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The Misinformational Loop: Why America Keeps Misreading Itself [1]

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Date: 2026-04-26  

Most Americans are not political animals. They are not ideological machines. They have lives that take up most of their time. And though they may label themselves liberal or conservative, nearly all of us are what cognitive psychologist George Lakoff called “biconceptual” — we carry more than one moral framework in our heads at once.

Anat Shenker-Osorio has a more colloquial name for the same phenomenon: “good point” people. These are people who can hear a concern or political position, recognize its truth, and still recognize that other valid points exist alongside it. They may answer yes to a polling question about strong borders and also yes (“good point!”)1 to a pathway to citizenship. They may be uneasy about transgender athletes in sports and still broadly support LGBTQ rights. That is not confusion. It is how actual minds work.

The strategic mistake — and it is a costly one — is to treat those citizens as if they were a fixed bloc waiting for a centrist candidate to bridge the divide. They are not. They are conflicted, reachable, and often more open than our politics assumes. As Shenker-Osorio2 put it plainly in a recent conversation: the persuadable public is not a hidden moderate middle; it is a set of people holding contradictory views simultaneously, with no strong conviction pulling them in either direction. Which side wins depends on which frame gets activated, repeated, and made socially visible. As political scientist Steven Fish would add: it also depends on which side makes its case with moral clarity and conviction.

That is why silence is never neutral. What silence does, in practice, is hand every conflicted voter a pair of headphones3: one ear gets race-baiting, xenophobia, and fear; the other gets quiet. Or worse — not just quiet, but a milquetoast, caveated, hedge-everything response that signals uncertainty rather than conviction. In a contest of frames, that is not a draw. It is a concession.

Immigration: the biconceptual voter in full relief

The 2025 Chicago Council Survey4 — conducted in July 2025 with 2,148 adults, amid the first wave of Trump-era immigration enforcement — found something that should have upended the political conversation. Support for legal immigration had reached a record high. Nearly half of Americans (49%) said legal immigration should be kept at its present level. Another 28% favored increasing it. Opposition to legal immigration had fallen to an all-time low: just 21%. That reversal cut across party lines. Republican desire to decrease legal immigration had dropped by half in a single year — from 50% to 34%.

The shift on immigration as a threat was equally dramatic. In 2024, half of Americans (50%) viewed large numbers of immigrants and refugees as a critical threat to the country. By the summer of 2025, that figure had fallen to 36%. Among Republicans, it dropped from 83% to 68% — still a majority, but a measurably softer one. The country, watching mass enforcement unfold in real time, was not rallying behind it. It was stepping back.

On undocumented workers specifically, the data are even more striking. Two-thirds of Americans (65%) said immigrants currently working in the United States illegally should be able to apply for citizenship — either immediately (43%) or after a penalty and waiting period (22%). Only 23% said they should be required to leave. Even among Republicans, 43% combined supported some form of path to legal status. The image of a public demanding mass deportation simply does not match the data. And yet Democrats regularly flee the field of contention when confronted with the anti-immigration arguments.

What the same respondents also said

A Pew Research Center survey conducted January 20–26, 20265 — the opening week of Trump’s second term — surveyed 8,512 U.S. adults on specific administration immigration policies. The results complete the biconceptual picture. Majorities favored some enforcement measures: a large military presence at the U.S.-Mexico border (62%) and social media review for those seeking entry (56%). But those same Americans, in the same survey, drew sharp lines:

• 79% oppose giving immigration priority to people who pay a $1 million fee (60% strongly oppose)

• 66% oppose suspending all asylum applications from people fleeing violence or danger

• 64% oppose keeping large numbers of immigrants in detention centers while cases are decided

• 60% oppose pausing visa applications from people in 75 countries seeking to legally immigrate

This is not an incoherent public. It is a biconceptual one. The person who wants troops at the border also does not want to suspend due process for asylum seekers. The voter who favors social media screening recoils at mass detention. The Republican who wants immigration reduced still, in plurality, supports some path to legal status for those already here. These positions are not contradictions. They reflect a genuine moral framework that values order and decency simultaneously. And repeating and vigorously defending the progressive moral stance with conviction and clarity is critical to winning over these biconceptual voters by giving the social proof that their moral position is good and shared by most people.

