What do Americans hear when they watch Sen. Bernie Sanders or Vice President JD Vance rail against the elite? Are they thinking of right-wing tech billionaires? Imperious college professors? Liberal magazine writers?
Instead of joining the myriad political commentators in continuing to speculate wildly, we decided to ask the American people. In a poll of 3,000 registered voters fielded nationally from July 20 to 26, voters rejected the MAGA theory of the elite: They “don’t think college professors, journalists, and academics are actually among the elite.” Instead, it’s billionaires, celebrities, and business executives who most commonly earned the designation.
Strong majorities of our respondents also endorsed free trade and gender egalitarianism, defying what they took to be opposing elite views on the matters.
In other words, the narrative that we are a country divided between the hardscrabble, anti-woke masses and the effete, culturally progressive elite is, at best, only a partial description of reality.
Our findings spurred lots of discussion, from the pages of The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post to the r/Professors subreddit. (“The salary certainly isn’t elite,” lamented one user.)
But, as with all polls, the top lines are just the beginning. As I dove into the back end of the polling data, I encountered findings that complicate three hot-button questions: Does our media diet determine our reality? Are people worried about declining birth rates or overpopulation? And is America actually gripped by an epidemic of loneliness?