Issue polling can make you think that voters are oblivious. A recent poll by the Los Angeles Business Council finds that although 61 percent of respondents in the nation’s second-largest city think L.A. should substantially increase the number of new housing units, just 40 percent believe that doing so will make housing more affordable. Nearly half think that doing so will drive up the cost of housing and push residents out.

But here’s a more generous interpretation of that poll: Angelenos want the housing crisis to be solved. And when they hear a pollster offer them potential solutions to the problem, they express their agreement. They’re not policy experts; they’re transmitting their values and priorities. They want cheaper housing, they want more options for where to live, and they don’t want people to be forced from their current neighborhood. They just expect—quite reasonably—that working out the details is up to somebody else. That is, after all, the point of representative democracy.

Polls are incredibly useful in trying to demystify public opinion. They’re much better than heuristics such as “I ran into a guy at the grocery store” and “I saw a lot of lawn signs on my morning commute.” But issue polls are still merely tools that help uncover public opinion. They’re not public opinion itself.

Voters do have intuitions about what kinds of policies sound better to them. On housing policy, for instance, poll respondents are typically most excited about demand-side policies that have a clearly identifiable beneficiary. In this spirit, President Joe Biden’s new plan to lower housing costs calls upon Congress to expand rent vouchers and give first-generation homeowners up to $25,000 in down-payment assistance, among other measures.

Many people are cooler on supply-side policies that ease the construction of more housing, even though this is the only systematic answer to the housing crisis. Promises to streamline regulations sound amorphous and vague, and they directly benefit developers, who are routinely cast as villains. Sometimes, giving voters what they most want—in this case, an answer to an affordability crisis—can come only through seemingly unpopular means: building a lot of dense new housing.

[Jerusalem Demsas: Housing breaks people’s brains]

By pushing initiatives more directly tailored to poll results, policy makers can appear to be addressing a crisis. But a popular course of action may not be a solution to the core problem. In March, Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, vetoed an ambitious supply-side housing reform designed to produce more starter homes; the following month, she pledged $13 million in financial assistance for “up to 500” first-time homebuyers. How can helping a few hundred people buy a house seriously address a cost-of-living crisis that affects millions?

When pundits and political operatives take issue polling too literally, they may come to see the public’s views as hopelessly contradictory. You want fewer taxes and more social services? How could some of the same voters who said, in May 2020, that the government hadn’t gone far enough in shutting down businesses during the early pandemic also believe that all businesses that establish social-distancing protocols should be allowed to reopen?

[Jerusalem Demsas: Why did the U.S. Navy kill Arizona’s housing bill?]

A lot of polling is intentionally misleading, though. As ABC News’s G. Elliott Morris explains on his Substack, “The landscape of issue polling is particularly fraught with partisan advocacy organizations and biased surveys.” We should also be wary of polls that ask respondents to render instant judgment on oddly specific questions. What does it even mean to say that 54.6 percent of Americans think that the funding structure for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is unconstitutional? Or that 81 percent of Arizonans support conserving 30 percent of America’s land and waters by the year 2030?

How a pollster frames any question affects the response. More respondents might consider the 30 percent goal excessive if you told them that it would require setting aside more than 600,000 square miles of additional land—an area more than twice the size of Texas. Political context matters too. If you told people in Arizona, a polarized purple state, that the conservation goal is a Biden-administration priority, would 81 percent of voters still support it?

It’s reasonable to view a complicated policy proposal more or less favorably based on who is promoting it. If Biden doesn’t represent respondents’ values in policy areas that they understand well, they might rationally view an unfamiliar conservation proposal with more suspicion.

Political professionals tend to look down on the mental yardsticks that real people use when answering poll questions. In 2012, one Democratic pollster, frustrated with voters who embraced individual elements of Obamacare while rejecting the overall law, declared, “The first lesson you learn as a pollster is that people are stupid.” But policy makers miss something important when they decide that polls—about health care, housing, or anything else—reveal the shortcomings of the respondents rather than the complexity of the issues.

