviews. Sample: National adult.
84. Survey by Cable News Network, USA Today. Methodology: Conducted by Gallup Organization, September 21–September 22, 2001 and based on 1,005 telephone interviews. Sample: National adult.
85. Gallup Poll, August 5–8, 2010.
86. NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll conducted by Hart Research Associates (D) and Public Opinion Strategies (R), June 11-15, 2014.
87. Summary of polls on American foreign policy reported at PublicAgenda.org, http:/
88. This seems to be the case in foreign and national defense issues as well. See John H. Aldrich, Christopher Gelpi, Peter Feaver, Jason Reifler, and Kristin Tompson Sharp, “Foreign Policy and the Electoral Connection,” Annual Review of Political Science 9 (2006), pp. 477–502.
89. For a summary of the evidence, see Erikson and Tedin, American Public Opinion, pp. 305–312.
90. Alan D. Monroe, “Consistency Between Public Preferences and National Policy Decisions,” American Politics Quarterly 7 (January 1979), pp. 3–19; and Benjamin I. Page and Robert Y. Shapiro, “Effects of Public Opinion on Policy,” American Political Science Review 77 (1983), pp. 175–190.
91. James A. Stimson, Public Opinion in America: Moods, Cycles and Swings (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991).
92. Paul Burstein, “The Impact of Public Opinion on Public Policy: A Review and an Agenda,” Political Research Quarterly 56, no. 1 (March 2003). See also Vincent L. Hutchings, Public Opinion and Democratic Accountability: How Citizens Learn About Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
93. The various arguments for this are summarized in Benjamin I. Page, “The Semi-Sovereign Public,” in Navigating Public Opinion: Polls, Policy, and the Future of American Democracy, ed. Jeff Manza, Fay Lomax Cook, and Benjamin I. Page (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); and in Shapiro and Jacobs, “The Democratic Paradox,” in Shapiro and Jacobs, Oxford Handbook of American Public Opinion and the Media.
94. For the argument that public opinion is largely a media creation, see W. Lance Bennett, “News Polls: Constructing an Engaged Public,” in Shapiro and Jacobs, Oxford Handbook of American Public Opinion and the Media.
95. Lawrence R. Jacobs and Robert Y. Shapiro, Politicians Don’t Pander: Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000); Shapiro and Jacobs, “The Democratic Paradox,” in Shapiro and Jacobs, Oxford Handbook of American Public Opinion and the Media; John Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Wolfe, Does American Democracy Still Work?
96. W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston, When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), ch. 5.
97. Page and Bouton, The Foreign Policy Disconnect. Also see Lawrence R. Jacobs and Benjamin I. Page, “Who Influences Foreign Policy,” American Political Science Review 99, no. 1 (February 2005), pp. 107–124. On the elite–mass public disconnect also see Daniel W. Drezner, “The Realist Tradition in American Public Opinion,” Perspectives on Politics 6, no. 1 (March 2008), pp. 51–70.
98. Bartels, Unequal Democracy.
99. Public opinion scholar Larry Bartels suggests that the 2001 tax cut (the largest in two decades, with tax relief going overwhelmingly to upper-income people) was supported by the public out of sheer ignorance and confusion about the impact of changes in the Tax Code. See Larry M. Bartels, “Homer Gets a Tax Cut: Inequality and Public Policy in the American Mind,” Perspectives on Politics 3, no. 1 (March 2005), pp. 15–29. In the same issue (pp. 33–53), Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson disagree; in their article “Abandoning the Middle: The Bush Tax Cuts and the Limits of Democratic Control,” they suggest that manipulation and deception were prominent in the successful effort to raise public support for the 2001 tax cuts.