It’s only one data point or measure of where things stand politically today in America, but the latest Gallup survey shows something that really ought to be impossible:
Americans’ views of the two major U.S. political parties remain more negative than positive, but the Republican Party’s favorability is now slightly better than the Democratic Party’s.
Both parties’ images have shifted slightly since last year, with the GOP’s favorable rating edging up four percentage points to 44% and the Democratic Party’s rating slipping by the same amount, to 39%.
With the government gridlocked on many things, inflation high, and markets reeling, I can understand why neither party gets high marks from the public, but I can’t think of a single reason why the Republicans’ position should have improved over the last year.
But the aggregate generic ballot question confirms it. A year ago, the public preferred that the Democrats control congress by a 45.1 to 41.7 percent margin, and today the split is down to 45.4 to 44.2 percent.
Yes, the Dems still show a slight advantage in the most important predictor of the upcoming midterm elections, but as with the Gallup results, we see the Republicans inching up.
On October 3, 2021, Biden’s upside-down approval numbers stood at 45.0 positive and 48.9 negative. Today, he gets the thumb’s up from only 42.1 percent compared to 51.9 percent who are dissatisfied. Personally, I have difficulty understanding why the president’s numbers haven’t improved, at least modestly, after a very productive summer. But it definitely looks like he’s a drag on the whole party.
What’s most perplexing is not that Biden is unpopular, nor that his party is treading water, but that the public hasn’t grown more negative about the Republicans. We certainly see indications that the public is not keen on many individual Republican candidates for office. Many of them appear too far out of the mainstream for the electorate’s taste. But this doesn’t seem to be reflected in the broader image of the GOP.
I’m also not sure what’s more urgent: to figure out what the Democrats are doing wrong or what the Republicans are doing right?
I don’t get it either. I don’t understand how people are drawn towards a party hell bent on taking away our rights (what’s left of it). What makes those voters think they are safe? Especially those who claim to care about their individual rights and freedoms when it suited them, but seem willing to give it up to those fascists they support.
~40% of the population are right-wing authoritarians who just want a rightful authority figure to tell them what to do, and really want to make their way down their own lists of people who they don’t identify with.
There are many reasons for this.
US citizens have been thoroughly propagandized against supporting the Democratic Party because the Democratic Party hates America and secretly supports communism. This has been ongoing since the 1930s.
~30% “Crazification Factor”, people who are generally just fucking crazy and believe in non-sense, and they’re almost always going to go with the Political Party who supports their fucking crazy beliefs.
~40% of any population in any given location are right-wing authoritarians who are itching for a rightful authority figure to give them the go-ahead to murder the people they don’t identify with.
The Democratic Party’s partial capture by Corporate America that turns off lefties who are so ideologically pure that they’d rather cut their own throat than let a Democrat give them $100 before kicking them in the crotch.
Etc.
The only thing Republican and Democratic support numbers show is the percentage the population that is paying attention at any given time.
About 45% of the population is aware that the Republican Party is a direct threat against democracy, freedom, and the livelihoods of millions of Americans. Honestly, we’re lucky it’s this high given the above assault on reality, paired with most Americans having a hard enough time staying fed and indoors.
About 40% of the population is cheering on the Republican threat against democracy, freedom, and the livelihoods of millions of Americans. These are the people who we should encourage to not get vaccinated, not wear their seatbelts, and stop breathing altogether if we can figure out a way to make breathing something that libtards do because they hate America.
About 10% of the population are too fucking stupid to vote but meet all voting requirements and will vote. These are the dumb mother fuckers who end up determining how fucked this country will get, and will fall with whichever way the wind is blowing, or whichever way their Facebook feed is flowing.
About 5% of the population are name-brand voters who only drink Coca Cola or Pepsi, only drive Fords or Chevys, and only vote for Republicans or Democrats…feel free to mix-and-match the categories, and like the 10% above, are the dumb mother fuckers who end up determining how fucked this country will get. This is the group of people whose name-brand schtick might have been the most affected by COVID and vaccinations, as the Republican name-branders hopefully forwent vaccinations because they are truly free and have an immune system or whatever.
That’s just my back-of-my-brain meta on the numbers themselves. All of that said, the amount of people who are actually aware of societal collapse occurring everywhere, right now, is probably 5%, and that’s the most scary number, because when the other 95% finally see it, things are going to get real bad. Eco-fascism bad.
Thank you. Your comment helped me better understand what we are up against and how we got here. I just wish we had a better plan to fight against this evil force that has taken over the GOP. I’ll repeat a phrase taken from an Italian proverb that I heard from one of my favorite k-dramas, Vincenzo. “It takes a devil to drive out another devil”. That line really resonated and perfectly represented the overall theme of the drama. Democratic leaders can’t be the monster but I sure wish we had a Vincenzo on our side right now.
