Republicans and Democrats each face an issue where they are on the wrong side of a 20/80 public opinion split. For Republicans, it’s former President Trump’s anti-NATO stance — 80% of Americans  say the alliance still serves an important function, and NATO ranks as the third most popular of the forty-eight organizations in our preference poll.

For Democrats, the problem is wokeness. Liberals like to say Republicans can’t even define it, but most Americans see wokeness as a performative version of political correctness, and 80% view PC culture as a problem for the country.

Which side has the bigger problem with their 20/80 issue? The bad news for Democrats is wokeness is a more important topic to likely voters than NATO. Two of our ten most popular Fat Finger polls (as defined by number of respondents) were on woke-adjacent subjects (one on affirmative action was 4th, one on drag shows 10th) while the most popular NATO poll ranked just 40th.

Further, Americans believe wokeness is enough of an issue that the backlash to it has led to a string of real-world outcomes ranging from the rise of populism to the ratings collapse for the Academy Awards. It is not a stretch to think it anti-wokeness will have meaningful impact in the 2024 election.

More bad news for Democrats in 2024 is that don't seem to have room for improvement on their issue. Biden has already distanced himself from several woke ideas, opposing the Green New Deal, speaking out against defunding the police, and calling an undocumented immigrant an “illegal” in his 2024 State of the Union address.

Trump, on the other hand, has doubled down, regularly suggesting he’d leave NATO and that our allies are more cost than benefit. The best news for Democrats is that there is little chance that Trump reverses course on the issue, because if he did, it could be mean the difference in a very tight race.