Saturday thread on new insurrection polling at the anniversary of the January 6th riot
While many Republicans don’t support the insurrection per se, the vast majority support what it stood for
Here’s something I missed during my recovery from covid-19 this week.
A new poll from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst sheds light on Americans’ attitudes towards Joe Biden, Donald Trump and the January 6th attempted coup. The partisan breakdown in opinions is not exactly what I expected, so I thought it worth noting, but more than that, the questions treat separately the matter of whether Americans support the insurrectionists and what they stood for. I think that is a useful distinction that ultimately tells us more about the landscape of electoral illiberalism in the US than whether, eg, Republicans support breaking windows at the Capitol or some such.
For example, the poll finds that 28% of Republicans — roughly a third of the ones who expressed an opinion — say they support law enforcement efforts to “identify, arrest, and charge individuals who participated” in the “events at the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021.” This is a good reminder that partisans are not uniform in their opinions; while our party affiliations explain a lot of what we believe and how we behave, they do not explain it all.
Now contrast this with the 62% of GOP respondents in the poll who say that Vice President Mike Pence should “definitely” or “probably” have “used his role in counting the Electoral College votes to challenge Joe Biden’s victory.” Further, 71% say Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 was “probably” or “definitely not legitimate.”
These numbers are alarming in revealing the staying power of factional narratives on election loss. Especially when our political side loses (as in a sports game), we are primed to adopt theories and believe leaders that provide comforting explanations and confirm our membership in the group. But unlike in sports, confirmation bias in politics has manifested itself as opposition to partisan opponents even when all the facts say they rightfully won. That is an extremely dangerous thing. It led to a violent insurrection last year; what could it lead to in 2022?
If we are lucky, the answer will be not much. Yet that may not be a particularly realistic optimism.
In my largely rural section of New York, a case is unfolding in which Republicans in Rennselaer forged absentee ballot applications (once spelling the name wrong) and voting. What I don't think has received sufficient media attention is the likelihood that the conviction that Democrats steal votes will be used to justify similar Republican efforts in 2022. I see no evidence that Democrats anywhere are mounting the kind of protections needed from the army of election "checkers" the GOP is planning to field. (And I'm still convinced that there weren't some of these activities in Republican areas that were never audited in 2020.)
Glad that your COVID bout is leaving you well enough to keep writing. Feel better (and Happy New Year).
ned schneier
Thanks, Elliott, and Happy New Year. A couple of observations. 1. All politics are local. This means that X% of Republicans doesn't help us count or forecast the state by state vote. 2. This page https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/12/05/1059828993/data-vaccine-misinformation-trump-counties-covid-death-rate tells us that GOP counties are losing more people to Covid than are non-Trump counties. Can we count the number of GOP votes lost and count the number of Democratic votes suppressed/lost per congressional district and per state? Probably, but I haven't done the work yet. Here's a pull quote: "94% of Republicans think one or more false statements about COVID-19 and vaccines might be true, and 46% believe four or more statements might be true. By contrast, only 14% of Democrats believe four or more false statements about the disease."
Happy New Year.