Originally published at: Americans increasingly in favor of an authoritarian crackdown, according to new poll | Boing Boing
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This feels a lot like bothsidesing. Biden voters feel Trump supporters would use violence because they have already seen them do so. Trump supporters just feel like “we know we are better than them, so they would do even worse!”
IOW, it’s observation vs projection.
On the democracy front, fascists know that they cannot win elections unless they cheat their asses off, and even that is getting harder. The small minority of dems see that democracy got them Trump, and, well, it’s really hard to tell them “trust it anyway.”
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Is that Tom Selleck? I think that is Tom Selleck! 
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according to a poll of 2,008 Americans
I dont know; does that sound like a reliable sample-size?
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When asked, "I view individuals who strongly support the [Republican/Democratic] party as a threat to the American way of
life," 47% of Trump voters said yes and 52% of Biden voters said yes.
So, the majority of Biden voters consider the Democratic party to be a threat to the American way of life? At least the Trump voters are being honest about the Republican party.
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These numbers brought to us by 40 years of Republicans undermining public trust in government and civil society and chipping away at the foundational institutions of liberal democracy. If a Syrian-style civil war or authoritarian regime comes to pass in the U.S. it will be the product of modern American conservatism.
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It’s poorly worded, but I would assume that the Biden voters were being asked about the GOP and the MAGAts were being asked about the Dems.
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I thought the /s was superfluous.
In the world we live in, sadly, the /s is never superfluous. The Onion is now as close to serious news as some, and closer than the fascist press. Poe’s Law is always invoked.
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And has been for [checks calendar] at least ten years now.
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For something that’s 50% with +/- 5% for something the size of the US, you need 385. So if randomly chosen, yes.
ETA:
Let’s get some more specific numbers. For this I’m going to assume an even split between Trump & Biden voters, using the margin of error calculator here. Population size taken from the vote counts of the 2020 election.
That’s a 95% chance of being within 3.04% of the real number for Trump voters 2.81% of the real number for Biden Voters
All of the others are going to be along the same scale, with the smaller numbers more accurate.
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If it’s a fair sample, representative of the US population in general, it’s plenty. Around a thousand people is enough for most purpose, no matter how big the population.
This is a deeply uninituitive thing about statistics, but it’s true.
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That tracks. Approx. 2000 respondents seems to be the industry standard for sample size. The methodological problems of polls occur in other areas.
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Over twenty.
Bush concluded his speech on a note of healing and redemption.
“We as a people must stand united, banding together to tear this nation in two,” Bush said. “Much work lies ahead of us: The gap between the rich and the poor may be wide, be there’s much more widening left to do. We must squander our nation’s hard-won budget surplus on tax breaks for the wealthiest 15 percent. And, on the foreign front, we must find an enemy and defeat it.”
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It so much is. Assuming they framed it so they were asking the pollens about the other party for each of the either/or questions, this one is especially annoying:
Without defining what they mean by “the American way of life,” this is pretty meaningless.
Republicans can’t even explain their platform, ffs, didn’t even update it for Trump’s second run. So supporting that party is just blindly supporting the side that “hurts the right people.”
Dems, otoh, have a platform based on narrowing the wealth gap, providing basic human rights to all, and protecting the environment from rampant capitalism, at least to some extent.
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That number is adequate for the standard of a margin of error computed (as 1/sqrt(N) → 3% for N>1000) for a proper random sampling. Can you get a ‘proper random sample’ by robotically phoning up people until you get over a ~1000 who will take your survey? no. That’s not a proper random sample of the populace; that’s more like phone people up randomly until you discover the highly non-random skewed set who will answer an unknown incoming number and bother to take a survey. Some would be so snarky as to say it’s a way to discover stupid people who would be more “in favor of an authoritarian crackdown”
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Using 2008-registered voters seems like it would skew too old.
Did they use the party declared during the Bush administration? A lot has changed, the Republican party has shrunk and radicalized. It looks more like they asked which party the respondents considered themselves, which also has problems.
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That’s a count, not a year.
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