… Unfortunately, the polls have been betraying us of late. They keep telling us things that can’t possibly be true. … Let’s find new research methods that will give us more, um, nuanced answers to the question of what the American public thinks.
One such idea is to treat the presidential candidates as a research method. These people spend their days crisscrossing the country from Iowa to New Hampshire and back again, talking endlessly to voters and imbibing the zeitgeist of the heartland. They have a big incentive to understand the public’s views and, for the best ones, an intuitive feel for the mood of their constituents. Perhaps by listening to their consensus views, we can actually understand the public better than by reading the polls.
So, following that method, what does last night’s Republican debate tell us about how the Republican electorate thinks about foreign policy? CONT.
Jeremy Shapiro, Brookings Institution