Do Voters Want Bipartisanship... Or For Opponents To Agree With Them?

The NPR Politics Podcast

NPR

Politics, Daily News, News

4.5 • 24.9K Ratings

🗓️ 15 December 2022

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll shows that most voters want to see bipartisan compromise in Congress, but the survey also shows that Americans are as entrenched as they have been for years. So what is it that voters really want? And on issues where voters of both parties appear to have overlap — including the idea that American democracy is facing serious threats — are they really talking about the same thing?

This episode: political correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben, voting correspondent Miles Parks, and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, this is Peter and Cambridge Massachusetts. I'm a first-year student at Harvard Law School,
0:05.3	who is procrastinating studying for final exams by reading about my beloved home state of Iowa
0:09.9	and the death of our first in the nation caucus. Oh well, it's probably for the best. This podcast
0:15.8	was recorded at... 107 PM Eastern on December 15th, 2022. Things may have changed by the time you
0:21.6	hear this, but also be finding ways to waste my time. Enjoy the show! Peter Buddy, probably for the best.
0:33.5	Should have told Iowa Democrats not to use that app, man. Yep, as long as it is. I don't get to have
0:39.0	an opinion on this. Anyway, hey there, it is the NPR Politics podcast. I'm Danielle Kurtz-Layman,
0:43.7	I cover politics. I'm Miles Parks, I cover voting. And I'm Dominica Montenegro,
0:47.5	Senior Political Editor and Correspondent. And today we are talking about the latest NPR
0:51.6	PBS NewsHour Marist poll, which shows us that Americans, surprise, have really strong ties to
0:58.1	their political identities. Yet, they still say they want to see lawmakers work across the aisle.
1:04.3	That is one of the insights we've gleaned. We're going to talk about a whole bunch of them,
1:08.0	but Dominica, let's start by talking about that bipartisanship. Because voters got to see a fair
1:13.6	amount of that in the last Congress. There was Ukraine, A, there were some gun control measures,
1:18.4	and there was spending on American technological manufacturing, aka the CHIPS Act and infrastructure.
1:25.0	So, voters must feel pretty good about that. Well, they do want compromise. Three quarters of
1:31.6	people in the survey said that they want people to work with others across the aisle. They're not
1:37.8	very confident that's actually going to happen. 58% of people said that they think that they have
1:43.8	no confidence that they're going to work across the aisle, which is in 2008, when we asked that
1:49.8	question, it was only 23%. So, clearly, people with good reason have become far more pessimistic
1:56.0	about their members of Congress. But the 74% is actually the highest we've seen in a decade
2:00.9	for people wanting compromise. And the last Congress maybe gets a little bit of credit,
	...

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