Public Opinion Is Meaningless Against Trump — Public Action Is What Matters

Anat Shenker-Osorio is a political strategist and communications researcher for progressive campaigns.

Since Donald Trump and Republicans seized control of the federal government, we’ve seen a flood of illegal executive orders plus a takeover of the Treasury Department and other government agencies by a billionaire who paid his way into shadow presidency. Democrats, in response, have issued sternly worded social media posts, threats to deny a budget deal five weeks away, and promises of future legislation to render illegal the current crime of breaking and entering. 

To be sure, #NotAllDemocrats applies. Lawmakers like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Jasmine Crockett, Maxwell Frost, and Jamie Raskin have made potent denunciations and cast votes to indicate they would like to stop the authoritarian takeover of our government. Senator Chris Van Hollen and Representative Don Beyer led a delegation to the U.S. Agency for International Development and filed an injunction to block Elon Musk’s efforts to destroy the agency. But they are the exception. 

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, whose publicized strategy is wait till Trump screws up, has helped him get his robber-baron Cabinet picks seated while tut-tutting about tariffs. Senator Amy Klobuchar told The New York Times, “well, first of all, it is very clear that, if there is a middle of all of this hot mess of division, Americans want us to work together when we can and find common ground. We have said repeatedly — our leaders, individual senators — that we are ready to do that. So that’s No. 1.” According to NBC News, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told his colleagues to “tune out the noise” of most of Trump’s actions and “zero in on pocketbook issues.” How that manifests when Musk is presently looting the Treasury Department, while most Democrats make empty speeches or look on, remains to be seen. 

Why have most Democrats refused to pull out all the stops to block Trump’s cabinet of kleptocrats and halt the administrative coup afoot? In part because polling has become the party’s stand in for position-taking. Too many Democratic leaders determine what to say based on what polls purport to tell them voters think. Nevermind those polls — in bringing issues top of mind in order to ask about them — couldn’t possibly detect what’s most salient, nor do they tell us how people make arguably the most critical electoral decision: whether or not to vote in the first place. 

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If you follow the news even tangentially, you’ll have some sense that the majority of Americans oppose many of Trump’s executive orders and actions. You will also know that Americans’ number one issue ever and always is what’s in their wallets. And, obviously, who can blame people for worrying about having food on their tables and a roof over their heads?

You know this because a big chunk of America’s news coverage consists of reporting on what people think of the news, rather than providing context and insight into what is actually happening. 

But the fact that large percentages of Americans approve or disapprove of something means absolutely nothing in terms of what comes next. Democrats may follow polls to figure out what to talk about, but virtually no politicians use them to govern. 

Political scientists have long measured what the public supports and what public policy gets enacted and found there’s very little correlation between them. Witness, for example, majoritarian support for abortion care, which did not save it nor the Democrats purportedly campaigning for it. Consider how 85 percent of Americans favor banning the assault weapons currently for sale across the U.S. If public opinion dictated public policy, you would have affordable health care.

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A Princeton University study examining aggregate polling-reported preferences across over 1,700 policy issues concluded, “When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

In other words, the billionaires who finance our representatives call the shots — more now than ever. Still, every couple of years ‘we the average Americans’ go through the fantasy that we get a say in the decisions that impact our lives by voting for representatives. Your vote, to use the common slogan, is your voice. It’s just that ‘cha-ching’ is drowning it out. 

The ubiquity of public opinion polling and reporting on it lends dangerous credence to the fiction that what the majority of Americans purport to want — as filtered through the inescapable biases of question wordings, sampling approaches, and weighting methods — has some meaningful impact on what happens in politics. And it doesn’t. This is directly responsible for our current inability to confront MAGA’s efforts to prey upon our country and feast upon the carcass.

Upholding the veneer that we live in a representative democracy lends legitimacy to the Trump regime, even as he came to power after attempting to overthrow the government, thanks to the judges and justices he put on the bench excusing and abetting his criminal conspiracy. Attempts to check MAGA’s ongoing crime spree are too often met with a shrug and a well, the voters decided refrain. This emerges over and again as the reason Democrats in leadership and elite media claim to be incapable of confronting the litany of illegal moves MAGA makes or even clearly naming them as such. 

Instead of becoming daunted or defeated by what polling claims about “where Americans are,” there’s a counterintuitive liberation to realizing that public opinion has not delivered policy change. 

Yes, a majority of people agreeing with your view means nothing. But a majority of people opposing your view is similarly meaningless — if you can get a small sliver to not merely agree but sustain robust action. Civil rights — the cause, the tactics, and the leaders — were unpopular in their day. Until, that is, average Americans saw with their own eyes the courage and righteousness of people boycotting, sitting in, and protesting in the face of horrific repression. The notion of a Muslim Ban in Trump’s first run at office held a slim majority of support until people rushed off to airports to offer free legal help and voice their objections. Watching Americans demonstrate their disapproval led to shifting public attitudes, and eventually the majority came to oppose this campaign promise. And while the swift Republican-engineered backlash has memory-holed it, the resurgence of Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd immediately increased support for the cause by double digits. Tragically, that support fell once the protesting abated. 

This is a familiar pattern that scholars of authoritarianism have noted worldwide: Public action moves public opinion. But far more importantly, public action yields better public policy. Campaigns of peaceful civil resistance that involve a threshold of 3.5 percent of the population of a country consistently topple autocratic regimes. 

Sometimes, the first move you make is wildly unpopular. But doing it doesn’t merely move you toward your goal, it alters the majority public opinion many Democrats are so feverishly chasing. Actions shift how people perceive what is occurring — what is at stake, who are the villains, victims, and heroes — and which issues are most salient to consider next time people vote. They can change the dynamic of a future election from one that is about, say, “the border” and “law and order,” to one that is about wresting our freedoms and our families, our lives and our livelihoods, from the grip of billionaires hell-bent on our destruction. We cannot poll, cajole Democrats, or even vote our way to democracy. We must take to the streets and demand it.