Your friends are not a representative sample of public opinion

It’s not just Republicans who are at risk of epistemic closure.

Pauline Kael was slandered.

OK, maybe not by the literal legal definition of the term. But a famous quote from the former New Yorker film critic, a woman full of interesting opinions, is widely misrepresented. It’s often claimed that Kael said something like this — “How could Nixon have won? Nobody I know voted for him” — referring to the landslide 1972 election in which Richard Nixon defeated George McGovern 520-17 in the Electoral College, winning all jurisdictions but Massachusetts and Washington, D.C. The purported quote is often used as a go-to example of the false consensus effect, in which people mistakenly assume that their own views or that of their social circle are representative of broader public opinion. 

The false consensus effect is real — that’s the subject of today’s newsletter — but the quote is fake. Instead, Kael said this:

“I live in a rather special world,” Miss Kael said, continuing: “I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them.”

This is a perfectly reasonable and self-aware utterance. Kael recognized that her friends in Manhattan — where McGovern took two-thirds of the vote, and undoubtedly won by wider margins still in the literary circles she inhabited — were not representative of the broader population.

A lot of people who follow politics today could stand to have more of Kael’s humility. I think there’s honor in being willing to defend an unpopular position. And I don’t think public intellectuals ought to behave like political strategists. But if they’re going to make claims about public opinion, they ought to at least be able to locate their views somewhere on the Cartesian plane of the broader American electorate. And you do that by looking at polls, election results, and other data, and maybe by doing some first-hand reporting in communities that are unlike the one you inhabit — and not by relying on the opinions of your friends.

I thought of Kael’s apocryphal line the other day when I came across a quote from Masha Gessen, another New Yorker writer who clearly is also a person full of interesting opinions:

“'Biden is willing to sacrifice reelection for Israel. That's shocking, heartbreaking and dangerous.”

This quote is real — it comes from an interview that Gessen conducted for a podcast with Haaretz, a well-regarded liberal Israeli newspaper. The podcast is worth a listen. Gessen strikes me as a thoughtful and honest broker, and brings up some points — why are students protesting university endowments and not higher-stakes questions like US aid to Israel? — that I haven’t often seen raised elsewhere.

But Gessen’s political diagnosis on what ails Biden is mistaken — and is probably a reflection of Gessen’s lefty social bubble. In the interview¹, Gessen said the following (emphasis mine):

You know, that question about friends is actually excellent, because I'm observing such a huge gap between different social groups [...] Most of my friends are in the media. A lot of my journalist friends are just much better informed. A lot of them have had experience reporting on Israel-Palestine, and are quite critical of both Israel and the anti-Semitism narrative.

Then like my wife was a lawyer and her circle is a little bit different, right? It's not dominated by media people. Like people in law or in other professions seem to be broadly much more kind of taken by the sense of, of profound insecurity and shift in the American Jewish experience. I think we sort of see different things. For example, when we watch the hearings in Congress on anti-semitism on campus [...] what I see is a right-wing campaign against higher education that is weaponized [...] not anti-semitism as a practice. And what they see is [...] people who represent institutions or lead institutions that they feel an affinity with, often institutions that they graduated from, who are not standing up for them. Which, I find that viewing of those hearings somewhat shocking, because people seem to be turning off their critical faculties. But people, intelligent, educated, politically astute people don't turn off their critical faculties unless they're scared.

A couple of problems here. First, Gessen says that most of their² friends are in the media. This is some of the most important advice I’d give to aspiring journalists: I think people in the media should do what they can to ensure that they plenty of friends who don’t work in the industry.³ That’s especially the case as the media increasingly selects for graduates of elite colleges — 25 percent of New York Times reporters attended the Ivy League (!) — and as educational attainment is highly correlated with political views, particularly on social issues.

And although Gessen does demonstrate some self-awareness here — at least recognizing that their wife’s social circle consists of people who hold different views on Israel — it’s more than a little presumptuous to then claim that people on Gessen’s (pro-Palestine) side of the argument are “just much better informed”, whereas the other side is ruled by fear and emotion. In the Congressional hearings with the college presidents that Gessen refers to, for instance, there are plenty of things a reasonable and well-informed person could object to — like the presidents’ lack of principled defense of free speech, or the inherent inconsistencies of “wokeness” as it applies to Jews, or their overly lawyered, mealy-mouthed responses.

Instead, Gessen makes an appeal to authority — claiming that all of the “better informed” people agree with their stance on Gaza. But it’s not as though the Middle East is some issue where an expert consensus can be divined through painstaking application of the scientific method. (Setting aside for a moment that the scientific consensus is also socially constructed,) People have been arguing about this particular parcel of land for centuries. Has it never occurred to Gessen that the reason their friends agree with them on Gaza is precisely because Gessen seeks out friends who hold similar political views (or they seek out Gessen)? Or if not that, because political views are strongly correlated with a person’s position in the lattice of occupational, demographic and socioeconomic categories? And that those views become further entrenched as those social ties deepen? Birds of a feather flock together.