A third data point reinforces the pattern. A FWD.us survey6 found strong, cross-partisan majorities supporting a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers — people brought to the United States as children and covered under DACA — when paired with increased border security. The combination of enforcement and compassion is not a political compromise people are reluctant to accept. It is, for many, exactly what they actually believe.

What politicians and staff often hear, though, is only one half of that sentence. They hear “strong borders” and miss “path to citizenship.” They hear enforcement and miss legal status, and “our neighbors.” They hear the loudest voices from the right — shaped by right-wing media, filtered into talking points, then called into congressional offices — and infer a wholesale mandate for hardness. The polling tells a different story: many Americans want a secure border, but not a spectacle; rule of law, not theater for the cruel.

LGBTQ issues: one flashpoint, broader support

The same biconceptual pattern appears on LGBTQ issues, though the terrain is different. Americans can be sharply divided over transgender sports participation while still holding broad support for LGBTQ equality. Many people are not rejecting LGBTQ people as such; they are reacting to one highly charged question while remaining supportive on the larger terrain of rights and relationships. One controversial question gets elevated until it seems to define the whole debate — but the public is usually more nuanced than the culture-war script allows.

When Gov. Andy Beshear defended transgender Kentuckians by simply saying “These are Kentuckians,” it worked because it did something political speech so rarely does: it turned an abstraction back into a human being. That is the reframing the data support. Not abandoning the conversation, but making it about real people, real lives, real citizens, rather than abstract policies.

The gatekeepers

Understanding why politicians so consistently misread this “non-median” public7 requires starting upstream — with staff.

Researchers Hertel-Fernandez, Mildenberger, and Stokes found that legislative staffers systematically and significantly overestimate how conservative their districts are. Not occasionally, and not at the margins. Systematically and significantly. Staff are not peripheral to this problem — they are the first interpreters of public sentiment. They decide what sounds risky, what gets flagged for the member, what gets quietly set aside.

If the baseline assumption is that the district leans more conservative than it actually does, then advice trends cautious by default. Not because the public has spoken clearly in one direction, but because someone upstream has misread the room. That misreading appears across district types — in blue districts, purple ones, and often more acutely in red ones. That is how representation gets warped before the conversation has even begun.

The echo chamber

Broockman and Skovron found that elected officials themselves overestimate conservative opinion by as much as 20 percentage points on key issues. That means a 50-50 issue may look 60-40 conservative; a genuinely center-left position becomes a coin flip.

This should not surprise us. Politicians do not hear from a representative sample. They hear from the most engaged, most mobilized, most aggrieved slice of the public — the people most likely to call, write, and show up at the district office. Night after night of Fox News and a day-after-day diet of right-wing radio amplifies that signal further. A vocal minority becomes a surrogate for the whole.

And once that happens, caution starts to look like savvy electoral politics. Retreat starts to look like “the middle ground.” Inaction, or outright capitulation, gets called “centrism.”

It is none of those things. It is classic “working the refs,” and in this case, the refs being worked are our reps.

The silence

Then there is the public’s own role in the loop.

Pluralistic ignorance is the term researchers use for the odd but familiar fact that people often support a policy while falsely believing their neighbors oppose it. That false belief has real consequences. It keeps people quiet. It keeps them from going to the meeting, writing the letter, making the call, having the conversation. It keeps them from saying the obvious thing out loud: I’m not alone here.

Housing is a clear example. Most people want workable solutions, more supply, and less absurdity in a market that has turned shelter into a luxury good. But they assume the neighbors are hostile to change. So the silence of the majority becomes the raw material for the opposition’s confidence. The loudest voices win not because they are numerically dominant, but because they are visibly present.

Housing as a case study

That gap between reality and perception is especially destructive in housing policy, where the debate gets trapped in symbols with deeply ingrained baggage — “developers,” “luxury units,” “neighborhood character” — rather than the actual people on the receiving end of bad policy.

The nurse who cannot afford to live within an hour of the hospital where she works. The firefighter priced out of the community he serves. The adult child who cannot afford to stay in the town where he grew up. These are not abstractions. They are the human cost of a political system that keeps responding to caricature instead of reality.

