WASHINGTON — For the first time in modern public life, the American people have arrived at a firm, durable, statistically significant consensus about the biggest problem facing the republic. The problem is the other side.
A Fox News poll of 1,202 registered voters found that 88 percent are extremely or very concerned about corruption in government — first place, ahead of inflation, ahead of health care, ahead of nearly everything a pollster has to compete with these days. Six in ten said they are extremely concerned, a level of intensity Americans have historically reserved for hurricanes and high school football.
Both parties received the news as a triumph, for the same reason: each is absolutely certain the poll is about the other one.
“It’s gratifying to see the electorate speaking with one voice,” said Judith Pemberton, chief cross-tabulation officer, a real position, in the network’s polling division. “Two voices, actually. But the two voices say the identical sentence with different nouns in it, which in this business we call a finding.”
The Republican response praised the survey for confirming what the party has long maintained: that the Democratic agenda is a money machine with a flag painted on it. The Democratic response praised the survey for confirming what the party has long maintained: that the Republican agenda is a money machine with a flag painted on it. Officials on each side said the 88 percent figure should end all debate. Officials on each side were not referring to the same 88 percent.
Americans, it turns out, can agree on the diagnosis and disagree only on the patient. A nation that cannot settle what to call a soda cannot settle whether its government is for sale, but it has at last settled that it is. This is what stability looks like.
Both parties have now announced ethics initiatives to respond to the moment. The Republican National Committee unveiled a candidate-vetting program, and the Democratic National Committee unveiled a candidate-vetting program, and insiders in each party say with great confidence that their party’s program will produce no findings. The same insiders, reached separately, said the other party’s program would also produce no findings, because the other party wrote it.
On Tuesday, voters will go to the polls to choose between competing groups of people they each suspect equally. This is the system functioning exactly as designed: the founders foresaw that Americans would never agree on who to trust, and so they built a country where the untrusted are rotated on a two-year cycle, like refrigerators.
A second read of the poll shows concern climbing among voters of both parties, and among independents, which is the closest this country has come in a generation to a unified field theory.
The poll has a margin of error of three percentage points. Both parties said that proves their case.