Frankly, I’m surprised the ratio isn’t even higher.
The study of 850 college students finds 71% of Democrats would not go on a date with someone who voted for Donald Trump. Just 31% of Republicans surveyed said they would not go on a date with a Biden voter.
It also found four out of 10 Democrats would not shop at or support a business of Trump voters. Just seven percent of Republicans felt the same way about Biden voters.
Three in 10 Biden voters would not work for someone who voted for Trump. Just seven percent of Trump voters felt that way about a Biden-voting boss.
Some of those on the right are bristling at the results of the poll, with one pointing to the line that talks about dating as "terrifying."
When asked if they would be friends with someone who voted for the opposing presidential candidate, more than one in three Democrats/Biden voters (37%) said no. Just 5% of Trump voters said they could not be friends with a Biden voter.
"Democrats argue that modern GOP positions, spearheaded by former President Trump — are far outside of the mainstream and polite conversation," Axios explains.
Let's be real. Trump came down the escalator and made the ridiculous racist proclamation that “Mexicans are Rapists.” He followed that up by tossing Latino children into mini-concentration camps and trying to ban Muslims from the entire country, He tried to take on China economically alone using mostly unproductive sanctions instead of using the leverage of multiple nations via TPP and then sponsored a national wave of violent attacks against Asians. He decided he saw “both sides" with violence by White Supremacists and turned a blind eye to the danger of their gathering terrorist threat while repeatedly attacking the “Radical Left” and Black Lives Matter with threats and harassment by Federal agents, and if he’d had his way the U.S. Army. He stole a half $Billion from the military to build a ‘big beautiful wall” in the middle of the desert that fell over in the first stiff wind while the remaining parts for it are rusting out. He continued to accuse the Central Park Five of rape even after DNA proved they were completely innocent. He completely blew the initial response to Covid by listening to quacks and crackpots more than doctors and scientists, claiming it would just “go away”, downplaying tests, tracing, masks and the vaccine, promoted the hoax “cure” hydroxychloroquine and even suggested that people should drink bleach and inject ultraviolet lights under their skin to combat the virus. He stacked the SCOTUS with three justices totally opposed to reproductive freedom. The average GDP of Trump the “economic genius” was 1.7%, which is the worst aggregate since Hoover in the Great Depression. Obama’s GPD was 2.1% and Biden’s — so far — is 5.7% Trump only improved unemployment by 0.7% during his four years before the pandemic, during the pandemic it peaked at 12.3%, whereas Obama’s recovery improved from 9.9% to 4.2% (+5.7%) and Biden improved it from 6.3% to 3.5%. (+2.8%). Trump increased the deficit — largely due to the pandemic — by $2.3 Trillion, whereas Obama at his greatest differential had improved it by $900 Billion, Biden brought the deficit down by $380 Billion in his first year and is on track to reduce it by another $1.7 Trillion in his second year. He sponsored and fomented the largest domestic terrorist attack on American soil ever and directed it at the U.S. Capitol.
If you’re a reasonable Democrat who supports your own economic and reproductive freedom, equality, inclusion and the Civil Rights Act —- why in the world would you ever want to be romantically associated with someone who directly opposes all of that? For most of us being a MAGA supporter is a serious deal-breaker for some damn good reasons.
It’s a hard No. Never.
Obviously, members of the MAGA/GOP crowd are plenty upset about all this.
Some conservatives reacted angrily, and others used it as a tool to bash Democrats. None appeared interested in examining the actions of the right that led to the poll results, such as working to weaponize religion, and attacking abortion, same-sex marriage, voting rights, the Affordable Care Act, mask and vaccine mandates and social distancing, Black Lives Matter and the equality of people of color, the integrity of America's electoral systems, and Democrats themselves.
Attorney and former Trump DOJ spokesperson Sarah Isgur commented on the poll by saying it "doesn’t bode well."
Andrew Follett, a senior research analyst at the right wing Club for Growth called the lines on dating "terrifying."
(The Club for Growth, backed in large part by right wing anti-LGBTQ billionaire Dick Uihlein, spent $20 million "supporting 42 rightwing lawmakers who voted to invalidate" President Joe Biden's victory, according to The Guardian.)
Former Bush 43 White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, who regularly uses Twitter as a platform to attack those on the left and liberal policies, noted that when he worked on Capitol Hill he "never cared" what party his friends belonged to
Countless others chastised those on the left, claiming as one former Maine state senator wrote, "The party of 'tolerance?'"
Radio host Ross Kaminsky, a former board member of the climate change denying organization Heartland Institute (which for years worked to defend Big Tobacco), offered this take on the study:
So we should be tolerant of hate-speech, bigotry and partisan violence?