The symbolic politics of housing works precisely because it converts complexity into moral theater. Theater, however, does not make good policy. And if the frame stays wrong, the outcome stays wrong. Broockman and his colleagues found that this is not just a stylistic point — it is an empirical one. When housing arguments were reframed around the people who need homes — workers, families, people experiencing homelessness — rather than the symbolic actors who build them, public support shifted measurably. The moral case, grounded in human need, moved people in ways that technocratic or density arguments did not. The fix, here as everywhere, is the same: make the people visible. Put the nurse in the room. Name the firefighter. Give the abstraction a face, a zip code, a commute.

Breaking the loop

The problem with the housing debate — and with the immigration debate, and the LGBTQ debate, and almost every contested issue in American politics — is not that the public is in the wrong place. It is that the public’s actual positions never get reflected in the public discourse.

The nurse and the firefighter and the adult child priced out of their hometown are far more numerous than the political debate suggests. And Broockman’s research on housing offers a useful reminder: moral framing around people experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity — the human consequences of the policy failure, not the policy mechanics — was among the most persuasive arguments available. The same logic applies across issues. Across issue after issue, people like them hold views that are more generous, more pragmatic, and more humane than the political class assumes. What they lack is someone willing to say so out loud, repeatedly, and without apology.

This is where several lines of research converge. Shenker-Osorio’s work on the “good point” voters shows that the conflicted 60% in the middle do not have fixed positions — they have activated and dormant frames. Which frame dominates depends entirely on which side keeps making its case. Election analyst G. Elliott Morris makes a related point about immigration specifically: when polls separate the abstraction of “border security” from concrete proposals for mass deportations and sweeping raids, support for Trump-style measures drops sharply — including among some Trump voters. The apparent mandate evaporates the moment the question gets specific. Topline polling that shows immigration as a “Republican strength” is concealing a much more favorable landscape underneath.

A persuasion argument that is never made cannot persuade. A moral position that is never voiced cannot activate empathy or rectitude. The field you vacate does not stay empty. It gets occupied. Rachel Bitecofer’s theory of negative partisanship adds a further dimension: the goal is not only to persuade conflicted voters but to energize the people already on your side. When Democrats go quiet or hedge, they do not avoid alienating anyone — they demoralize their own coalition while leaving the opposition’s narrative unchallenged.

Fish’s argument is simpler and older: conviction is persuasive. People are drawn to leaders who appear to believe what they say — not because agreement precedes trust, but because clarity and commitment signal that someone has actually thought things through. Voters who are themselves conflicted are especially responsive to this. The “good point” person is not looking for a mirror. They are looking for a guide. And for leadership. Think FDR or TR or JFK or MLK. Moral clarity and commitment.

Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger adds one more useful lens: people have a “zone of acceptance” and a “zone of rejection.” The biconceptual voter is not in the rejection zone on immigration or housing or LGBTQ rights — they are in the acceptance zone, holding two frames simultaneously, waiting to see which one gets reinforced. The strategic error is to assume their second frame — the more conservative-sounding one — is their real position. It is not fixed. It is just louder, because only one side has been making noise.

What this means practically is less complicated than it sounds. It means speaking to constituents — and to the electorate at large — about immigration not as a liability to manage but as a value to defend. It means saying, clearly and without hedge: most Americans do not want mass detention. Most Americans support a path to citizenship. Most Americans see immigrants as neighbors, not threats. These are not brave positions. They are majority positions that have been allowed to feel like minority ones because the people who hold them have been handed only one earphone. This was the position of Ronald Reagan, for goodness’ sake!

It means we must engage with the biconceptual voter not by finding the position between their two views, but by activating the better one. Not triangulating. Persuading. The data show that the frame which gets repeated, which gets said with conviction, which gets made socially visible, is the frame that wins. We may roll our eyes when right-wing media repeat the same talking points over and over again, but it works. Silence and equivocation do not split the difference. They concede.

And it means giving people the social proof that they are not alone. The voter who quietly supports a pathway to citizenship but assumes their neighbors don’t needs to see that they probably do. The constituent who recoils at mass detention but hasn’t said so in public needs to hear others say it first. That is how pluralistic ignorance breaks — not by winning an argument, but by making the majority visible to itself.

Elected officials and their staffs are not the only audience. They are, in fact, downstream of the real problem. If the loop is ever going to break, it begins with people — neighbors, advocates, community members — speaking with the same clarity and conviction that Shenker-Osorio urges on politicians. The political class hears what it hears because that is what gets said loudly and repeatedly. Change what gets said. Change what gets heard.