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New polling shows Joe Biden trailing Donald Trump in five out of six key swing states. Voters there say they want change—which presents a challenge for the candidate who won in 2020 on the promise of normalcy.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Biden’s weakness with young voters isn’t about Gaza. The Real ID deadline will never arrive. The Atlantic’s summer reading guide

The Battleground States

Michigan and Nevada are two very different places. As are Pennsylvania and Arizona, Wisconsin and Georgia. Still, these six states share a quality of enormous consequence: They wield massive electoral influence because their voters tend to waffle on their political preferences. In swing states, a suburb here, a county there—totaling perhaps a few hundred thousand votes—may be enough to decide who will become the next president.

Earlier this week, a new set of polls from The New York Times, Siena College, and The Philadelphia Inquirer found that, among registered voters, Donald Trump leads Joe Biden in five swing states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania), and Biden is ahead only in Wisconsin. In 2020, Biden carried all six of those battleground states, which helped him clinch the election. Though he doesn’t need every single one this time—wins in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, for example, could help get him to 270 electoral votes—the polling signals some glaring challenges for his campaign in the months to come.

Americans are divided on policy issues—especially when it comes to the economy and Israel’s war in Gaza. But abortion is an issue that will resonate across the country at every level of the ballot, my colleague David Graham told me. And it’s one area where Democrats clearly “have an edge.”

The polling also gestured at a sweeping sense of dissatisfaction among 70 percent of respondents, who said that they want major changes in America’s political and economic system, or for it to be torn down entirely. And they don’t seem to think that Biden—who promised in 2020 a presidency steeped in normalcy—can bring that. Voters are divided on whether Trump would bring good or bad changes, but an overwhelming majority of them believe that he would indeed shake up (or tear down) our country’s political and economic system.

“If the election is a referendum on Biden, he’s clearly in trouble,” David told me. Here’s a look at the swing states and some of the issues that matter most to their voters.

Arizona

Arizona has voted Republican in all but a few presidential elections in recent decades, and its MAGA presence—though diminished in the 2022 midterms—is strong. Biden won the state by just 10,000 votes in 2020, and Trump has used this slim margin of victory to push his disproven claim that the election was stolen. Recent polling shows that the state is leaning heavily toward Trump, and Republicans are banking on people voting red in response to the rising cost of living and immigration. But abortion will be another significant concern; some Arizonans were up in arms last month after the state’s supreme court reinstated a Civil War–era law that banned most abortions with no exceptions for rape or incest. The governor has since signed a repeal of the ban—but abortion access will likely remain top of mind for some voters.

Michigan

Biden won Michigan by a smaller margin than expected in 2020, and a new confluence of factors is making his prospects there shaky. Times/Siena polling found that Biden was trending slightly ahead of Trump among likely voters, but trailing behind among registered voters. Voters in the state are worried about inflation and the economy. And as my colleague Ronald Brownstein wrote earlier this month, Biden has been “whipsawed by defections among multiple groups Democrats rely on, including Arab Americans, auto workers, young people, and Black Americans” in Michigan. About 13 percent of voters (some 100,000 people) in the state’s February Democratic primary voted “uncommitted” in protest of Biden’s handling of Gaza, signaling that Gaza is on the minds of voters in the state, which has the largest percentage of Arab Americans in the country. Adding to the mix is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has managed to get on the state ballot and could inject uncertainty into the race and siphon votes from the major candidates.

Georgia

This bedrock of modern suburban conservatism delivered a victory for Biden in 2020, when he became the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the state since Bill Clinton in 1992. The triumph was a surprise in some ways. But it was also the culmination of a years-long crusade championed by Stacey Abrams, a former state representative, to turn the state blue. In 2020, Biden won over a coalition of voters in Georgia that included Black and Hispanic voters, suburban moderates, and young people—and he will need to try to retain their support even as their enthusiasm falters.

In a state with a restrictive six-week abortion ban, more than half of polled voters said that they thought abortion should be mostly or always legal, and issues including the economy and immigration were among their top concerns. Currently, Trump and his associates are also charged in Georgia with conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election, though it isn’t clear whether their trial will take place before the election is over.

