Pollsters and pundits visit polarized Wisconsin. Now what?

Political polarization is bad. That’s one thing we can all agree on, say Democratic and Republican pollsters Celinda Lake and Ed Goeas. The bipartisan polling team held a press call with Wisconsin reporters Wednesday to discuss the findings of the latest Georgetown University battleground poll.

Politics have become so toxic that 81% of voters across the political spectrum think democracy is threatened, only 23% are not worried about political violence breaking out and, Lake told the Wisconsin press corps, “one of the things that was so amazing was how close people thought we were to civil war” — with the danger that civil war will break out in the near future rated by survey respondents at about 71 on a scale of zero to 100.

Wisconsin voters, specifically, are “very worried about civil war. They’re very worried about division. They’re very much of the opinion that elected officials ought to be able to work together,” said Lake. “They want very much to protect voting rights and they are worried about violence and threats to democracy being a product of the 2024 elections.”

Worth more than a footnote was the poll’s finding that an overwhelming majority of respondents see current political leaders, not ordinary citizens, as the source of the threat to democracy. Those leaders are not reflecting the will of the majority when they spin out fantasies about a “bloodbath.”  

As Wisconsin Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher officially leaves office this week, Lake’s Republican counterpart Goeas delivered a eulogy for the constructive approach to politics Gallagher represented — and that Goeas, among many others in his party, thought was “the future for making this a better country and bringing civility to the country.” 

“I am afraid that after this next election, we’ll see more of the good guys that are out there stepping away,” Goeas said.

The collegial relationship between Goeas and Lake, and the emphasis on civility by their poll’s sponsor, the Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service, was a welcome respite from the partisan warzone in the escalating conflict of 2024. But there was also something peculiar about the “bothsidesism” of the polarization discussion. 

Sure, we are hunkering down as never before in hostile political camps. And it makes sense that poll respondents say they want their elected leaders to do a better job working together. But drawing a parallel between the “hard core left” and the “hard core right,” as Goean did, lamenting that a smaller and smaller segment of the base comes out to vote in primary elections, obscures the real crisis.

Only one major political party has a leader who is threatening violence against his opponents and proposing to send a militarized police force door to door to round up undocumented immigrants and throw them into camps. Only one presidential candidate is facing multiple felony charges and potential prison time. Only one party is laying the groundwork to challenge the results of the 2024 presidential election, after the failed fake electors scheme of 2020 and the Trump-inspired violent insurrection of Jan 6. 

In the battleground poll, 51% of respondents see Trump as a major threat to democracy, compared with 35% who see Biden that way.

“Bothsidesism” has always been a sloppy approach to politics. In 2024 it’s downright ridiculous.

On the same day Lake and Goeas delivered their remarks to Wisconsin reporters on polarization, Ezra Klein spoke at a breakfast organized by WisPolitics to discuss the same subject with members of the media and politicos in our closely divided state.

Klein, the New York Times columnist and popular political podcast host, like the gracious Lake-Goeas team, delivered a boatload of bad news with style and wit. 

Asked about media bias — a major problem according to the respondents to the battleground poll — Klein drew a helpful distinction between a “neutral product” and a “neutral process” when it comes to reporting.

Journalists owe it to their readers to research their subjects thoroughly and not to deliver a lazy, one-sided view. But, having done their research, they also owe it to the public not to pull their punches or soft-pedal their conclusions to achieve a fruitless, view-from-nowhere neutrality.

Still, like the other pundits who have come to examine our divided state, Klein seemed blissfully unaware of his own role in creating the very political effects he studies with such diligence.

Take his famous essay urging Democrats to find a replacement for Biden, on the grounds that the president is too gaffe-prone and too old to run a winning reelection campaign.

While Klein has moved away from the search for another candidate, conceding that Biden has been looking a lot better since his triumphant State of the Union address, at the WisPolitics breakfast he repeated his assertion that the public has been “incredibly consistent” in saying that Biden is too old. 

As he wrote back in February,  “In poll after poll, 70 percent to 80 percent of voters are worried about his age.”

Yet surely the fact that poll after poll, and story after story about those polls, focused on Biden’s age — and far fewer polls and stories focus on Biden’s extraordinary economic and political achievements, which Klein himself extols — amount to a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy.

Political polls, along with journalists descending on remote Midwestern cafes, hanging on the off-the-cuff opinions of voters — those familiar set pieces of U.S. presidential elections — continue even in this unprecedented moment of crisis. Come the civil war, there will probably be someone with a microphone asking insinuating questions of citizens caught in the crossfire. But transcribing the talking points voters have heard in their siloed political echo chambers won’t help us get out of this mess.