THE MEDIA STILL BELIEVES THERE ARE ONLY TWO AMERICAS

This New York Times story is typical of the mainstream media's coverage of public opinion:

One State, Two Very Different Views of Minneapolis

Pull up a stool at Ye Olde Pickle Factory and listen to a story about America’s urban-rural divide.

The regulars file into Ye Olde Pickle Factory in Nisswa, Minn., before 10 a.m. most days, taking their seats at the bar....

Nisswa is a town of about 2,000 people in the Brainerd Lakes Area, a popular summer vacation destination about 150 miles north of Minneapolis. Most of the regulars on hand this morning say they prefer not to go the city anymore. Not since the summer of 2020, when George Floyd was murdered by a police officer and the city erupted.

Now, Minneapolis is in the news again. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed a woman, Renee Good, during an immigration operation last week, and demonstrators are back on the streets.

What did the regulars make of it?

Ms. Good’s death was tragic, they said. Horrific.

But they also said that she had asked for trouble.

“You obey the law officer,” a man in a veteran’s ball cap said, “and question it later.”

This is the divide, in a single sentence. In Minneapolis, protesters saw an innocent woman killed by a federal agent and took to the streets. At “the Pickle,” the regulars saw a woman who should have complied.

But that isn't "the divide." America isn't divided into two roughly equal segments, half rural and half urban, half Trumpist and half anti-Trumpist.

America consists of Democrats, Republicans, and independents. It's not true that everyone outside big liberal cities is a rock-ribbed rural Republican. On ICE right now, Republicans are overwhelmingly on President Trump's side, as you'd expect, and Democrats are overwhelmingly opposed to what Trump is doing, also as you'd expect. But independents are largely siding with Democrats, tipping overall public opinion against Trump.

Recently, when YouGov asked, "Do you think the ICE agent was justified or not justified in the amount of force he used in shooting the woman in Minneapolis?," 88% of Democrats said no and 61% of Republicans said yes. But the numbers among independents were 20% yes, 58% no. Overall, 53% of survey respondents said the shooting wasn't justified; 28% said it was.

YouGov also found that 53% of respondents think the shooter should face criminal charges. Democrats agree 90% to 4%; Republicans disagree, 14% to 63%. But independents largely side with Democrats, 54% to 23%.

We frequently see this split. In Quinnipiac's latest poll, 88% of Republicans and 3% of Democrats approve of how Trump is doing his job. But independents strongly disapprove -- 33% approve, 59% don't. Trump's overall approval rating is 40%, with 54% disapproving. Republicans are the outliers.

More than two-thirds of Republicans think the Trump administration should be running Venezuela, and approve of the U.S. taking over Venezuelan oil sales. But overall, poll respondents oppose the U.S. takeover 57% to 35%, and oppose a takeover of the oil sales 55% to 38%.

There are times when Republicans and independents agree on many issues and Democrats are the outliers, but this is not one of those times. The public is wary of both parties right now -- as John Guida notes in a Times interview with Kristen Soltis Anderson, who conducts most of the paper's focus groups, and Nate Silver, Gallup now finds that 45% of Americans identify as independents -- the highest percentage of self-described independents Gallup has ever recorded. "Young people in particular reject both parties," Guida notes. However, "if you count independents who lean toward a party, it is 47 percent Democratic and 42 percent Republican." Anderson says:

Republicans got a brief reprieve when Democrats ran a very, very old Joe Biden during a very, very tough economy for young people, and that combined with some backlash to overzealous progressivism among Gen Z got overstated into Republicans having won over a new generation. Behold how short-lived it was! Only 21 percent of millennials and 17 percent of Gen Z identifying as Republicans is bad, bad news for the G.O.P. over the long haul.

And Silver adds:

You also have a phenomenon where the Democratic brand is very unpopular, especially among younger voters who don’t have any institutional loyalty to it. So young liberals often identify as “independent” when you first ask them, but are independents who “lean Democratic” if a pollster pushes them to pick one of the two parties.

And yet Anderson's most recent Times focus group features eleven Trump fans -- who, you will be astonished to learn, think Trump is doing an awesome job as president.

The Times feeds us pro-Trump focus groups with the implication that this is how "the other half" thinks. But it's not the other half. It's a minority of the population -- and for now, independents and Democrats add up to an anti-Trump majority.