Yesterday, a new Wall Street Journal poll gained a lot of attention over its finding that there has been a steep decline since 2019 among those who say patriotism, having children, and religion are “very important.” The trend lines are real, but that poll should be taken with a grain of salt: When the Wall Street Journal asked the same battery of questions in 1998 and 2019, it was conducting traditional telephone-based polls; the new 2023 poll was a (high-quality) online panel of people who were paid to take the survey. As Jim notes, GOP pollster Patrick Ruffini writes that the different methodologies could explain the very different results:
WSJ poll changed methodologies, fwiw: Traditional telephone polls in 1998 & 2019; some sort of panel in 2023. https://t.co/uQ3hicH5FY pic.twitter.com/j3ftVUhVRY
— John McCormack (@McCormackJohn) March 27, 2023
For a better survey on American attitudes about patriotism, see Gallup, which also finds a decline in patriotism, but not nearly as steep as what the WSJ poll found since 2019. Whereas the Journal reports a 23-point drop since 2019 — from 61 percent to 38 percent — in the percentage of Americans who say patriotism is “very important” to them, Gallup finds only a five-point drop from 2019 to 2022 — from 70 percent to 65 percent who say they are “extremely” or “very” patriotic.