The Great Awokening Is Over, But Trump Might Revive It

Partisan control of the presidency has a lot of direct effects on American life. Republican presidents appoint conservative judges and reduce regulation on business, taxes on the affluent and social spending on the poor. When Democrats gain control of the presidency, those things move in the opposite direction. This is all highly intuitive.

What’s less intuitive is that aspects of society that lie outside the president’s control tend to move in the opposite direction. Political scientists describe this aspect of public opinion as “thermostatic.” Under Republican presidents, public opinion generally moves left, demanding higher levels of government involvement in the economy and so on. The opposite occurs during Democratic presidencies. It’s thermostatic because the public senses policy moving in one direction and then decides it wants a correction. (One apparent exception is public opinion on abortion, which has moved left during the Biden presidency — but this, too, confirms the general tendency, since people reacted to policy shifts that had been engineered by Republican presidents, albeit on a time-delayed basis.)

Join us for Dinner Party, a lively evening newsletter about everything that just happened. Sign up to get it every weeknight.