alt Hacker NewsLooking at their charts, Democrats and Independents clearly think corruption is up a lot since 2024. But Republicans think corruption is down from 2024. The polarization of the electorate in the U.S. is pretty incredible.
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It's not just a question of belief, it's also a question of their information environment. The polarization in the electorate isn't just a question of what people believe, but what information their fed. Unfortunately, information environment -> belief -> environment is forms a strong sustaining feedback loop.
It is also worth pointing out that that 83% of republicans (vs 90% of independents) still believe that the government is widely corrupt. Like given the ~20% "crazy threshold" in basically any type of political polling, 80% of republicans is effectively "every single republican you could ever convince".
I would not lose sleep over polarization in this context.
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.
U.S. Trust in Government Depends Upon Party Control
https://news.gallup.com/poll/697421/trust-government-depends...
At least they think it's up since 2025. I wonder how this will inform their votes in November...
From 2024 -> 2026
Republican: 88->83
Democrat: 57->91
Republicans barely changed. It's insane than Democrats were so low 2 years ago.