Nevada

A Republican presidential candidate hasn’t won Nevada in 20 years, but voters in the state, which has a large Latino population, are favoring Trump in recent polling. Although Biden had managed to garner support in the Sun Belt in 2020, Nevada’s economy relies on tourism and hospitality, meaning that issues such as high inflation and unemployment are on voters’ minds. The Times/Siena polls found that a large share of registered voters in the state said they trusted Trump to “do a better job” on the economy than Biden. (Though the state is notoriously difficult to survey, in part because many people there are transient and work unusual hours.)

Wisconsin

Trump won this Rust Belt state in 2016—before losing ground in the traditionally conservative areas such as Green Bay and the Milwaukee suburbs that helped deliver a win to Biden in 2020. The economy is a key issue for Wisconsin voters. And abortion may be pivotal, too: Republican lawmakers approved a controversial bill in January that would ban the procedure after 14 weeks, with exceptions for rape and incest. As Ronald noted in The Atlantic, the election of a liberal state-supreme-court judge in last November’s closely watched race could signal that broader voter support for legalized abortion “has accelerated the recoil from the Trump-era GOP.” That could bode well for Biden, but it will be a tight race: He eked ahead there among polled registered voters in the Times/Siena surveys, though he trailed slightly behind Trump among likely voters.

Pennsylvania

In the 2020 election, Biden’s win in his home state pushed him over the 270 mark. Pennsylvania has 19 electoral votes, making it important to capture this time around. On his recent visits, Biden has tried to drill down on kitchen-table issues and burnish his blue-collar, all-American “Scranton Joe” image, my colleague John Hendrickson reported last month. To target working-class voters, Biden is focusing on taxes and attempting to draw a contrast with his opponent, whom he portrays as a friend to the rich. Registered voters in the state said that the economy was a top issue, along with abortion and immigration. It’s unclear whether they will coalesce around their hometown politician after going for Trump in 2016 and now showing RFK-curiosity in some areas. Among registered voters, Biden currently trails Trump by a small margin.

Related:

Biden’s Electoral College challenge How every U.S. election became existential (From 2022)

Today’s News

House Speaker Mike Johnson visited Donald Trump’s criminal trial in New York and lambasted Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, who was on his second day of testimony. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Kyiv on an unannounced visit to affirm U.S. support for Ukraine and promise more weapons shipments, as Russia ramps up its attacks on Ukraine’s northeastern border. A bus carrying farm workers crashed on a Florida highway, killing at least eight people and injuring dozens more, according to officials.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Russell Bull / Star Tribune / Getty.

The Sad Fate of the Sports Parent

By Rich Cohen

A true sports parent dies twice. There’s the death that awaits us all at the end of a long or short life, the result of illness, misadventure, fire, falling object, hydroplaning car, or derailing train. But there is also the death that comes in the midst of life, the purgatorial purposelessness that follows the final season on the sidelines or in the bleachers, when your sports kid hangs up their skates, cleats, or spikes after that last game.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The Vatican’s gamble with Beijing is costing China’s Catholics. Asteroids could fuel the clean-energy transition.

Culture Break

The Atlantic

Listen. The trailer for Good on Paper, a new Atlantic podcast (out on June 4) hosted by Jerusalem Demsas, who questions what we really know about the narratives driving public conversation.

Discover. American Bloods: The Untamed Dynasty That Shaped a Nation, by the philosophy professor John Kaag, traces the little-known Blood dynasty and what it reveals about the nation’s wild spirit.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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The Atlantic is continuing its expansion in audio and podcasts with the launch of a new weekly interview podcast, Good on Paper, hosted by Atlantic staff writer Jerusalem Demsas. With Good on Paper, Demsas will explore some of the most important questions of the day, with each episode examining an idea or development that challenges the conventional wisdom in policy or politics. A trailer is out now, with the show launching on Tuesday, June 4, and episodes coming out each Tuesday.

