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at fxnetworks.com slash FYC. From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. If you are listening to this show, you're an odd duck. I mean, I'm an odd duck too. But if you're here, you can probably, say, list the Trump trials off the top of your head. You can maybe quote inflation data going back months. You probably hector your friends about what's in the IRA. And hell, you probably know what IRA means.
I mean, what's wrong with you? We talk a lot about the left-right divide in politics, but there's this other divide, interested and uninterested. The people who follow politics closely and the people who avoid it as much as they can. And I think that divide is bigger, or it's at least harder to cross. If you're a liberal who loves MSNBC, you're not going to be able to
You kind of get a conservative who loves Fox News. You have different ideas and different views. The things that are attractive to them might be repellent to you and vice versa. But you have a similar relationship to politics and political media. But if you're the kind of person who can't even imagine what it would be like to not know who the Speaker of the House is, it's hard to imagine the media habits and political thinking of someone then who has negative interest in Mike Johnson.
But people who don't really follow politics do vote. In 2016, about 65% of them said they cast a vote for president. And Trump is winning this group handily right now. There was an NBC News poll from a few months ago that found 15% of voters don't follow political news. But Trump was winning them by 26 points. When you go up the scale of interest, Biden does better. Down the scale, Trump does better. Biden needs to win some of these voters back.
But what drives their votes and how do you reach them when they actively dislike and avoid political media? Yana Kropnikov is a professor of communication and media at the University of Michigan. Along with John Barry Ryan, she's the author of The Other Divide, Polarization and Disengagement in American Politics. So she literally wrote the book on this. So what did she learn? As always, my email, ezraklineshow at nmytimes.com. ♪
Yana Kropnikov, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. So you're here on a podcast that is hosted by a political obsessive who likes to talk to everybody about politics, is listened to by legions of people who love to learn about and then tell other people about politics.
I'd like you to tell me and my listeners why we're weird and nobody likes us. Well, I should say that I am also surrounded by people who constantly live and breathe, follow so much, so much politics. So I'm not going to say that we're all weird. I'm going to say that we are part of a minority. Basically, we can think of this idea of something that my co-author John Ryan and I call political involvement.
which is kind of this extent to which you are engaged with politics. It's things like how much you care about politics. Do you constantly follow the news? Do you really read about politics? Do you get mad when you hear that somebody isn't doing basically any of these things?
If you have ever found yourself on like a four hour flight and your Wi-Fi went out and you thought to yourself, oh, my goodness, something is going to happen in the news and politics. I'm not going to know what happened. You might be what we call deeply involved in politics.
Now, the thing is, what we find is that these deeply involved people are actually the minority. On our scale, they're maybe at about 20% of the American public across a variety of surveys. So it's not kind of that these people are super weird. They just happen to be the minority in terms of the American populace. But there is something a little bit beyond them being the minority. I
I thought one of the funniest parts of your book, from at least the perspective I'm reading it, is how you keep testing this question of, is it liberals and conservatives that people don't like? Or is it just liberals and conservatives who talk about politics that people don't like? For most people, you seem to have a lot of evidence that we are very off-putting. Well,
Unfortunately, yes. I could see you trying to wiggle away from that and then the weight of your data overwhelming you. You know, I'm trying to be very nice, right? We're about to spend, however, a long time talking about politics, right? But yes, our research kind of repeats
pointed us to this really interesting place, which is that people don't like talking about politics. People don't like others who talk about politics.
To the extent that any survey question is actually famous, there is this kind of famous survey question about how happy or unhappy would you be if your child married somebody of the opposing party? And so one of the pieces of evidence for the growing polarization in the U.S. is this idea that people would be much unhappier than they've ever been in the past if their child married somebody of the opposing party.
So what we do with this question is that we add kind of a caveat to it. We say, OK, how happy or unhappy would you be if your child married somebody of the opposing party? But they're not going to talk about politics. They will never mention politics. And we see a weakening of this dislike of the other side. We see a weakening of this polarization, in part because we now promise people your dinners aren't going to be this person on the other side talking about politics.
But there is kind of even more evidence than just us. There's research, for example, on why people unfriend others on social media that suggests, yes, certainly it's somebody who is posting things that you find kind of offensive and things you don't like from the other side. But it might be somebody from your side who is just continuously posting things about politics.
It's this expression, that conversation that seems to sort of turn people off. People don't want to hear about it. So what's important about that difference, that difference between caring about politics and talking a lot about politics? To me, this is one of the most important things in the involvement divide, in part because there is this
correlation between being politically expressive and being deeply involved in politics, most of the people who we hear from about politics happen to be deeply, deeply involved. What that means is most of the voices that we're getting are these heavily engaged voices.
Now, there's another thing that correlates with all of this, and that's your level of affective polarization. So the idea of how much you dislike the other side. So now the people we're most likely to hear from are people who are deeply engaged, people who are constantly following the news, and people who actually very, very much dislike the other side.
That gives you a certain impression of what politics is like, but it also gives you a certain impression of what it means to actually be in person who is deeply, deeply involved. One of the things you might say to yourself is, "I can't be like this. I can't pay this much attention. I can't speak like this about the other party. I must not really care that much about politics, I guess, or I must not be that politically engaged."
Another distinction of that divide is the possibility that the expressiveness and avoidance
have a certain relationship that the more kind of some people talk about politics and they talk about just like in the other side and they're constantly posting about it, the more that leads to people basically trying to avoid this political anxiety of trying to avoid this person. And I think that is in some sense further facilitating this divide.
