Nate Cohn
speaker
982 appearances
7 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 16 Sep
Nate Cohn’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
This is a significant change in the last few years.
We asked that same question in September of 2020, which, by the way, was not exactly some time when American politics was kumbaya.
Even at that point, 54 percent said we could still address the nation's problems.
Only 40 percent said we were too politically divided.
So we've gone in just the last five years from being maybe not exactly optimistic, but perhaps cautiously optimistic that we can still solve our problems to pretty resoundingly being pessimistic about the capacity of the political system to solve the country's problems.
Well, first, I just can't help but want to reiterate what you said.
It is a huge shift.
We don't see swings in public opinion like this that often.
I was just saying at the beginning that everything's the same.
So when you have a huge reversal in people's attitudes, it means something.
And if you look back over the long history of polling, there are other times when Americans have felt like the conditions in the country were worse.
I mean, you can imagine like during the financial crisis or something that more voters were saying that the economy was worse and thought that the country was in a worse spot.
But they didn't have the same pessimism about the political system's ability to get us back on track.
Yeah, and I think that juxtaposition between voters being so pessimistic about the political system at a time when, in a lot of ways, material economic conditions aren't that bad is so telling, right?
It would be one thing for voters to be this pessimistic about the political system if things were just really, really bad, like the depths of the financial crisis and during the Iraq war.
But for it to be happening now, it really just shows how squarely voters are thinking about the politics itself as the problem.
Now, it's worth noting, I guess I should caution that that doesn't mean that voters are panicking about the imminent collapse of American democracy or a collapse of the government.
And, you know, I think it's fairly telling that we felt compelled to ask about this, but we did.
And only 18 percent of voters say that American democracy isn't strong enough to survive the Trump years.
That's a big number in one sense, but it's still well short of the majority of the public thinking that the end of democracy is right.
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