Good on Paper is a policy show that will challenge popular narratives—ideas that are “good on paper” but don’t always pan or prove out. The show asks: What if the commonly held beliefs driving our public discourse aren’t quite right? What if new evidence on housing or immigration or relationships flies in the face of what we believe? What if the policies we support give us results we don’t like? Each week, a different expert will join Demsas to better examine ideas rigorously and honestly, allowing listeners to deepen their understanding of topics and gain a new way of considering an idea and navigating its complexity.

The podcast builds upon Demsas’s acclaimed reporting for The Atlantic, which includes stories on housing and homelessness, economics, urban development, and democracy. She has recently written the articles “Why Americans Hate a Good Economy,” which offers several explanations as to why Americans report negative assessments of the economy; “Why America Doesn’t Build,” which explores how even green-energy projects get quashed by local opposition; and “Americans Vote Too Much,” about how no one can be a full-time political animal.

Good on Paper joins a growing network of audio journalism at The Atlantic and can be found in a new audio landing page along with all podcasts and narrated articles. The Atlantic’s flagship show, Radio Atlantic with host Hanna Rosin, relaunched last spring, and yesterday, the first episode dropped for How to Know What’s Real, the sixth season of our social-science franchise, hosted by Megan Garber and Andrea Valdez.

The audio team at The Atlantic announced the recent hiring of Jinae West as a senior producer, who came to The Atlantic from New York magazine and Vox, where she was a founding producer of the pop-culture podcast Into It. Dave Shaw has also joined The Atlantic’s podcast team as an editor. Shaw has more than 20 years of experience in editing, newsroom management, and show development, and most recently worked at The New York Times, where he launched new shows and was a supervising editor for The Daily.

The trailer for Good on Paper is now available, and listeners can subscribe here or wherever they get podcasts.

Have you ever heard a commonly held belief or a fast-developing worldview and asked: Is that idea right? Or just good on paper? Each week, host Jerusalem Demsas and a guest take a closer look at the facts and research that challenge the popular narratives of the day, to better understand why we believe what we believe. Good on Paper launches Tuesday, June 4.

Listen to the conversation here:

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: What’s an idea that you’ve felt was good on paper but didn’t pan out in real life?

Alice Evans: Oh my God. So much of my life, so much of my life.

Demsas: [Laughs]

Demsas: What if the conventional wisdom driving our public discourse isn’t quite right?

Natalia Emanuel: This is the question in many ways.

Demsas: What if new evidence on housing or immigration or relationships flies in the face of what we believe?

Evans: Wow, okay. Big question.

Demsas: What if the policies we support give us results we don’t like?

Nick Papageorge: We were playing with data, and we found a pattern that didn’t make sense.

Emanuel: One of the first people we presented to said, Are we sure this isn’t mansplaining?

Evans: Okay, great. So I maybe sound a little bit Marxian now.

Demsas: My name’s Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic. And I’m hosting a new podcast called Good on Paper. It’s a policy show that will question what we really know about the world and challenge the popular narratives of the day. Like, were the 2020 protests—both the Black Lives Matter and anti-lockdown ones—actually full of radicals?

Papageorge: That was one part of the caricaturization, right? That there are these gun-toting vigilantes and then there are these privileged leftist extremists going to these BLM protests. But then, you start to look.

Demsas: Or—is remote work actually good for workers?

Emanuel: If you have even one colleague who is remote, that yields about 30 percent of the loss from having everyone be remote.

Demsas: Wait, so if one person on your team goes remote, that you just lose all of that?

Emanuel: Well, a third of it, yeah.

Demsas: A third of it, that’s huge!

Emanuel: Right, it’s huge—from just one person.

Demsas: From The Atlantic comes Good on Paper. First episode drops June 4 wherever you get your podcasts. Come be surprised.

Evans: I do a Lara Croft roly-poly, spinning off to the side. At this point, I hand over the phone, and I sprint, and I’m bleeding, and I’m covered in blood.

Demsas: Well, I just think it’s—

Evans: So, yeah, that is something that had not gone to plan. Getting punched in the face was not on the agenda.

Demsas: Not good on paper.