I think there's an assumption that people who do not like politics do not vote. And my sense from the data is that that is true at somewhat higher numbers than people who do like politics. But a lot of people are not engaged in politics, who are not expressive about their politics. They do vote.
And they seem to be particularly important this year. There's been a lot of survey data suggesting that Joe Biden is doing, you know, OK among quite likely to vote demographics and people and that Donald Trump has a quite significant lead.
Among more disengaged voters, voters who are not getting political news either at all or at least very often or from traditional forms of political media, voters who just don't vote very often like they are breaking for Trump very heavily. So first, can you talk a bit about this question of whether or not the uninvolved vote and what leads them then to do so?
So I want to back up a tiny bit here. You know, I think of involvement as a continuum rather than there being these two groups and there's this one deeply involved group and one completely uninvolved group. This large group of people that I think we've been calling the uninvolved includes kind of a variety of people. There are some people who are, yes, completely and utterly disengaged, right? Those folks are probably not going to turn out and vote. They might say in a survey that they will vote.
But it ends up being unlikely. Then there is sort of a much larger group of people who aren't living and breathing politics. They vary, right, in how much they might follow politics, how much they might follow the news. They might get a little bit more engaged when it's election time and it's kind of everywhere. They probably don't like it. It's probably not something they're enjoying.
But they're not completely checked out. They're not completely disengaged. And in that group, we find, yeah, they're voting. They're going to turn out and vote. They are going to kind of keep abreast of what they might perceive to be key campaign moments. They're following their local news.
They're just not living and breathing politics. But these aren't people who are completely out of it, who are completely and utterly disengaged. Well, one thing I've seen in the data I've been looking at is I agree with you. There is this continuum. But as you move across it steadily, you move from people likely to vote for Joe Biden, people likely to vote for Donald Trump. So there's been really good polling breaking people down by their media sources. And it's like if you read a newspaper overwhelmingly likely to vote for Joe Biden.
If you don't follow political news, overwhelmingly likely to vote for Donald Trump. But in between there, if you're getting your news from cable news, you're a little bit likely to vote for Donald Trump. If you're getting it from YouTube and Google, which I think is...
describing people who are not primarily getting news, that's not where you really go for political news as a political news junkie. You're quite likely to vote for Donald Trump. In my memory, it's 13 or 14 points, but I could be off by a couple points there. If you're getting your news from social media, you're quite likely to vote for Donald Trump. If you're getting your news from digital news websites, you're quite likely to vote for Joe Biden. I think sort of in between there, you're seeing a similar continuum.
So how do you understand the way this is breaking down this year, this sort of slide of engagement also being a kind of slide down towards Trumpism? This is, you know, this is an incredibly complicated question because it gets into questions of causality, essentially. What causes what? And I think we can have two stories and both of them are going to be plausible in this particular case.
One is, is that basically this decision to either follow mainstream news sources or to get your news via social media or YouTube or Google is something that has just been happening.
And it just so then happens that if that's what you're doing, if that's how you're getting your news, the information you're getting is pushing you toward Trump. So that is the story that the causal chain is from the information to your voting decision or to your supporting decision. But I think there's another story that I think is also actually equally plausible.
And that is that your decision to not follow mainstream news and your decision to support Donald Trump are actually part and parcel of kind of the same phenomenon, the same psychology, which is that the same forces that are leading you not to trust mainstream news are actually also leading you to support Donald Trump. Or maybe you kind of supported Donald Trump. And so that's why you aren't following mainstream news. You're going to these other sources.
This idea of kind of which way this direction is going is actually quite thorny. So we can tell that there is this co-occurrence between people who aren't going to places like newspapers, like digital news sources, and instead are getting their news from these other places. They're often termed the news finds me people, essentially. Yeah.
And that there is a support for Donald Trump. But I think it's questionable kind of how we got here and whether it's basically just a general distrust of the establishment that has led to both outcomes in that sense.
One thing that's interesting, though, is that these less politically attached voters have not traditionally, so they're not always been Republican leaning. I mean, it used to be conventional wisdom in politics that a very high turnout election would be good for Democrats because the people who are not that involved and don't vote lean Democratic.
And now the view is that that has flipped. Democrats do better among the people who reliably turn out to vote. That's maybe one reason they did pretty well in the midterms in 2022. Maybe a reason they've been doing well in special elections. But if there's a really high turnout election, that actually might now be good for Donald Trump because those kinds of voters are more likely to support him. Do you have a view on why this seems to be changing over time? I think it's a lot of things coming together.
You know, so I think one is something you've already alluded to, which is a fragmentation of the media. So this idea that now there's a lot more places to get media. If you are a disengaged, non-news following voter of now,
you are still getting information. You're getting this information from somewhere. There's, for example, this kind of amazing work by Yoonji Kim at Columbia that people who avoid politics are actually picking up a lot of really interesting political ideas from entertainment news sources.
And so what Yunji finds is that, for example, watching reality shows leads these people who are totally disengaged to believe more in the American dream, right? So it's people who are sensibly not following the news, but they're getting politics from somewhere. And now you also add social media, you add these other ideas. There is still a political push. You just don't realize that that is the case. I think that's kind of one idea. Another idea is
Phrasing research by a scholar, Michael Bang-Peterson, is this idea of anti-establishment. It's plausible, right, that the reason people aren't following news now is for totally different reasons, that they weren't following it in the past. That now kind of being disengaged from politics is part of a broader idea of being anti-establishment.
Well, that would push you toward Donald Trump. So again, the reasons that you're disengaged are going to push you toward a really particular political outcome. Now, we can think of some other ideas. We can think of these ideas of efficacy and how you see the world around you versus kind of what you think people who are deeply involved are telling you.
