16 thoughts on our free-speech poll

Hot takes on crosstabs

This morning, The Argument released its first issue poll testing American attitudes toward speech. There’s a lot to sift through in the crosstabs (which are available for our paid subscribers here), so we wanted to offer a few of our thoughts on what our staff found most interesting:

The Argument reacts:

1. There’s a long, racially fraught history of grumpy sports fans and Republican pundits complaining about players expressing political views, as when Laura Ingraham infamously told LeBron James to “shut up and dribble.” It turns out they’re in the deep minority: More than 77% all voters — and 71% of Trump voters — think professional athletes should be allowed by their employers to make political endorsements. - Jordan

2. Most Americans seem a bit Pollyannaish about the state of free speech in America: Nearly 64% of all respondents — and 48% of Harris voters — said that, “Yes, people in the United States are free to criticize their government without fear of government retaliation.” Meanwhile, John Bolton just had his house raided by the FBI. (It’s possible that survey takers read the question as asking whether most people are still free to criticize the government without getting a knock on their door, which remains true enough.) - Jordan

3. Like Jordan, I’m largely concerned with how free people feel. Regional variation stuck out a bit to me in our poll. In the Northeast, just 58% of folks said people in the U.S. were free to criticize their government without fear of governmental retaliation but 71% of folks in the Midwest felt the same. Some of this is explained by partisanship, I’m sure, but the numbers for the South (61%) and the West (65%) indicate regionalism may be playing a role as well - Jerusalem

4. I looked through our poll for areas of divergence between college- and noncollege-educated respondents. There’s a 10-point gap on the question of whether people avoid expressing political views out of concern for negative reactions from their employer. Just 25% of noncollege-educated people said yes to that question while 35% of college-educated people said the same. - Jerusalem

5. Have we found America’s Groypers? About 4% of all voters said they would support a white supremacist speaking on campus but not Benjamin Netanyahu. Maybe some of those folks have a principled opposition to platforming war criminals or foreign nationals. But we suspect something else might be at play ... - Jordan

6. The polling had some notable racial gaps. The most surprising one to me was the racial gap in whether having opposing political views was ever an acceptable reason to cut off contact with a friend: Nearly 45% of Hispanic voters said yes, while only 26% of white voters and 33% of Black voters agreed. Other racial splits include: Nearly 76% of Black respondents agreed a public school teacher should be allowed to publicly express support for presidential candidates, while just 58% of white respondents thought the same, and 66% of Black respondents were in favor of federal judges getting that privilege, while only 41% of white respondents were. - Jerusalem

7. Similar shares of Trump (70%) and Harris (77%) 2024 voters agree that “white supremacists” should not be allowed to speak on college campuses. My hunch is that the two sides might disagree on who fits that description, though. - Jordan

8. The poll showed pretty big class differences in support for a trans rights activist getting to speak on a college campus. Just over 74% of those making over $100,000 a year said yes, while just 60% of those making under $50,000 a year said the same. Interestingly, a similar pattern appears when respondents were asked about a white supremacist on campus: Nearly 35% of those making over $100,000 a year said yes, while just 23% of those making under $50,000 a year said sure. - Jerusalem

9. I find it genuinely surprising that just under half of both Trump and Harris voters believe that federal judges should be allowed to endorse a presidential candidate. I guess people are OK dispensing with the pretense of impartiality? - Jordan

10. Only 17% of Americans think that anyone from Netanyahu to Putin to white supremacists should be allowed to speak on a college campus. That would be my answer — I think university students can, actually, handle hearing from some terrible people. It’s not like “deplatforming” Putin or Netanyahu reduces their ability to drop bombs. And the strongest argument against white supremacy I’ve ever encountered is hearing white supremacists speak. But mine is a pretty sturdy minority view. Maybe that’s because some of the respondents are justifiably getting hung up on the logistics of how in the world a foreign leader wanted for war crimes is giving a talk on campus in the first place, so I also took a look at the share who think that someone who argues for the abolition of Israel, someone who argues for transgender rights, an opponent of same-sex marriage, and a a white supremacist should all be allowed to give a speech on campus. It’s only 21%. - Kelsey

11. In June 2024, Vanderbilt polled American adults (important: we polled registered voters, not all adults) on many of the same questions. Some notable differences include 37% of Vanderbilt poll respondents saying they were OK with a white supremacist speaking on campus whereas in our poll we got just 26%. In one area, we found pretty comparable results: Vanderbilt found that 63% of people believed a “preacher who believes that homosexuality is a sin” should be allowed to speak on campus, and we found that 60% of people thought it was OK for someone who opposed same-sex marriage to give a speech on campus. - Jerusalem

12. Just over 53% of respondents think Netanyahu should be allowed to speak on campus, but only 41% think a Palestinian activist who calls for the abolition of Israel should. That’s a lot lower than I expected. With the youngest respondents, that’s flipped — 40% for Netanyahu, 50% for an activist who wants the abolition of Israel — but still lower than I would have guessed. And it’s not that most people are picking one or the other — 34% of the sample would like both banned from campus. - Kelsey

13. I took a look at the portion of the sample that was in favor of allowing a Palestinian activist who called for abolishing Israel to speak on campus, but was not in favor of Netanyahu speaking. That group, which was 12.4% of our sample, split 75%-15% for Harris in 2024. - Lakshya

14. I found the media consumption habits fairly interesting. The viewing population on TikTok is somewhat Democratic (though maybe not as much as some people might expect). Instagram? Extremely liberal. Facebook? Quite Republican. Newspapers and news websites? Very blue. YouTube and podcasts? Kind of right-leaning. None of this will come as a massive surprise to anyone who’s followed the discourse about where people get their news diet from, but it’s further confirmation of the fact that nobody really has a cohesive news environment any longer and that different places vary wildly in audience, unlike the 1980s and 1990s. I suspect this is also part of why polarization has accelerated, and why landslides are less common than before — you can simply choose what to hear, and consequently, what you believe. - Lakshya

15. Roughly three-quarters of our sample said they read a book in the last year. That’s actually in line with Pew Research Center’s estimate from 2021. I actually suspect respondents are somewhat overinflating their reading numbers in both surveys, but I confess I have no way of proving that beyond pointing out how suspiciously uniform it seems across demographics. I do worry about what it means for whether panels and polls are reaching people who don’t read, though, especially because that’s a nontrivial chunk of the population, and online surveys, by definition, require a decent bit of reading. - Lakshya

16. I think liberals have got to understand that we, as a constituency, are very much unlike the rest of America. It’s not just that we’re different from Trump voters — it’s that we’re very different from people who don’t vote as well. The findings about who was more likely to cut off friends and family over politics really underscored this for me, because Harris voters were the only group that was even close to evenly split on that. That’s not a statement that we’re wrong, but it is a statement that the rest of Americans view and interact with the world very differently than we do. Knowing this, I wonder if some of us should start thinking about the implications, because it also underscores the “shrinking tent” critique we’ve heard about Democrats lately. - Lakshya