American Eagle’s latest ad campaign featuring Sydney Sweeney managed to light up social media with accusations of “Nazi-esque” undertones — but the polling says the outrage brigade was more of a vocal fringe than a national movement.
The campaign itself was straightforward: Sweeney modeling several styles of American Eagle jeans with the tagline, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” The double entendre was obvious, and for most people, harmless.
But online critics, grasping at the homonym, claimed the brand was sending a coded message about her “genes” — an insinuation that, because Sweeney is white, blonde, and blue-eyed, the ad was somehow trafficking in racial superiority themes.
According to a new Economist/YouGov poll, however, just 12% of Americans found the ad “offensive.” Nearly four times that number either thought it was “clever” (39%) or didn’t care one way or the other (40%). The supposed national firestorm? Mostly confined to the social media echo chamber.
YouGov has Sweeney data - 12% of Americans find it offensive.
The gender gap is bigger than the political gap on whether the ad is “offensive” (7% of men, 17% of women)
Men are also more likely to find the ad “clever” (49% of men, 31% of women). pic.twitter.com/SMQGsWM66S
— Will Jordan (@williamjordann) August 12, 2025
The political breakdown is telling: 18% of Democrats took offense, compared to just 7% of Republicans and 13% of independents. Even among Democrats, more respondents labeled the ad “clever” (22%) than “offensive.” Independents (38%) and Republicans (57%) were far more likely to see the humor.
The gender gap was even sharper. Women were more than twice as likely as men to call the ad offensive (17% vs. 7%), but still, far more women (31%) saw it as clever — and among men, that number jumped to nearly half (49%).
By race, black respondents were slightly more likely to view the ad as offensive (16%) than white (12%) or Hispanic respondents (7%). But in all groups, those calling it “clever” outnumbered the offended: 21% of black Americans, 43% of white Americans, and 40% of Hispanic Americans.
The poll, conducted August 9–11 among 1,635 adults, drives home the reality that viral outrage doesn’t always translate into widespread public sentiment. On the internet, a handful of critics can dominate the conversation. In the real world, most Americans either chuckled at the wordplay — or just shrugged and went on with their day.