If, for example, your experience of the world is one thing, right? You think that things are too expensive. You might think the economy is bad. And any time you have an encounter with a mainstream news source, you might think it's not reflecting your actual experience and you might disengage.
And in this particular case, be pushed quite simply against the incumbent, which is Joe Biden. As our media environment switches, as we kind of get this capability to live in a world where the news does find you via the social media, via kind of these other places.
What it means to be disengaged is very, very different. And what that means for your politics might be very, very different. So when I wrote my book on political polarization, which came out in 2020, I was very influenced by a bunch of studies on the media.
That made to me this very interesting point, which was you might have imagined that as you got this huge possibility of absorbing information about the world around you over the course of the 20th century, you know, you move from having a couple television networks to bazillion cable channels and then, you know, cable news and you have...
blogging and you eventually have social media and right like there used to be such a constraint on how much you could know about the world there was so little political information and now there was so much and yet net net people don't become more informed we take off the stricture on how much you could know and yet people don't seem to know all that much more and the resolution that you see in some of these studies is that it created this new possibility to be really
from political news and information and really immersed in it. So, you know, there's a point where if you wanted to read the sports page in the paper, you sort of went, had to go past the other parts of the paper too. And like, you might see some news about politics that would catch your eye or some news about foreign affairs. But now you just click onto a sports information website or whatever it might be.
And so at one point, you know, if you were watching sitcoms in the evening, the nightly news came on it at the time it comes on and maybe kind of sat through it because that's what was on. But now you don't anymore. And so at one point, you know, if you were watching sitcoms in the evening, the nightly news came on it at the time it comes on.
And so there is this kind of growing, like you have this possibility to truly be into the news and this possibility to truly be outside of it, which creates this class of hyper news consumers and this class of genuine news avoiders. How much do you buy that explanation?
Well, I mean, I'm a scholar of political communication, so you're really, you're speaking kind of the fundamentals of the discipline here, right? I personally think it is a very good explanation. One of the fundamental books here is Marcus Pryor's Post-Broadcast Democracy, which kind of tracks this idea that once we get more choices, we're going to
really choosing to follow politics. But I think this point you make about the rise of the almost the hyper news consumer, the person who is deeply, deeply engaged is
is something that is, in a way, an equally important part of using Pryor's term, this post-broadcast democracy. So if you're going to be engaged in the news, you can be engaged in the news every single hour of the day, every single hour, every 10 minutes, you could be engaged in the news. You can keep track of it through, as you said, blogs, there's sub-stacks, there are kind of updates, there are all of these things.
The thing that this does is that it kind of broadens that divide. So if we just have media fragmentation, you have some people who are going to stick with the news, some who aren't. But now you have some people who aren't sticking with the news. You have some people who have stuck with the news. And now you have some people who have gone literally above and beyond the
They're sticking with the news basically for the duration of their day. And that, I think, is this next level of media fragmentation. That is that next level of this availability of information. And so the reason that some people don't learn anymore, despite the fact that they have more information, well, they don't want to. They have other choices. There are other ways they're going to fill their time. But the other component is that there are going to be some people who learn
so much. These were always people who were going to be news consumers, but now they're at that next level.
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One thing I notice is that when I talk to partisans of either side, the hyper consumers you're talking about, about the people who don't typically turn out, they almost always believe it's because those people have extremely strong political opinions that are not being met by the system.
So this was a big belief within the Bernie Sanders campaign and sort of democratic socialism worlds that if you had, you know, a real kind of socialist candidate who is offering, you know, single payer health care and like an end to corporate control over American politics, like you would turn these people out. Like they're not coming out because they're not being represented. You also hear this on the right all the time, right? These people are tired of these like, you know, a big business, a big government, right?
How much should one think about, like, less involved voters ideologically? Like, what do we know about them ideologically? And then how much do their ideas or the general thrust of their ideas map on to one of the structured ideologies that dominate in American politics? I'm actually hearing two parts to your question. There are probably even more than that. So I'm going to split this question into two parts.
Okay, the first part is, are there people out there for whom their two candidate choices aren't reflecting their true ideological worldviews?
I think that is quite likely the case, right? Because we only have the two major parties. The two parties are basically like buckets for a lot of different ideas. So it's entirely plausible that somebody out there is basically not turning out in large part because there is no candidate that really reflects their views.
That their views might be potentially more liberal or more conservative than what is being offered. They're not quite there and their preference is not to vote at all. So that's part one. I want to separate those folks out from people who are not involved.
When we look at the issues that people who are less involved are sort of interested in, we see a pretty sizable divide on a lot of issue importance questions. This is not the same as saying that their views don't map on to this left-right ideological continuum.
You know, they still are taking issues that are along with their at least partisan positions. What is different is the issues that they find really, really important. What is different is what they think are the things that politics and the government should be focusing on and addressing. So where we see involvement mattering is not necessarily in how you line up.
but what you think is important. So what do they think is important that diverges from the way the system acts? I think the easiest way to summarize is in terms of the bread and butter issues. They care more about costs. In the book, for example, we saw that when we originally did these studies, we see these big divides in people who are less deeply involved saying like, yes, but...
This kind of financial thing is what's really important relative to those who are deeply involved. Now, we actually happened to ask this question again in the summer of 2022. We again measured how people involved, how involved they are. So, you know, how deeply involved you are, where are you on this continuum? And we again asked people, how important are these issues?