What about the principle that if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything? How about the idea that being silent in the face of injustice and tyranny is being complicit with it?
Apparently, young Democrats have standards, while the GOP mostly doesn’t. Democrats look at Trump and they are repulsed by his crass grifting and pandering to bigots. Republicans look at Trump, and they see themselves as they wish they could be — rich, powerful, pig-ignorant, mouthy and an unrepentant asshole.
It seems the days of relationships like that of James Carville and Mary Matalin are numbered.
The real difference of course, is while there may only be a minority of Republicans who wouldn't be willing to date a Democrat that may be because that group — particularly the growing Q-contingent of 30% of them — increasingly wants to kill us all.
On Wednesday, writing for The Bulwark, history professor Thomas Lecaque warned that the "influencers" profiting off the QAnon conspiracy theory are moving towards more and more open advocacy of bloodshed.
"QAnon is violence in its ideology, in its end goal, and in its imagination: the 'Storm,' a military coup where Donald Trump defeats the so-called 'Deep State' and arrests and executes their opponents in something very much akin to the white supremacist Turner Diaries’ Day of the Rope," wrote Lecaque. "We saw it on January 6, when coup plotters erected a makeshift gallows and shouted 'Hang Mike Pence.' That blood lust hasn’t gone anywhere, even if some humorous headlines about dissension in the Q ranks is distracting attention from the underlying bloodlust at the heart of the movement."
[...]
"Romana Didulo, who called herself the QAnon 'Queen of Canada,' called on her 70,000 Telegram followers on November 21 to murder healthcare workers, writing, 'Shoot to kill anyone who tries to inject Children under the age of 19 years old with Coronavirus19 vaccines/ bioweapons or any other Vaccines. This order is effective immediately,'" wrote Lecaque. "She changed that to arrest two days later, but not because she doesn’t want these 'traitors' dead: 'Please, use airports, hospitals, schools, stadiums, and other public venues to hold and detain all traitors. They will stay there until Military Tribunal is held for each one of them until the day they are executed via firing squad or hanging.'"
And all of this is having disastrous consequences, wrote Lecaque, noting the case of Matthew Taylor Coleman, a California surf instructor and QAnon believer who murdered his own children out of the belief that they had "serpent DNA."
That goes a little bit deeper than swiping Left or Right, I would say. 30% of us are still willing to date them, 30% of them want us dead.
Also, it appears the big divide that currently splits the country just might soon become permanent.
Politics in the United States have become an increasingly polarized affair for decades, driven largely by the right moving further to the right. Observation of political polarization is not merely anecdotal; studies repeatedly bear this out.
Now, some researchers say the partisan rift in the United States has become so extreme that the country may be at a point of no return.
According to a theoretical model's findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the pandemic failing to unite the country, despite political differences, is a signal that the U.S. is at a disconcerting tipping point.
"We see this very disturbing pattern in which a shock brings people a little bit closer initially . . . but if polarization is too extreme, eventually the effects of a shared fate are swamped by the existing divisions and people become divided even on the shock issue," said network scientist Boleslaw Szymanski, a professor of computer science and director of the Army Research Laboratory Network Science and Technology Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. "If we reach that point, we cannot unite even in the face of war, climate change, pandemics, or other challenges to the survival of our society."
As I've reported before, sociologists and experts in disaster resilience studies often observe that a "therapeutic community" surfaces in the wake of a disaster — whether that's a hurricane, wildfire, or a terrorist attack. While that was the case to some extent after 9/11, the pandemic hasn't united the nation the same way. Experts have argued that any possibility of unity was doomed from the start of the pandemic, in part because of how politically divided and polarized the nation was before the novel coronavirus began spreading. This latest paper adds to this theory, and suggests that the U.S. is so divided that it is at an irreparable point at which unity is not possible.
Put in simpler terms we may not be able to get the toothpaste back in the container. Even though major shocks of the past may have driven people to put away their partisanship, now they do the opposite and the response to a common threat, issue or danger also becomes partisan. We can’t come together on Climate Change because science has become a partisan issue. We can’t come together on the pandemic even after losing nearly 800,000 of our fellow Americans because vaccines, masks and medicine have become partisans issues.
I used to believe that the GOP and MAGA were like addicts. Hooked like junkies on racism, paranoia, conspiracy theories and bullshit. You can’t talk a addict out of their habit after they’ve grown chemically and emotionally dependent. You can only hope that one day — like Robert Downey Jr. who finally decided to quit drugs after falling so far the only thing he had to eat was a massively fucked up cheeseburger — they finally reach rock bottom, they finally come to realize the mess they’ve made of their lives and decide on their own to go a different direction.
Yeah, I don’t think that’s gonna happen. Not anymore. We’re already past rock bottom.