Do you have a citation for the ~40% of any population being right-wing authoritarian? I admit it’s been a minute since I’d read any of Bob Altemeyer’s work, but a thought that the percentage was closer to ~25-30% of any population. Obviously too high for my comfort. But yeah, contemporary references would actually be helpful to something I’ll be writing soon. Otherwise, I think you hit a lot of the demographic side of the equation on the head.
The numbers are “back of my brain” numbers, nothing that has necessarily been measured.
That said, I’ll cite two recent elections, 2020 US and 2022 France, in which no less than 40% of the population looked at the candidates and decided to go with the outright fascist candidate for any number of “reasons”. Wiki links below that just show the election percentage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_French_presidential_election
And that’s not to mention any number of elections all across the world where more than 40% of the population looks at the candidates and say yeah, let’s go with the fascist one, what could go wrong.
Finally, if you want an actual measurement, there is this study from 2021.
https://morningconsult.com/2021/06/28/right-wing-authoritarianism-international-study-methodology/
That said, the study only goes with “high right-wing authoritarianism” vs. “low right-wing authoritarianism”. which is kind of like saying you’re either autistic or not-autistic, when we know it’s a sliding scale “spectrum”. In fact, the RWA scale goes from 20 – 180, meaning that “high rwa vs low rwa” is an arbitrary distinction. Instead of low vs. high, I’d bet there’s a more accurate line that could delineate “not really rwa” vs “rwa”.
Here’s a link to the original book, and it’s on page 14 or so where the scale is described.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxxylK6fR81rckQxWi1hVFFRUDg/view?resourcekey=0-WGxUhtR8lhJdnFck4tTIyA
Yes! I agree with this. Republicans are pretty much always willing to back their candidates and party regardless of how crappy their leaders are (Trump, Bush, Bush etc.) But Dems tend to voice their disappointment in Democrats. This trend that Booman is pointing out makes perfect sense to me and seems to always happen. The only surprise for me is that Martin is surprised 😉
I would like to see other polls before reaching a conclusion about this. As of last month, Biden’s numbers were going up, as was positive talk about Democrats. Did the public mood change so quickly or did the narrative reporters and analysts are telling change? Was there some major happening that shook things up? Suddenly I heard reporters talking about gas prices ticking up, but I haven’t seen it on the ground. Gallup has been guilty in the past of oversampling Republicans in their polls, based on assumptions about who is actually going to vote.
I’d say that n1cholas makes some excellent points and gives us some much needed perspective. I’d add to it that we just suck when it comes to giving the public a simple, easy-to-understand message that doesn’t feel like it was concocted at some Ivy League university. I just happened to be home when my wife had on MSNBC and one of the topics was what was going on with the Latino vote. I’ll set aside the fact that there are multiple Latino cultures with their own unique vantagepoints. But one thing apparently one pollster did was to probe a bit and find out what their opinion of Democrats was after policy positions they’d enacted and otherwise pushed for were explained to them in just ordinary language. Suddenly the Democrats looked a hell of a lot better. One other thing – Dems need to stop playing nice. That CPAC tweet that had the #AmericaFirst hashtag demanding we stop giving aid to Ukraine, that got boosted by MTG and the other usual suspects? That’s fifth column crap right there. Call it that. Almost a century ago, the last “America First” movement was coopted by actual German Nazis. Those caught did some time as a consequence. This time around it’s likely Putin, and however clandestinely he can get some Rubles deposited into their offshore accounts. Call them traitors. Force them to defend themselves. They may be shameless, but some low info voters might just notice and wonder why someone would support fascism, and why they’re even on a ballot.
We’ve traded blue collar workers, for college graduates. Our policies are worker-friendly, but our language, our approach, is all top-down arrogance: we’d like to raise your minimum wage, but first get your pronouns right. We are now the elitist party. We don’t speak English, we speak acadamese, the language of smug and self-satisfied intellectuals. 60% of the country is not college-educated. What’s our message to those people? Go to college peasants, elevate yourself intellectually, so you can level up and be one of us. Join the Eloi.
The Democratic Party exists to feed the hungry, treat the sick, shelter the homeless and defend the oppressed. We are supposed to be the party of the little guy. But right now someone is reading this comment and being annoyed that I used a gendered term like, ‘guy.’ Democrats come off as smug, condescending and obsessed with irrelevancies.
We haven’t been the party of the little guy in decades now