What's interesting about the time in which we happened to run the survey is that it was summer of 2022 over the January 6th hearings. And we again found these really broad involvement divides. So one thing, for example, we found is an almost kind of enormous divide within Democrats
on the extent to which inflation was important. Democrats who were deeply involved said that inflation was not that important, whereas people who were less involved, these uninvolved Democrats, put it right at the top of their important issues.
And we actually saw the same thing when we asked a question that was kind of designed to get at people's thoughts about these January 6th hearings. We asked a question about addressing attempts to subvert elections. And we again saw a sort of really big divide, both within involved and uninvolved Republicans, and again within involved and uninvolved Democrats.
In fact, what we found really surprising is that on a number of these issues, even when we re-interviewed people in the summer of 2022, there was actually less division between uninvolved Democrats and Republicans than within party by the extent to which people were involved in politics.
Wait, I'm sorry, I didn't understand that last piece. So there was less difference between uninvolved Democrats and Republicans than there was between like an uninvolved Democrat and a highly involved Democrat? Yeah. This is so interesting. I want to spend some time here. So if I'm hearing you correctly, one thing you're saying, and I've seen evidence of this in polling and I've heard this from people do polling. Let's focus on Democrats here or Democratic leaning voters.
More involved Democrats, for instance, are very focused on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy. They're very focused on January 6th. They're very focused on Donald Trump's criminal trials. And less involved Democrats, as I understand it, are much more focused on affordability, inflation, cost of living, and do not seem to be highly moved by those issues. Is that both what you're seeing and sort of what you're saying here?
Yes. If, and again, this is surveys from the summer of 2022, right exactly as the January 6th hearings are happening, we see basically exactly what you are suggesting. What the uninvolved Democrats are saying is key to them is inflation.
They are not moved, or at least they weren't in our survey, on these attempts to subvert election. This is right during the televised January 6th hearings.
So you were saying that that was for you in a poll of 2022, but it reminded me of something I just saw in a poll from this year, from The Times. So this is Nate Cohen writing about Times-Santa Paul that showed Biden trailing in swing states to Donald Trump, with the exception of Wisconsin, and also trailing Democratic Senate candidates. And Cohen was making this point that in the poll, it is these less engaged voters who are proving the problem for Biden. And so he says, quote,
What I found striking when I read that for the first time before we spoke was
was that it isn't just a view about politics. It's also a different view about the economy, right? Like those questions include a question not about how you think Biden is doing, but is the economy good or bad? How much of the increased materialism you're noting among these less attached voters is a function of income? I mean, is what we're seeing that poor voters are less likely to vote, but they rate economic issues more highly? Or does this not track any kind of simple demographic cut?
There are two things here. So one thing that we very, very consistently find every single time we've asked about involvement is that income does predict involvement. The higher income you are, the more likely you are to be involved in politics.
That actually makes sense if we think about the amount of time it takes to be that engaged with politics, right? We can think about what kind of job you might have, what your evenings or days might be like. And so I think it makes sense, right, that income would predict that level of involvement in politics as it does in our data.
And so then, you know, the question is, how much does all of that filter through into which issues you see are important? So I think some of it is likely there because income is predicting how involved you are in politics, right? Certainly income would predict the issues. And so you see that relationship.
But I think there is also kind of an interesting underlying possibility there, and that is your relationship to politics. There is a scholar from 1922, Walter Lippmann. He basically argues that a lot of politics is basically pictures in our heads. It's how we imagine it, right? It's how we experience it.
And so for people who are deeply involved, the pictures in our heads are coming from just a tremendous amount of information that they're constantly getting. They're reading about democracy. They're reading about threats toward democracy. They're reading about economic statistics. They're reading about unemployment and GDP and things like that. So their picture of politics is coming from this broad informational world.
Now, somebody who is less involved and less engaged, they might have a different picture that emerges in their heads. Their picture might be coming from how they perceive their own lived experience and their own economic experience.
they're not necessarily picking up on all of these more abstract ideas that are kind of existing about politics and explaining why you experience something and explaining why this is the big thing, where actually that is the important thing. And don't focus on this price or don't focus on this immediate thing. Focus on this other much bigger threat. The pictures in your heads are going to be fundamentally different.
I wonder how much this suggests an explanation for Biden's troubles this particular year. The picture you're painting in my head of these sometime less involved voters is a class of the electorate that cares a lot more about bread and butter economic issues, that cares more about affordability, that isn't consuming that much political news.
And that this particular year we know is breaking unusually heavily against the Democrat. And that's happening in a year when prices are really elevated, right? We had a big burst of inflation. We've had a long period of growing affordability problems and bigger ticket items like housing, health care, elder care, child care, higher education. And now you have, you know, kind of everything is expensive. Eggs, coffee, gas, cars, everything.
You have this class that is absorbing less political information and is practically sensitive to prices and cost of living dimensions.
And so here we are. We have an election where Democrats really want to make an argument against Donald Trump. It's a highly political argument. He's a threat to democracy. He's unusually unqualified to hold the office he seeks. And they're doing it amidst a situation of very high prices and a lot of constant economic aggravation. And so the kinds of voters who you're describing who are less likely to worry so much about these questions of democracy and more likely to worry about prices are turning on Joe Biden. How?
highly engaged Democrats want to do things that appeal to highly engaged Democrats.
They need to start doing something different or they're going to lose the election. How compelling of a gloss on 2024 is that to you? Based on the data that I've seen, that seems to be a very good guess to me. Looking at these differences within party by level of involvement on issues that have to do specifically with economics, like in the summer of 2022, inflation suggests
that the pictures in the heads are a bit different. And in some sense, I think it's difficult to convince somebody that they shouldn't be concerned about their own economic issues. It's hard to tell somebody not to worry or not to be nervous by feeling that things are too expensive.
And I think that is the really, really difficult part. The attempt to push people to focus on things that honestly in some way just seem more abstract to them, I think is really hard, especially when what you notice is that the things you used to pay one price for are now tremendously more expensive. When it comes to making plans, you are the best.
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So we're talking a few weeks after Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts by a Manhattan jury. What have we seen in the polling since and has it surprised you? So I think we've seen that there hasn't been that much movement.
There have been maybe inklings here and there through, for example, focus groups and conversations that people have had about the conviction. But really, we haven't seen kind of a mass breakthrough. Now, to be totally truthful here, it would have actually surprised me more if we had seen that after this conviction, there were all of these people
changes in the way people were going to vote. It seems like one of those cases where almost these null effects are what we would have expected rather than a mass change in public opinion or public behavioral intent on voting.
But let me ask you why. So in my way of imagining a lot of voters we're talking about, they're not that interested in political news. They're not following the day to day. You know, when I do a long thing about how Trump's tariff plan is bad, nobody's going to read it.
But so the opportunity to change minds is in a news event like this, where suddenly so much focus is on it. You know, all the news is talking about the same thing. Convicted felon is on all the headlines. It's, you know, happening as people flick around. But if anything is going to break through, it's going to be something like this. And the stability, I mean, I'm seeing the same thing in the polling you are. It has barely changed. Right.
The stability after the former president gets convicted on 34 counts, do you understand that as being because the people seeing it just don't care or because they are not seeing it or because they are seeing it and don't trust what it means, right? They're cynical that the justice system is fair or that Trump is being treated fairly. Is a null response a lack of knowledge, a lack of interest, or a lack of agreement?
I don't think it's a lack of knowledge. People might not know that it's 34 counts, but they do know that there's been a conviction, most likely. They do know that something has happened. So as you said, it's really been everywhere, right? It's hard to avoid it. It is definitively a news event. I think from one side, to put it in the simplest way possible, it's a lack of knowledge.
It's not clear what is the new information that has been offered here. Yes, definitively a conviction, right? The former president is now a convicted felon. A candidate is now a convicted felon. But in some ways, I think there were people who already knew and assumed that he had done this and believed that he had done this. And now we just have this conviction, but this is things that they believed all along. And then there were people who
Thought he had done this and just never cared. So I think that's part one. And so from that sense, the conviction isn't going to get them to care about it. It's not in that sense informative because this is now just a legal decision, potentially an illegally complex decision for them. And they just do not care about it. This is not something that ever really bothered them.
I think the second component is this idea that you just pointed to, which is this idea for cynicism. In some ways, in this really fragmented media environment that we're in, in which we're getting tons of information from tons of different places, you can go to the New York Times, you can go to mainstream news sources, you can go and listen to Joe Rogan, right? You can listen to a podcast.
I think what happens in this media environment is that it gives this opportunity for people to have cynicism, but to also perceive that cynicism is the way that you understand politics and the way that you interact with politics.
There's this really interesting paper by researcher Hillary Stile that shows that people believe that to seem politically knowledgeable and politically intelligent, you have to seem cynical. That that's the way that you seem like you really get and understand politics.
And I think this is a news event that is in some sense really sort of ripe for this form of cynicism, of people kind of saying, well, yeah, of course this was going to happen, especially for people of the type who aren't really following mainstream news and who might not trust mainstream news. And I think this idea is something that really filters how people view this news story. So there was a New York Times Siena survey that came after Trump's conviction that
And it didn't find a big overall shift, but it did find that to the degree there was any shift, it was concentrated among politically disengaged voters. It was practically concentrated among young and non-white voters. 15% of former Trump supporters who switched to Biden after the verdict said they pay attention to politics some of the time or never. How did you take that concentration? Did that read as something that is likely to persist to you? I think it's a tough one, in part because
There's a thing research has suggested that this might be the group of people who pay, as you mentioned, like little to no attention to politics, who might be most responsive to new information coming in.
But if that's the case, there are going to be potentially other informational jolts throughout the campaign. And so it's hard to predict the persistence of any one of these bouts of information. It's certainly possible that it is a meaningful and it's an important shift. It would have seemed reasonable that a candidate being convicted on 34 counts should be a meaningful shift for people. But again, if
If the idea here is that these are folks, in some sense, because they aren't paying as much attention, where other information might break through as well, the campaign is a long one. There's still likely things that we can't predict that will happen.
There's a question here that I know a lot of Democrats are thinking about, which is, should they try to make people care about this more? Or is this not the kind of thing the voters they need to attract care about? So, I mean, there are different plays Democrats can make from making this a huge part of their advertising campaigns to doing things that are a little bit more stunt-like to try to keep the conviction in the news, to try to keep focus on Donald Trump's conviction.
And there's also the argument that, you know, the voters they need are more worried about cost of living. They're worried about the price of eggs. And there isn't an amount of getting people to focus on Donald Trump's conviction that will matter. Politically disengaged voters were especially likely to shift from Trump to Biden based on this news. But it was a pretty small shift and these things can move backwards, too. And so I don't think it's an easy one to answer. Given what your researcher or what the research you know of has said about these voters, it's
Is this the kind of thing that they can be made to care about? Or is this just the kind of thing that in general they feel is that's just politics? I want somebody who's going to be, you know, focused on the price of eggs at the supermarket. This is a tough question, in part because I think sometimes connecting what people say in surveys and what's
What people do in experimental studies to what is actually going to happen to them, to what they decide in the moment is often hard. It's not impossible, but there are no really easy answers here of saying you focus on this thing, you present it in just this way, and you're going to get them to care about the Trump conviction.
