Polls: US Voters Massively Reject Fascist Policies Of Man Half Of Them Narrowly Elected
But many Republicans don't think he'll really enact them, so relax.
According to a new Washington Post-University of Maryland poll, Americans mostly don’t want Donald Trump to do most of the cruel and democracy-crushing things he promised he’ll do (Washington Post gift link). Most Republicans, however, definitely share several of Trump’s wettest dreams, especially the ones about using the military to deport everyone who’s in the country without papers, and also the ones about going after his enemies and pardoning the poor oppressed January 6 Capitol visitors. But the poll’s results for Republicans are way out of line for Americans as a whole.
Funny how Trump ended up with a narrow plurality of the vote anyway, but the poll didn’t ask about the price of groceries, so there’s that.
Here’s the kicker: Most Americans think that America’s democratic institutions will prevent Trump from becoming a dictator, if he decides to, and we’re also divided on whether he will actually try that, too.
As we noted right after the election, it’s pretty damn weird how so many American voters seem to want policies that are associated with the Left, but keep electing Republicans. These poll results suggest that lots of us feel the same about the rightwing policies of the very Republicans whom lots of us vote for anyway.
Here, have a chart from WaPo summarizing the results:
Again and again, the Post explains that while most Americans reject Trump’s anti-democratic policies, most Republicans are pretty jazzed about them, especially sending the military to conduct mass deportations. Only 42 percent of Americans are for that, but 77 percent of Republicans want that to happen. And so it goes, down the list:
Nearly 6 in 10 Republicans say they support the Justice Department investigating Trump’s enemies, whereas fewer than 4 in 10 Americans overall agree. And 60 percent of Republicans back Trump pardoning Jan. 6 convicts, almost double the 32 percent of Americans in general who feel the same.
On several other policies, there’s still a partisan divide, but Republicans are a bit less excited (on paper) about some of Trump’s fantasies. A whopping 88 percent of Americans oppose Trump jailing reporters for writing stuff he doesn’t like, and Republicans were nearly the same, at 85 percent opposed. Similarly, 72 percent of Americans oppose the idea of police using force to stop people from protesting against Trump, as do 58 percent of Republicans.
On the police using force against protesters thing, though, the crosstabs show another worrying division when you look at whether respondents “somewhat” or “strongly” oppose cops busting heads of anti-Trump protesters; 45 percent of Americans overall strongly oppose it, with 27 percent somewhat against.
Republicans are much more open to some police use of force, with only 21 percent strongly opposing it, and 37 percent just somewhat opposed. (Twenty-eight percent of Republicans “somewhat” support police violence, and 13 percent “strongly” support it, and we’ll just assume they’re all saying so on Twitter.)
Of course, those results are simply responses to abstract questions in a poll. We suspect that you would see higher Republican support for head-bustings once Fox News started showing scary anti-Trump protesters, especially if any windows get broken.
As for Trump’s desire to be a dictator, the poll shows Americans pretty divided over whether It Can Happen Here, though those in the poll mostly believe he won’t get away with it:
The poll finds 40 percent think he will try to rule as a dictator, 41 percent say he won’t and another 19 percent aren’t sure. Yet Americans widely have faith in democratic institutions, with 71 percent saying constitutional guardrails like the checks and balances of Congress and the Supreme Court would block Trump from securing total power over the country, while 25 percent think Trump would succeed if he tried.
Not surprisingly, huge partisan differences in the crosstabs on whether Trump would try to be a dictator: 75 percent of Democrats and 39 percent of independents thought Trump would try, and only 11 percent of Republicans thought so. Strangely, though, solid majorities of all groups believed he’d be stopped if he did, although Democrats were most likely to think he would get away with it, at 39 percent.
We find the poll’s lack of a “do you habitually whistle in the dark?” question to be a significant omission here.
As ever, we remain mystified by the fact that so many polls show that Trump’s “ideas” (we may go to hell just for putting those two words together) are so broadly unpopular, again, but that he is once more preparing to take office. It’s maddening, really, to know that such a monstrous figure, pushing widely disliked concepts of policies, managed to pull out a narrow win. Maybe it has something to do with this chart from University of Pennsylvania researchers, comparing top news outlets’ coverage of Project 2025 with their coverage of Joe Biden’s age throughout 2024, up through the election. On the Blusky yesterday, infomaven David Rothschild explained,
From 1/1/24 to 11/5/24 we tracked every article featured in top 20 slots on homepages of 10 major publishers. Using a combination of human oversight & AI categorization, we assign a category, topic, sub-topic to every article.
Here is how much they talked about Biden's Age v. Trump's Project 2025:
Nah, can’t be anything like that. Maybe we should just try being more like Trump, but more polite, so people will like us more.
[WaPo [gift link) / Poll crosstabs (Google Docs spreadsheet)]
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Me as a red dog sipping coffee while the room around me burns
TL;DR: Americans are by and large stupid dupes, and the media writ large are fascist-enabling assclowns.