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Heading into the 2024 election, Americans are of two minds. There’s the choice between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, of course. But it goes deeper than that: Americans no longer share the same set of facts.
A recent poll [ [link removed] ] by YouGov gave the numbers. Following the last presidential debate, the public opinion research firm surveyed adults on a wide variety of issues, from the serious (national defense) to the silly (Taylor Swift). One Trump quote from the debate that kicked up a furor was his striking claim about the thousands of Haitian migrants relocated to Ohio: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
In the weeks leading up to the debate, social media reports of the alleged crime went viral despite repeated denials by local officials. Yet when YouGov asked Americans if they believed the claim, half of Trump’s supporters (52%) did, while only 4% of Harris’ supporters thought it was true.
Trump also claimed that Harris’ vice presidential nominee Tim Walz supports “execution after birth—it’s execution, no longer abortion because the baby is born. And that’s not OK with me.” On this claim, 43% of Trump supporters agreed with the characterization, while just 8% of Harris supporters did.
Aaron Blake of The Washington Post was outraged [ [link removed] ]. “From Day One of his presidency to this day, Donald Trump has promoted an alternate reality that has caught on with a shocking proportion of his base…. [W]e have apparently tens of millions of Americans embracing a truly bizarre version of reality based on little more than one man’s say-so.”
The YouGov results mirrored results of previous surveys. Voters make their choices from a very different set of assumptions. One poll showed that most Americans can’t even tell a truth from a viewpoint. Researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign gave [ [link removed] ] 12 statements to American adults and asked if they were facts or opinions. On average, respondents correctly identified about seven of the 12—one correct answer more than the law of averages would dictate.
Many of the mistakes tracked with the person’s partisan bias. For example, just 54% of respondents correctly identified “Immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally have some rights under the Constitution” as a statement of fact. The study states that “biased partisans tend to see their side as possessing the facts and the other side as possessing opinions.”
Jeffery Mondak, a co-author of the study, asked, “How can you have productive discourse about issues if you’re not only disagreeing on a basic set of facts, but you’re also disagreeing on the more fundamental nature of what a fact itself is?”
Alternative Realities
Since the legacy media despises Trump, they naturally blame him for this inability to tell fact from opinion. But there’s long been a stark difference between the left and right when it comes to what is or isn’t a “fact.” Blake doesn’t realize that millions of Americans believe legacy media has promoted “a truly bizarre version of reality” on all sorts of issues.
Following George W. Bush’s re-election two decades ago, Democrats pursued a variety of conspiracy theories about how he was able to pull off a return to the White House. When partisans claimed that Florida voters had their votes flipped [ [link removed] ] and that Diebold machines leaned [ [link removed] ] Republican, the media was short on outrage.
The left’s commitment to its belief in this alternative “reality” only intensified following Trump’s win in 2016, with Democratic leaders alleging the election was stolen—including his opponent. “There was a widespread understanding that this election [in 2016] was not on the level,” Hillary Clinton said [ [link removed] ] in 2020. “We still don’t know what really happened. There’s just a lot that I think will be revealed. History will discover.”
Conspiracy theories are more damaging coming from a major party candidate than some rando raving on a street corner, but again the outrage was minimal. Clinton’s repeated allegations about Russian interference in the 2016 election hamstringed Trump’s term, and journalists won Pulitzers promoting her madcap theory. Left-leaning media breathlessly [ [link removed] ] covered [ [link removed] ] nonsense such as Trump partying with Russian prostitutes in a Moscow hotel, while simultaneously mocking the gullibility of the right.
When special counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence linking the Trump campaign to Russia, journalists shrugged their shoulders and stoked fears that Trump was stealing mailboxes [ [link removed] ] to hurt Joe Biden.
It Comes Down to Trust
Our current political moment is fertile ground for conspiracy theories on all sides. And the most blame lies with America’s major institutions. Voters simply don’t believe them.
In Gallup’s latest poll [ [link removed] ] measuring trust in 16 major institutions, only three got a majority of Americans’ support: small business (68%), the military (61%) and the police (51%). Fewer than one-third of Americans trust the White House or the Supreme Court, while just 1 in 10 trust Congress. The media fares nearly as bad: Only 18% have confidence in newspapers and 12% in cable news.
Who can blame voters for the widespread distrust? Americans believe they were lied to about the housing bubble collapse, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the COVID-19 pandemic, and a long list of smaller stories. When they listen to a politician’s speech or read a reporter’s scoop, it’s no wonder the first reaction is a sarcastic “yeah, right.”
Conspiracy theories are the obvious result of a low-trust society. When people believe that leaders, journalists and darn near everyone else is lying to them, they’re going to invent their own facts, sometimes downright outlandish ones.
The wildest theories have a psychological component as well—unhealthy connections with a certain political leader, a desire for pattern recognition even where no pattern exists, and the self-flattery of having secret knowledge that no one else has.
But the primary motivator is a sense of fear paired with a lack of control. It’s somehow more comforting to think some evil genius is moving the levers than to accept random events as simply random. Add in the self-selection bias of social media, and each tinfoil hat can easily connect with fellow tinfoil hats, creating a shiny metal echo chamber.
Tell the Truth
The way out of this hall of mirrors is pretty straightforward. Those in the media and the corridors of power should simply tell the truth. Not “a truth,” not “my truth,” but the truth, to the best of their abilities. And when partisan opinions color the narrative, include ideological opponents in the discussion.
America’s ideological divide isn’t as intractable as many fear. When it comes to core values such as fairness, compassion or personal responsibility, about 9 in 10 Democrats and Republicans alike [ [link removed] ] agree they are very or extremely important. The current challenge is that only about a third of either party believes the same is true for the other party.
One poll [ [link removed] ], conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, demonstrated this “affective polarization”—in other words, disagreements based on animosity or a lack of trust instead of differences in debate. Emotions are superseding logic, as they often do. But that’s no way to run a government or a news organization.
The Washington Post has declared “Democracy dies in darkness.” If true, the media should remove their own blinders before scoffing at the proles’ naivety.
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