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I used some "Feeling Thermometer" data in a class recently and was struck by an insane result reflected in the recent data. You'll see that below, where I've linked to the original polling agency, First, definition: A "Feeling Thermometer" is a commonly used research measure. Here's a reasonable definition from a recent piece of scholarship:The feeling thermometer, or thermometer scale, is a rating procedure to measure respondents' feelings about an issue using a scale that corresponds or makes a metaphor to temperatures in the thermometer.Political scientists often derive these numbers via public opinion polling. Sometimes, respondents are specifically asked to provide a number on a scale (0 to 100 is typical) and the results reflect averages, often broken down by specific demographic information.For example, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs asks Americans in a regular poll what they think about foreign countries. As this data reveals, Americans feel quite warmly about Canadians, but have quite cold feelings about North Korea, Iran, Russia, and China. Likely not coincidentally, these are four states specifically identified as threats to American interests in the Director of National Intelligence's annual (public) assessment report. Question for another day: which way does the causal arrow run?With those numbers in the 19 to 32 range in mind (and 85 for Canada), take a look at this next polling result, showing how Americans feel about other Americans -- limited by their political party. Americans like other Americans of the same political party just a little less than they like Canadians.And Americans' feelings about members of the opposing political party are comparable to their feelings about North Korea!Some recent political science research is particularly interesting about the meaning of such data, suggesting that these positive and negative feelings can have real-world consequences, at least in international politics:This research note utilizes novel country feeling thermometer data to explore the [Democratic Peace Theory] debate's micro-foundations: the underlying drivers of international amity and enmity among democratic citizens in the US, UK, France, and Germany.No wonder some scholars are studying the allegedly growing risk of American civil war.
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AbstractWe live in a time of feelings. Anger, disgust, and anxiety abound in the public sphere and in social analyses. Positive feelings are also increasingly demanded and exchanged in the capitalist marketplace, including care and empathy, tenderness and affection. Indeed, the intensity with which feelings traverse these boundaries of individual‐social‐cultural‐political‐economic life is arguably a defining feature of our times. Yet much of the scholarship on neoliberalism has focused squarely upon the extractive and exhausting quality of contemporary affective life. Strikingly, feminist affect theory in particular interprets a fundamental cruelty at the core of cultural demands for optimism (Berlant 2011) or happiness (Ahmed 2010), a dark underbelly that forecloses any other transformative outcomes. In this essay, I suggest that feminist ethnographic analysis requires a more complex account of affective pursuits. I turn to the specific context of the post‐colonial Caribbean island of Barbados, where a new surge in desires for intimacy, emotional expressiveness, and affective life is bound up within the 21st century thrust of neoliberal entrepreneurialism. In a society known more for its conservative 'stiff‐upper lip' and 'grin‐and‐bear‐it' demeanor, 'tough love,' and material, transactional modes of support and exchange than expressions of intimate affection, I chart a growing desire for new modes of feeling, a growing cultural pull toward romantic love and intimacy, and emotional expressivity itself. I read within these Barbadian desires (and even within their disappointments) a profound optimism, pleasure, and bold self‐discovery that does not only/always succumb to despair.

1. Postfeminist Sensibility as a Structure of Feeling -- 2. Gender, Race, Nation… and Barbie Savior -- 3. Sweat Is Just Fat Crying -- 4. Making-Up Enterprising Selves -- 5. Hot Men on the Commute -- 6. Cute! Cats! Intimacies of the Internet -- 7. Epilogue: Digital Feeling.

 A couple of months ago, some people were saying that Donald Trump's favorability ratings rose every time he was indicted (I've forgotten specific references, but I know I saw some).  The idea seemed to be that some supporters had been drifting away until their sympathies were reawakened by what they regarded as persecution by the "deep state".   Closer examination has shown that this isn't true, that his favorability ratings actually declined slightly after the indictments.  But at the time, it occurred to me that  the degree of favorability might be more subject to change--shifting from "strongly favorable" to "somewhat favorable" is easier than shifting from favorable to unfavorable--and that the degree of favorability will matter in the race for the nomination.  On searching, I found there aren't many questions that ask for degree of favorability, and that breakdowns by party weren't available for most of them.  However, the search wasn't useless, because it reminded me of the American National Election Studies "feeling thermometers" for presidential candidates, which ask people to rate the candidates on a scale of zero to 100.   Here is the percent rating the major party candidates at zero:With the exception of George McGovern in 1972, everyone was below 10% until 2004, when 13% rated GW Bush at zero.  In 2008, things were back to normal, with both Obama and McCain at around 7%, but starting in 2012, zero ratings increased sharply.  The next figure shows the percent rating each candidate at 100.  There is a lot of variation from one election to the next, but no trend.  In 2016, 6.4% rated Trump at 100, which is a little lower than average (and the same as Hillary Clinton).  He rose to 15.4% in 2020, which is the second highest ever, just behind Richard Nixon in 1972.  But several others have been close, most recently Obama in 2012 and Bush in 2004, and it's not unusual for presidents to have a large increase in their first term (GW Bush, Clinton, and Reagan had similar gains).   That is, Trump doesn't seem to have an exceptionally large number of enthusiastic supporters among the public (also see this post).  I think his continued strength in the party is mostly the result of Republican elites' reluctance to challenge him, which is a mixture of genuine support and exaggerated ideas about his strength among Republican voters.