But I think another really interesting component here is this idea of cynicism. It almost feels that the more it becomes a talking point for one political party, the easier it becomes for people to dial in on the cynicism of saying,
This isn't kind of a legal decision. This isn't justice being carried out. This is just more politics. This is just more political maneuvering. And I think it's a really tense and difficult tightrope. I'll be honest that this is one of the things that to me makes this particular conviction hard as politics. Look, there's a Georgia case that is moving more slowly.
And that case against Donald Trump is about his attempt to use the office of the presidency to pressure officials to wrongly find voters for him or decide the election in his favor. Right. It's a it's a crime intrinsically related to the powers of the presidency.
This one is a little bit more complicated. It's a crime about improperly accounting or hiding, really, payments to try to keep the Stormy Daniels information out of the news in order to help Donald Trump's candidacy, which is, you know, when you stack them on top of each other, it does become a felony. I mean, it seems to me that the case is right on the law.
But, you know, the voters, even people I know who don't like Donald Trump, what a lot of them who are not super engaged in politics say to me is that, well, don't all politicians do something like this? You know, wasn't Bill Clinton hiding his affairs with people? And you're like, well, yeah, but there's an accounting dimension to this one. It doesn't seem to move them that much. Like, I do wonder if you were talking about a group that is already cynical about politics—
One of the things that has seemed to me hard when I look at the focus groups, when I look at even the way people in my life have experienced this, this seems to fall into the bucket of, for many of them, things that politicians do because they are cynical and corrupt. And Donald Trump seems to be being prosecuted for it, as opposed to something that when you sort of lay out what Trump did, they are appalled and immediately back off from him. Yeah.
Yeah, so cynicism around politics is something that has been in research and in the literature for a really, really long time. If we look at measures and surveys of how we capture political cynicism, it's ideas like, are politicians kind of just out there for themselves? Are they just trying to win? Are they just in it to be corrupt and get things for themselves and win elections and they don't really care about people?
So this very idea you just mentioned, oh, they're all kind of doing this, they're all engaged in this behavior, it's very much present. I think another thing here is this idea that cynicism has become a deeply connected part of politics, even just talking about it generally.
Jamie Druckmann and Thomas Leeper have this really interesting paper where they talk about something termed as pre-treatment. So what is pre-treatment? It means that you've been exposed to something for so long that really now it's hard to move you on it.
Well, if we've been exposed to this idea of political cynicism, of believing that everyone's corrupt and if everyone's terrible and everyone's just outed for themselves in terms of politicians, we've been so heavily pretreated that it's hard once you've been that pretreated to get information that can move you. Breaking through is really, really difficult.
Breaking through means convincing somebody that this isn't just the ordinary kind of political machinations, that this is something extraordinary. But here then you get to the other really difficult piece. Going back to the Lippmann politics and frankly the world is made of pictures in our heads.
There's a question of how the picture gets into our head. And we were talking earlier about how, you know, you're a political junkie. Maybe you're listening to the Ezra Klein show, right? And we're putting some pictures in your heads right as we speak. It's happening here in real time. But if you don't follow politics, it is harder for politicians to get a picture into your head. There's a quote from a Democratic pollster. That's why it's hard to move the race based on actual news. They aren't seeing it and they don't care.
So, I mean, let's say you have the view that I'm at least putting forward here, which is that you really need to persuade these voters that Donald Trump, who has, to be fair, a highly inflationary agenda built on strengthening the dollar so imports are more expensive, built on a 10% tariff, built on a mass deportation of low-wage labor that would cause havoc in construction and agricultural costs, built on a bunch of other things that I think
you should expect from basic economics will raise prices. You want to persuade them that this is a bad bet, that even though you're sort of nostalgic for 2019 when we had not yet had the pandemic-induced supply shocks and the inflation, that Donald Trump is not going to bring that back. He's bad at governing. But they're not tuning in to Chris Hayes making this argument on MSNBC. They're not listening to my show. They're not reading The New York Times. How do you reach them? Reaching, I think, these folks is a challenge.
One thing I want to take a slight issue with is the quote from the pollster that you just mentioned, which said that they don't care. I don't think that's a correct or sort of reasonable way of characterizing a lot of people who aren't involved. They might care about different things, but they do care. A lot of them turned out to vote in a pandemic.
So to say that they don't care is, I don't think it's necessarily fair to that group of people. Now, the second question is how to reach these people when they're not exactly tuning in.
That's something that's actually been challenging for a really long time. Yes, the media environment is totally, totally, totally different now. But if we go back all the way to even kind of the 1960s, there were these concerns about how do we get to people who basically aren't following politics, who aren't paying attention to information?
One of the arguments there was something called the two-step flow, which is the idea that as long as there was somebody in your network who followed politics, it was okay that you didn't really because that person would just tell you about it.
The issue that I think we have reaching these people is something that there's a book by Ahn Huckfeld and Ryan where they argue that, yeah, you have people talking to each other, but these people aren't, as they say, encyclopedias. The information they're giving each other, even if you're the person who knows a lot about politics...
is essentially going to be kind of biased to what you think should happen politically. So that's actually not a solution either. So I realized that your question was looking for solutions, and I just gave another problem. I think the question of reaching these people is in terms of thinking how they perceive politics.
what they perceive is happening in the news, who they perceive the news is for, why do they think somebody is posting on politics to social media? I think kind of reaching these people goes to your point of modeling what it is that they seem to be disengaged by and what is it that they tend to be avoiding.
