public opinion

Yet Beijing chose to activate mechanisms that mobilize public opinion—indirectly shaping the behavior of businesses and consumers—and afford the government plausible deniability.

“The big thing that we find, not surprisingly, is that Democrats and Republicans look really different,” said political scientist Amy Lerman, director of UC Berkeley’s Possibility Lab, who studies race, public opinion and political behavior.

This wasn’t the first time public opinion exploded over when Thanksgiving should occur.

But then public opinion shifted against the tax in recent decades.

The longer it went on, their argument ran, the more Democrats were likely to win the battle for public opinion.