The phrase “epistemic closure” was in vogue a decade or so ago to describe this sort of phenomenon, usually associated with the right and the world of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. It persists among many Trump voters, who dismiss the mainstream media out of hand. But epistemic closure has now also become commonplace on the left and even in the White House — albeit usually with more elaborate rationalizations like the selective appeals to authority that Gessen makes.

Endorsing the student protests would cost Biden against Trump

This bubble mentality has real consequences. Gessen is both a journalist and an activist: as an activist, failing to have an accurate map of public opinion means you may land on some techniques that are exceptionally unpersuasive. And as a journalist, it means you’re misinforming your readers. The notion that Biden is costing himself the election by not being sufficiently pro-Palestine or sufficiently sympathetic to the student protestors is almost certainly wrong. At least on this issue, Biden — who has been harsh toward the students — is rationally following his political incentives in his effort to defeat Trump.

Just so I can be sure I’m not pulling a Pauline Kael on Gessen, there is their quote in fuller context:

The other thing that breaks my heart is that they’re right in the sense that the administration [...] Washington is responding with criticism of the protests, with supporting effectively the university’s calling on the police, even though that is actually going to cost Biden reelection. If he doesn't have the youth vote, he has no hope of beating Trump [in] the next election. [...] That Biden and his administration are willing to sacrifice the election, effectively, to ongoing engagement with Israel, is shocking, heartbreaking and very dangerous for this country.

I don’t doubt that Biden’s chances for re-election would be higher if there weren’t a war ongoing in Gaza. This is an issue that profoundly divides the left-liberal coalition that was instrumental in electing Biden and in Barack Obama before him. I also don’t doubt there are some people who will vote against Biden — or decide not to vote — because they think he’s insufficiently sympathetic to Palestine. In fact, we can come up with an estimate of just how many people this is based on the latest New York Times / Siena College battleground state polls:

One exception is Israel’s war in Gaza, an issue on which most of Mr. Biden’s challenge appears to come from his left. Around 13 percent of the voters who say they voted for Mr. Biden last time, but do not plan to do so again, said that his foreign policy or the war in Gaza was the most important issue to their vote. Just 17 percent of those voters reported sympathizing with Israel over the Palestinians.

Let’s do some math here. About 51 percent of the country voted for Biden in 2020. Of that 51 percent, 14 percent say they don’t plan to vote for Biden this time in the head-to-head matchup against Trump. Of those, 13 percent list Gaza or something related as their top issue. And of that 13 percent, 49 percent⁴ are more sympathetic to Palestine than to Israel (and only 17 percent are more sympathetic to Israel; the rest are in the both/neither camp). So we get:

.51 * .14 * .13 * .49 = .005

That is, 0.5 percent of the American electorate are 2020 Biden voters who say they’ll withdraw their vote from Biden because he’s too far to their right on Israel. (Or alternatively, 0.8 percent if you instead use the version of the poll that asks about third parties, which increases the number of Biden defectors.)

Losing 0.5 to 0.8 percent of the electorate is not trivial given how close the 2016 and 2020 elections were in the battleground states. But it’s still a small number of people in an absolute sense. If even a half-dozen of your social contacts think this way — meaning about 4 percent of a typical person’s social network — then you’re nevertheless in an extremely unrepresentative social bubble.

Even more importantly, Gessen neglects the question of how many more defections Biden would earn if he endorsed the protests, or otherwise took a more staunchly pro-Palestine position. Currently, the number of people who are abandoning Biden because he’s too far to the left on Gaza is small (0.2 to 0.3 percent of the electorate in the NYT poll, per the math above). However, there’s reason to think this would grow larger if Biden endorsed the protests.

It’s true that the notion of a ceasefire is possible. But this is a bit like asking people whether they prefer war or peace; the support erodes once you start to dictate terms. A recent YouGov poll is instructive on this issue, for instance:

By an overwhelming 64-13 majority, Americans support a ceasefire in Gaza. But by a 44-28 plurality, Americans oppose a ceasefire if Hamas “does not release its remaining hostages to Israel”, according to the same poll.

Furthermore, the protestors are not just demanding an unconditional ceasefire. Instead, many of the groups organizing the protests dispute Israel’s right to exist and even endorse violent means like October 7 to overthrow it. The latter position is a fringe view held by only 5 percent of Americans and only 9 percent of young Americans:

Now, it’s probably true that many of the students participating in the protests don’t endorse every goal of Students for Justice in Palestine or take every slogan they chant at face value. But there’s little in the way of reliable data on how many students are participating in the protests in the first place. And a visual metaphor from this weekend suggests perhaps not that many. On Sunday, Duke University held its commencement, and the commencement speaker was the comedian Jerry Seinfeld, who is Jewish and has expressed support for Israel. Some students planned a walkout, which made national headlines. Here is a view of the walkout from the cheap seats:

There’s various confused cheering and booing as the students walk out, then a “Jer-ry, Jer-ry” chant breaks out. But all of it is frankly not nearly as disruptive as the headlines claim. Why not? Because it’s a tiny number of students. According to local station WRAL,“about 3 dozen” students walked out among “more than 7000” graduating students. There is that 0.5 percent number again, even on an elite college campus.

