Most voters not moved by Dems' Jan. 6 obsession
Utah voters who tuned into Monday night’s Senate debate were treated to something relatively rare in the 2022 election: a candidate putting Jan. 6, 2021, front and center in his closing argument. Independent Evan McMullin seized upon texts Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) sent to the White House indicating a willingness to help President Donald Trump contest the 2020 election results, saying Lee “betrayed your oath to the Constitution.”
Despite the well-publicized Jan. 6 hearings, including the likely final one, held last week, the insurrection has not been an overarching focus of Democrats’ 2022 campaign messaging. Politico reported last week that Jan. 6 has featured in less than 2 percent of ads run for House Democrats.
This lacuna in their messaging comes even as most House Republicans supported Trump’s baseless last-ditch election challenges that led to the attack on the Capitol, and even as a majority of the GOP’s most prominent candidates have either denied or questioned the 2020 election results.
Indeed, a new poll reinforces that Democrats haven’t really driven the argument home. Many Americans view Trump as a major threat to democracy. But the Republican Party more broadly? Not so much.
A New York Times/Siena College poll shows that 45 percent of Americans regard Trump as a “major” threat to democracy, while just 28 percent say the same of the GOP.
That 28 percent figure is actually smaller than the percentage who view the Democratic Party as a threat to democracy (33 percent) — despite there being no comparable example of Democrats trying to overturn an election. (And no, Stacey Abrams and Hillary Clinton aren’t analogous.)
Some of this is partisanship — along with Republicans’ successful attempts to play up the issue of voter fraud, despite the utter lack of evidence that it’s a major problem in American elections. Polls have long shown Republicans and Democrats view the other side as a threat to democracy, but for very different reasons.
But if you dig a little deeper, you’ll see that isn’t the full story: It’s also the case that many Democratic voters haven’t been convinced that the problem goes beyond Trump.
The poll shows that 71 percent of Trump 2020 voters regard Democrats as a major threat to democracy. But just 52 percent of Biden voters say the same about the GOP.
And independents are significantly more likely to view Democrats as a major threat than Republicans. Although more than 6 in 10 view each party as at least a minor threat, just 23 percent view the GOP as a major threat, while 31 percent say the same of Democrats. Independents are actually more likely to view voting by mail as a major threat to democracy (31 percent) than the GOP.
...
I do not think either party wants to do away with elections or democracy. It is still the only way to power in the US and that is unlikely to change. When there have been arguments over elections they have been over whether they were honest and fair or whether the vote count was accurate. And both parties have made those claims after losing a close election.
When Trump disputes an election outcome, Democrats and their media cohorts immediately reject the assertion and resist any study of the accuracy of the vote count. When Democrats dispute an election it is time to have a study of the votes. See, Bush v. Gore. Dems want to act like Jan. 6 was a big deal but ignore the Dem riots that followed Republican elections. I am old enough to have witnessed Democrat riots after Nixon was elected.
See, also:
Comments
Post a Comment