Don Berwick’s maxim holds: every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. A political system fed on distorted signals will produce distorted policy. But the signal is not fixed. The public’s actual views — on immigration, on housing, on fairness, on who belongs — are there, waiting to be reflected, repeated, and made real.

That is the work.

Notes

1. Anat Shenker-Osorio, interview by Wajahat Ali, The Left Hook, February 17, 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuS5Zrze8AI

2. Anat Shenker-Osorio, interview by Andrea Pitzer, Next Comes What, March 2026. https://pod.link/1779885475

3. The headphones metaphor is Shenker-Osorio’s own formulation, articulated in the Next Comes What interview (March 2026) and in her appearance on The Left Hook (February 2026).

4. Dong, S., & Kafura, C. (2025, October 9). American support for legal immigration reaches new heights. Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Survey conducted July 18–30, 2025 (n=2,148). https://globalaffairs.org/research/public-opinion-survey/american-support-legal-immigration-reaches-new-heights

5. Daniller, A., & Oliphant, J. B. (2026, January 29). How Americans view key Trump administration immigration policies. Pew Research Center. Survey conducted January 20–26, 2026 (n=8,512). https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2026/01/29/how-americans-view-key-trump-administration-immigration-policies/

6. FWD.us (2022). New Poll: Overwhelming Majority of U.S. Voters Across Political Spectrum Support Legislation for Dreamers Paired with Border Security. https://www.fwd.us/news/new-poll-overwhelming-majority-of-u-s-voters-across-political-spectrum-support-legislation-for-dreamers-paired-with-border-security/

7. Hughes, C. (2026, February 12). Stop chasing the median voter: A better playbook for beating Trumpism in 2026. Daily Kos. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/2/12/2368444/community/stop-chasing-the-median-voter-a-better-playbook-for-beating-trumpism-in-2026/

References

Berger, J. (2020). The catalyst: How to change anyone’s mind. Simon & Schuster.

Bitecofer, R. (2024). Hit ‘em where it hurts: How to beat Republicans at their own game. Crown.

Broockman, D. E., Elmendorf, C. S., & Kalla, J. L. (2023). Voters’ views of the public as a barrier to housing development. SocArXiv. https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/kz4m8_v1

Broockman, D. E., Elmendorf, C. S., & Kalla, J. L. (2026). The symbolic politics of housing. https://tobin.yale.edu/sites/default/files/2026-01/BEK_Symbolic_Politics_Housing.pdf

Broockman, D. E., & Skovron, C. (2017). Bias in perceptions of public opinion among political elites. American Political Science Review. https://escholarship.org/content/qt7sk23908/qt7sk23908.pdf

Daniller, A., & Oliphant, J. B. (2026, January 29). How Americans view key Trump administration immigration policies. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2026/01/29/how-americans-view-key-trump-administration-immigration-policies/

Dong, S., & Kafura, C. (2025, October 9). American support for legal immigration reaches new heights. Chicago Council on Global Affairs. https://globalaffairs.org/research/public-opinion-survey/american-support-legal-immigration-reaches-new-heights

Fish, M. S. (2024). Comeback: Routing Trumpism, reclaiming the Democratic Party. Cambridge University Press.

FWD.us (2022). New Poll: Overwhelming Majority of U.S. Voters Across Political Spectrum Support Legislation for Dreamers Paired with Border Security. https://www.fwd.us/news/new-poll-overwhelming-majority-of-u-s-voters-across-political-spectrum-support-legislation-for-dreamers-paired-with-border-security/

Hertel-Fernandez, A., Mildenberger, M., & Stokes, L. C. (2018). Legislative staff and representation in Congress. American Political Science Review, 113(1), 1–18.

Hughes, C. (2026, February 12). Stop chasing the median voter: A better playbook for beating Trumpism in 2026. Daily Kos. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/2/12/2368444/community/stop-chasing-the-median-voter-a-better-playbook-for-beating-trumpism-in-2026/

Morris, G. E. (n.d.). Strength in numbers [Substack newsletter]. https://www.gelliottmorris.com

Shenker-Osorio, A. (2026, February 17). Interview by W. Ali [Video]. The Left Hook. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuS5Zrze8AI

Shenker-Osorio, A. (2026, March). Interview by A. Pitzer [Podcast]. Next Comes What. https://pod.link/1779885475

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