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Comment by BLKNSLVR

5 hours ago

Their corruption is bad. (Ie. the other party)

I wonder if the split would still be roughly the same if a Democrat was in power at the time of the survey.

Edited to add: Answer seems to be in the article, as pointed out here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49571258

First diagram in the article shows uptick, but since 2010 it's been in the 70-80% range. So it seems pretty party-agnostic.

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BLKNSLVR

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nonethewiser  28 minutes ago

>Their corruption is bad. (Ie. the other party)

Republicans were at 88 and went to 83. Down a tiny bit but pretty flat overall. The Democrats went from 57->91.

paisawalla  5 hours ago

Per the second chart:

Since 2024, Democrats went from being the most trusting (57%) to the most skeptical (91%), bringing all groups to within 10 points of each other on the question.

This is not a "both sides" situation: Republicans dropped from 87% to 83% after their guy was elected, whereas Democrats nearly 1.5x'd their number of skeptics. There is no universal implication here IMO, this is just Democrats joining the 80-percenters, i.e. everyone

  • vannevar  5 hours ago

    >...Republicans dropped from 87% to 83% after their guy was elected, whereas Democrats nearly 1.5x'd their number of skeptics.

    This is not surprising; a big reason that Republican voters were able to justify voting for Trump and open corruption was that they were bombarded with claims that there was a "Biden crime family" in office for four years. No real evidence of that was ever uncovered, but it didn't stop Fox News and every Republican leader from constantly referring to the accusations as if they were true. One the other hand, Trump is openly accepting huge payments from foreign governments, and never even bothered to separate himself from his companies. Republicans were at 87% due to general distrust of government and the rumor of phantom corruption, while Democrats (who tend to be more trusting of government) rose to the same level only on clear evidence of real corruption. The authors don't break it out by parties, but the overall level during Trump's first term is about the same as Biden's. Since the article notes that Republican skepticism is higher in general and more consistent, this implies that Democrats' perception of corruption is much higher in Trump's second term than his first. Which makes sense, the Republican leadership was much more responsible in applying guardrails in the first term than the second. Trump is getting away with a LOT more in his second term.

    • paisawalla  4 hours ago

      Woah! You're never going to believe this, but my opponents' beliefs are also unfounded, arising from their inability to perceive self-serving biases, and in general, their ignorance.

      I wonder what else we have in common?

      8 replies →