In fact, most young people treat the war in Gaza as a low priority — second from the bottom on a list of 16 issues in a recent poll of Americans aged 18-29. Again, I don’t doubt that it will punch above its weight as a voting issue. But out of almost any issue I can think of, Israel-Palestine receives a disproportionate amount of attention among elites like Gessen — and elites like me — as compared to the broader population.

And although young Americans are much more sympathetic toward Palestine than older ones, they are also more equivocal than Gessen assumes. In a March Gallup poll, Americans aged 18-34 were more sympathetic toward Palestine than Israel, but only by a 45-37 margin:

And in the same poll, young Americans were still slightly more sympathetic to Israel than the Palestinian Authority. 

This is something of an odd duck of a question, since the Palestinian Authority does not rule Gaza — it lost control to Hamas in the 2006 legislative elections. Still, it shows that younger Americans — and older ones — are able to make a distinction between the Palestinian people and the Palestinian government. 

The other problem is that Americans over the age of 34 remain considerably more sympathetic toward Israel than Palestine. And there’s no particular reason for Biden to give disproportionate concern to the concerns of younger voters. To a first approximation, a vote Biden loses to a 22-year-old is counterbalanced by a vote he gains among a 66-year-old. To a second approximation, you’d rather have the older person’s vote because older voters are much more likely to turn out — the notion of a youth turnout surge in 2022 is a myth, for instance.

Furthermore, Biden overall is losing more support among moderates than the left:

These change voters are not necessarily demanding a more ideologically progressive agenda. In the last Times/Siena poll of the same states, 11 percent of registered voters thought that Mr. Biden was not progressive or liberal enough. And while many liberal or progressive voters want major changes, relatively few of those voters are defecting from Mr. Biden.

Instead, Mr. Biden’s losses are concentrated among moderate and conservative Democratic-leaning voters, who nonetheless think that the system needs major changes or to be torn down altogether. Mr. Trump wins just 2 percent of Mr. Biden’s “very liberal” 2020 voters who think the system at least needs major changes, compared with 16 percent of those who are moderate or conservative.

I don’t think this is his only problem — there’s also age and inflation — but one way to read Biden’s current struggles is as a backlash to the excesses of the left. If you really do trust the science on how public opinion works, the idea of thermostatic shifts is a robust concept in the literature — meaning, that when the left gains power, voters want to turn the knob to the right, and vice versa. Another robust concept, based on all of the empirical work I’ve done on it⁵, is the median voter theorem — the idea that, other things being equal, steering toward the center of the electorate is a winning strategy.

And although sometimes left, center and right are abstract concepts, the student protestors clearly “vibe” as left. Privileged students — although the protests have now spread to a wide range of colleges and universities and not just the Ivy League — wearing keffiyehs and K-95 masks and waving Palestinian flags are just not going to come across sympathetically to most Americans. All of that helps to explain why Biden has denounced the protests, despite pressure from his own staff on Gaza, and despite raising the salience of what is a bad issue for Democrats.

Now, can people on Israel’s side of the issue make the same mistakes as Gessen? Absolutely. Here, for instance, is a tweet from the hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who was instrumental in the ouster of the presidents of Penn and Harvard after the Congressional hearings:

In fact, along with the Twitter personality “Alice in Queens”, I’m willing to make a bet with Ackman on this basis. I think it’s much more likely than not that a majority of the Jewish vote will go for Biden. The possible exception is if Biden does move substantially to the left on Gaza — but even then, Jews have a wide range of opinions on the conflict, and they may or may not treat it as a high priority. As a baseline, Jewish voters remained highly supportive of Biden after the October 7 attacks. Believe me, I have heard similar sentiments to Ackman’s expressed by some of my Jewish (and gentile) friends. I think Biden will probably experience some decline in his numbers. But I know my friends are not representative of the broader electorate, and I’m not sure that Ackman or Gessen do.

The fact is that American social life is increasingly atomized — and increasingly self-sorted along political lines. Unfortunately, this coincides with a time where there is greater distrust in polls — sometimes deservedly and sometimes not. But I’d still rather trust the polls than a survey of my group chats or Twitter followers. Particularly on issues like Israel-Palestine that elites are far more engaged on than the masses. For better or worse — very much for better in my view — we’re still living in a democracy where it’s one person, one vote. Perhaps the biggest bias of all among media types is conflating elite discourse with how a broader range of Americans feel about the issues.

1. I transcribed the podcast using an AI transcription service, and then re-listened to the passages where I’m quoting directly from Gessen. If there are errors in the transcription, they are on me, not Haaretz.

2. Gessen uses them/they pronouns.

3. Am I a hypocrite here? No. I have my share of friends who work in media, but I’m lucky enough to also have good friends with other perspectives. In particular, poker and sports are important sources of friendships for me. But my partner is an artist, so we also have friends from the art scene. And from the gay scene. Of course, although I might have a relatively diverse group of friends along occupational categories and to some extent political views, there are undoubtedly many other biases in my friend group — like that most of them are financially successful.

4. Per DM exchange with Nate Cohn.

5. For instance, in a sample of thousands of Congressional races, incumbents who break ranks from their party more often are re-elected more often, other factors held equal.