But I think the problem with that is that it suggests that a lot of really earnest forms of communication might not necessarily be all that effective. As I sort of track like the rise of, you know, other podcasts and kind of YouTube shows and TikTok and so on, one of the things that seems kind of obvious to me is that a lot of people get their news and their political opinion somewhat ambiently.
And they particularly get it if they're not into politics from people who primarily do not focus on politics. So maybe you like the Joe Rogan show because you like the UFC, you're into psychedelics, you like comedians, right? There are a lot of reasons you might like Joe Rogan.
And Joe Rogan does not do, I mean, some of his stuff is somewhat political, but he doesn't spend a lot of time talking about like the latest White House press briefing. But if you listen to a show, you know, he doesn't like Joe Biden, right? Just atmospherically. It's just kind of sitting there in the background. When Joe Biden comes up, Joe Biden comes up negatively. You know, if you're a big fan of, you know, like a lot of sports talk radio right now.
Atmospherically, that stuff is kind of anti-Biden, right? Like it just kind of views Biden as like old and out of touch and a censorious liberal, right? Comedians have become, you know, Chappelle, that kind of thing.
This is not all one thing, right? I mean, if Taylor Swift is going to endorse anybody, she's probably going to endorse Joe Biden and maybe that matters. But it does seem to me, particularly in like this alternative media age, like it has become more anti, not just sort of like Democrats. I'm not sure that's actually the right way to think about it, but anti-establishment, anti-institutions, anti-elites. And right now, Democrats are the ones in charge. So they're anti-Joe Biden. Yeah.
And this is a kind of hard problem because, again, it's not that they're not getting political news. It's just because they don't like political news. They're not going to get it from people who primarily do politics, but they are going to get it from somewhere. One thing I've just seen a lot of these numbers is Democrats have lost a lot of ground potentially among this class of influencer, this sort of like anti-institution, anti-elite, a little bit bro-ier. Do you see that? And is there any evidence for that?
Well, I think what there is increasing evidence for is this very idea that you are pointing to, which is people are getting political information from places they don't realize are political. There's this really interesting research by my colleague here, Ariel Hazel, which looks at what she terms aspirational influencers.
and how ostensibly these influencers are kind of lifestyle health influencers, but they actually end up giving people a lot of political information that in some senses can be almost quite conspiratorial. People don't realize that what they're getting is politics. And I think that idea of you don't necessarily think of this as getting politics
So you're not avoiding it. You're not hiding from it. You're taking in almost this broad idea of a worldview. I think it can be quite powerful. But I think another thing that we can think about is this idea that has recently come up quite a bunch in pop culture, which is parasocial relationships.
When you are engaging with an influencer, you are constantly following them. You are, in some sense, almost feeling like you know them. They become somebody you might think of as a sort of friend. And so what we know about politics is that getting your information through networks, through friends, can be extraordinarily powerful.
If you're talking to a friend, you're more open. You're listening to their ideas. That's really, really different than reading the news or hearing a journalist tell you what has happened. These parasitic relationships are incredibly difficult to study.
But in theory, if they are occurring, they make these things so much more powerful because in some sense, they've now are replicating these close friendships that we see being really powerful and political influence. And I think to take this one step further, what I'm suggesting is that first, all that 100 percent is happening. Absolutely. Absolutely.
But it is structured in a way by these new platforms that is going to be quite hard for Biden and the Democrats. So Eric Levitz writes in Vox, quote, "...the past four years have witnessed a proliferation of podcasts and alternative media gurus who portray the government, medical authorities, and conventional journalistic outlets as hopelessly corrupt. As more voters get their information from such influencers, it is plausible that political distrust would rise."
Among those who mostly get their news from social media, the president, Joe Biden, leads the third-party candidate, RFK Jr., by just two percentage points. And I bring those two together because I do think that there is a structure around it. You know, if you are making it on YouTube or TikTok or something, you sort of position against the institutions like the one that I'm sitting at right now.
And there is a kind of aesthetic to that, right? The wellness influencers, right? That's sort of the world RFK Jr. comes out of. And so I'm not sure this is all pro-Trump, actually. I think it's one reason RFK Jr. is doing fairly well. But it is a very tricky world for people who lead institutions or who are themselves institutionalists like Joe Biden to navigate.
Oh, absolutely. I think one of these sort of affordances of social media is that it allows people to, in a way, reflect these information streams that only used to be person-to-person. But now, with these platforms, people who have these platforms...
They have a kind of an unprecedented ability to reach a lot of people without there being any check on sort of what they are transmitting to people. And so returning to Ariel Hazel's work, what is interesting about what she's showing is these ideas that these influencers in some sense seem aspirational.
but that they're also giving you this almost like secret, really special information that you aren't going to get somewhere else. And I think that is in part the draw. The idea that you can go to mainstream media and get basically the same information everyone else is getting, or you can do one better. You can get this special information that perhaps the mainstream media doesn't necessarily want you to have.
There is this really great paper that actually has a really apropos title, which is Only Sheep Trust Journalists. And it's by Nelson and Lewis. And what they find in this paper is that people actually really pride themselves on not trusting mainstream news in a lot of cases, that they pride themselves on kind of going elsewhere and being really cynical about it and being really skeptical about what's being offered.
But I think this cynicism around mainstream news and this belief that Nelson and Lewis find in their paper that people think being impartial means not trusting what you're getting from the news or constantly thinking, ah, there's got to be the second end to the story. It can't just be that. And thinking that being cynical is how you get politics and how what's happening, I think that acts as a really giant filter.
So speaking of RFK, he's been polling fairly well. He looks to be drawing a little bit more maybe from Biden, at least measured by who supported Biden in 2020 than he is from Donald Trump.
