The Honesty Project: What Do Americans Really Think About Data Centers, Billionaires, Israel, and More

Welcome back to The Honesty Project, a series of opinion surveys from The Free Press. We’re asking Americans what they believe about the most important issues in public life. And we’re going deeper than a typical poll.

We partnered with Populace, an opinion-research think tank, to design surveys that gauge respondents’ “private” opinions—the views they feel are too sensitive to share publicly. Our goal is to overcome the bias inherent in polls, which often elicit less than honest responses, and to understand what parts of American life people don’t feel they can speak about freely. (Click to learn more about the initiative and methodology.)

For more on how these surveys work, and why they are better at gauging true public opinion, watch this explainer video, then scroll down for the key findings from our poll:

In our last installment we asked about capitalism versus socialism, and found that Americans are losing faith in free enterprise. Only a third privately express a positive view of capitalism, and more than 40 percent are privately open to voting for a socialist.

This week, we dive deeper into some of the most hotly contested questions in our politics. Among them: Have billionaires rigged the political system? Should we slow down data center construction, or leave it alone? Is Western civilization a force for good or not? How do Americans view Israel? And, with antisemitism on the rise, are claims about Jewish influence limited to the fringes, or widespread among the American people?

We found that: