I've argued before that due to the political environment in this country polls have become utterly unreliable.
To quote Jeffrey Gundlach the billionaire bond investor who called the 2016 election correctly.
""I think polls are very, very squishy right now because of the highly toxic political environment in which we live, two-thirds of conservatives or moderate conservatives say that they have lied about their support for Donald Trump either directly or by omission."
This aligns with the survey by Cato conducted, where they have found that "Majorities of Democrats (52%), independents (59%) and Republicans (77%) all agree they have political opinions they are afraid to share."
"Strong liberals stand out, however, as the only political group who feel they can express themselves. Nearly 6 in 10 (58%) of staunch liberals feel they can say what they believe. However, centrist liberals feel differently. A slim majority (52%) of liberals feel they have to self‐censor, as do 64% of moderates, and 77% of conservatives."
If this is true, and I believe it is (from personal experience) then it would suggest that there is such thing as a "silent majority" which is too afraid to speak out their political opinions and thus are not really heard across the social political landscape. It doesn't help when a lot of political news media tends to often rely on sharing tweets as a frequent source of where the people's opinions are.
Twitter?
Yes.
The Atlantic ran this article earlier this year.
Key point from the article:
"According to a 2019 analysis by Pew Research Center, 22 percent of adults in the U.S. use Twitter, but just 10 percent of those adults are responsible for 80 percent of tweets."
"The president of the United States, famously, cannot be torn from Twitter; the chair of the Federal Reserve and several Supreme Court justices reportedly consult it for news, gossip, and debate."
"Twitter is especially beloved by the press, and the unfortunate affinity that journalists and policy makers have for the social network means that--as with politics itself--you may not care about Twitter, but it cares about you, especially if you’ve just done something embarrassing on national television. Reformed Twitter users who’ve quit the service talk about how tweets are inescapable. They are embedded in news stories, screencapped for Instagram, and quoted on TV shows and podcasts."
A much more somber study by the Center for Journalism Review
Came to even more somber conclusions, pointing out how utterly pervasive the relationship that news media and Twitter has.
What I am getting to is this: The political camps on both sides rely on any and all information to get a feel to where the American people's opinions, grievances, issues, etc, are. Journalism and Twitter have become a very distorted looking glass into that information. I think that the distortion is so heavy that too often the people making the decisions out there are making it based on what literally 2-3% of Americans talk about.
But, here's the bigger issue: If let's say there is a massive segment of our society that is too afraid to share their true opinions in any way that anyone in the political arena can hear it, then how would anyone know what the true feeling of the country is?