But in general, I think there's always this view that these sort of less attached voters are going to break for the third-party candidate and third-party candidates in general underperform. So what's the relationship there? How does the kind of third-party player usually play out among this portion of the electorate? I think the third-party vote is always...
really, really challenging. Research on third party candidates often points to kind of different patterns, different findings. It's hard to predict how this is going to shake out in this particular case. The one thing I would suggest here is to return to this idea of actually turning out to vote.
It is one thing to tell a pollster, I'm going to vote for RFK. It is one thing to actually think it would be something you want to do or to tell other people or to think, you know, I might do this, I might vote for RFK. It's a whole other thing to, on the day of the election, take the time to turn out, to come out and vote. So...
In some sense, we would need a person who is committed to showing up, who is committed to turning out and committed to voting for RFK. That might happen. That might heavily correlate with somebody who is less engaged and less involved in politics. But again, simply supporting the third party does not ease the cost and burden of actually showing up to vote.
One of the theories I have heard from Biden campaign folks, from Democrats for the last year or so, is that, yeah, this is a continuum, right? As you say, people might be less involved, but they're going to become more involved, right? The continuum is not static. People change on it even within the course of a single year and practically within the course of an election year. And that as we get closer to a real election and Donald Trump is a real possibility again,
a lot of these voters are going to come home. They're going to snap back to reality. They're going to remember what Donald Trump was like, and they're going to realize that they don't want to go through that again. Now, I think that's become, you know, an idea people are wavering on because I think they thought it would begin happening by now, and we're not seeing evidence of it in polling. But I'm curious how you think about it, this hope that many Democrats have that the election will focus the minds of a lot of people
And that, you know, if you're it's low cost to tell a pollster, you know, at least four or five months ago, yeah, whatever, Donald Trump, I don't like Joe Biden. But when it comes down to it, these people are going to change and these folks are going to going to come home to Democrats.
I think there are a couple of things at hand here. So one is, well, are people going to vote? So that's kind of one decision. You might, in some sense, come home and sort of decide that, yes, we remember what this was like. We're going to support Joe Biden. But not so much that somebody will change their day around to actually turn out and vote.
But I want to return to this idea that you just raised about the possibility that people will become more engaged over the course of a year, that people's engagement and involvement ebbs and flows.
And that, I think, is a really interesting and challenging proposal. So there is some evidence to suggest that people do become more interested over the course of the campaign. They report talking more about politics, as kind of makes sense because there's this big campaign going on. They do report more interest. But there's this great book by Marcus Pryor called Hook. It's about political interest. And Marcus basically argues that
that, well, your level of interest and engagement in politics, it is socialized early on in life.
And it actually pretty much stays steady over the course of a lifetime. Now, we don't have the immense amounts of lifetime data that Marcus had. But in our research, when we've run our involvement measures over the course of, you know, let's say multiple waves of a survey, we do see them holding quite steady. So are people going to become more engaged? Are they going to talk about it?
Maybe. That's quite likely. Is it reflecting true engagement, true kind of connection, true interest in politics? Maybe, maybe not. Then there's another theory, which is this is actually a problem not for Joe Biden, but for Donald Trump, because these less involved voters, they're not going to vote. They're hard to get out to vote. This is a very weak group in which to have strength. How do you take that?
I think that's a fair kind of assessment here. It is something that survey researchers have talked about for quite a long time, which is this idea that it is relatively costless to say that you're going to turn out. It is something else to actually turn out and vote.
I think forces would suggest kind of research looking at why people turn out would suggest that you cannot necessarily count on those folks to show up. But that, of course, depends on exactly what we were talking about before. Is there going to be this genuine increase in their determination to cast the ballot for this candidate that they report supporting? So then if you're Joe Biden, what should you do? I think a couple of things.
I think one thing is to potentially take people who are less engaged at their word of what is it that they are interested in or what is it that their issues are. I think there could be two things at hand here. So one is convincing people of what they should care about.
And I absolutely get that. I absolutely understand the idea that it's important to convince people that there is a threat to democracy, right? That it's important to convince people that they should care about these really big things that are happening out there.
But I think convincing people of what they should care about is in some sense more challenging than convincing people that you are prepared to help them on things that they already do care about.
There also needs to be some level of acknowledging what is it that people do place at the forefront and what you're actually going to do about those things as well. And I think that is the challenge. And always our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience? So my three books, I think, are going to have a theme, which is about talking to other people.
The first book I would recommend is a book called What Goes Without Saying by Taylor Carlson and Jamie Settle, which is about how people talk to each other or actually don't talk to each other about politics, which is a really kind of fascinating book, especially for people who really like talking about politics, about what everyone else feels like.
The second book is a forthcoming book, again, by Taylor Carlson, who is a professor at Washington University in St. Louis. It's a book called Through the Grapevine, which is a book about what happens when we count on other people to tell us about political news, how people get it wrong, and what ends up happening if that's who we are dependent on.
I'm going to deviate from the academic track here. So my apologies. Or maybe it's like, maybe that's what people want. And it is a book called Sorry, I'm Late. I Didn't Want to Come by Jessica Pan, which is about dealing with other people as an introvert and
It is an incredibly funny book, but it also gets at this idea of looking at the world from the eyes of somebody who is completely different than you, which kind of speaks to all three books. Jana Kropnikov, thank you very much. Thank you for having me.
This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing by Amin Sahota and Afim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu, Elias Iskwith, and Kristen Lin. We have original music by Isaac Jones, audience strategy by Christina Samieluski, and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser, and special thanks to Sonia Herrero.
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