Trust but verify

A poll examines the trust gaps between the nation's main political parties:


Americans are united in their trust of the military and Amazon, and in their distrust of Facebook, political parties, and Congress.  Both parties are lukewarm on state and local government, philanthropy, non-profits, and the courts. They differ sharply in their trust/distrust of the executive branch, local police, organized labor, the FBI, religion, Google, banks, big corporations, the press, and academia.

8 comments:

Grim said...

Amazon is a highly trusted entity, isn't it? I guess they do a reliable job of producing deliveries of the products I've ordered. Maybe politicians should consider what it would take to actually deliver on the promises they make.

E Hines said...

It's interesting, and unsurprising, to me that bitter Bible-clingers trust religion much more than do Progressive-Democrats, and that Republicans trust (their) President so much more than do Progressive-Democrats. It'd be interesting to see how this latter bit came out (if the poll was done) anytime between 2009 and 2016.

It's also interesting/amusing that Progressive-Democrats trust social media so much more than do Republicans, given that they so loudly disapprove of Trump's extensive use of it and are (or should be) seeing how extensively, if futilely, the Russians used it to "influence" the 2016 elections. Of course, I'm taking Facebook as a stand-in for all of social media; it would have been better had Twitter and Instagram been included in the poll.

Eric Hines

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Democrats trust the press and academia.

Republicans trust the Executive branch.

I wonder how much they generally trust them, versus wanting to say the right thing to make the team look good. One sees the same thing with surveys where Scandinavians, with their high suicide and alcoholism rates, nonetheless say how happy they are. They feel obligated to say so, to make their people look better. I understand that.

raven said...

It is not the executive branch per se- it is who is running it- no doubt the numbers would have been reversed circa 2012.

David Foster said...

What does it mean to "trust Amazon"? I trust them to ship what I've ordered and not steal the money; I'm not sure I would trust them to sell a product on their site and not do a knock-off version of it, and I'm not sure I trust them to keep their personal political beliefs from causing them to remove books from the market.

Texan99 said...

That's about the same for me: I trust them to send products more or less on the schedule they promise, and to issue prompt refunds if there's a problem. Their customer ratings are a reliable way to vet the products before I buy.

Gringo said...

Of course the Democrats would trust the press and academia, given that Democrats exercise a near monopoly in those institutions.

Interesting that though Facebook has shown a definite lefty bias in deleting stuff,both sides of the aisle distrust them at about the same rate.

As others have already pointed out, trust in the Executive Branch depends on who's in charge.

Aggie said...

Well......if it's down to that, then I'll nominate my toilet to #1, as it flushes every time.

Interesting that some gap numbers are negative, some are positive. Is this a 'tell' on the poll taker?