Democratic, Republican Confidence in Science Diverges — Jeffrey M. Jones

Americans as a whole remain confident in science, but compared with the mid-1970s, a large partisan gap has emerged, with Republicans becoming much less confident at the same time Democrats are becoming more so. It appears that science, like many other issues, has become a politicized topic.

Republican mistrust may stem from conservative thought leaders' allegations of liberal bias in the scientific community, perhaps because colleges and universities employ many scientists. Republicans also mistrust colleges and universities and cite a liberal political agenda as the reason for that lack of trust. A specific recent example of Republican allegations of bias concerned the theory that the COVID-19 virus leaked from a Chinese lab. Many scientists, including Anthony Fauci, initially favored other theories, but the lab-leak theory has gotten more serious consideration in recent months.

Still, Republicans' lack of trust in science opens up the possibility of their being more vulnerable to influence by ideas that lack scientific support, especially if those ideas are advanced by political conservatives they implicitly trust.…