Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 09:42 pm
Fifty-two percent of Republicans think that President-elect Donald Trump won the popular vote according to an online Qualtrics survey, Eric Oliver and Thomas Wood wrote Sunday in The Washington Post.
In fact, Trump won with one of the lowest percentages of the popular vote in history. Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by over 2.8 million in the popular vote.
“Respondents’ correct understanding of the popular vote depended a great deal on partisanship. A large fraction of Republicans — 52 percent — said Trump won the popular vote, compared with only 7 percent of Democrats and 24 percent of independents. Among Republicans without any college education, the share was even larger: 60 percent, compared with 37 percent of Republicans with a college degree.”
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These numbers aren’t just something to mock Trump supporters over, they are actually indicative of the larger problem Democrats face in the age of partisan media that denies truth. As another example, Politico determined that Republicans’ views on Putin are shifting to more favorable with Donald Trump’s refusal to criticize the Russian President, “Back in July 2014 just 10 percent of Republicans held a favorable view of Putin, according to a poll conducted by the Economist and YouGov. By September of 2016, that number rose to 24 percent. And it’s even higher today: 37 percent of Republicans view Putin favorably, the poll found in December.”
Republicans keep repeating that Donald Trump has a mandate, but he doesn’t. Conservative CNN contributor David Frum corrected conservatives saying the people “didn’t speak” because “Donald Trump won 0.35 points more of the popular vote than Michael Dukakis in 1988.”
This didn’t start with the “fake news” crisis that hit our country during the 2016 election. It started a long time ago with Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. It started when we partisan “news” sources were picked up to play to our troops in their lunchroom and around base.
When I lived in the South, it frustrated me to hear Northern progressives say Democrats just needed to be more liberal in the South to win. They needed to articulate their message more, these folks claimed.
But it was pointless to try to sell positive messages to people who had been cultivated to reject any incoming message from Democrats as immoral. They got this message from Fox News and Right wing talk shows.
Now I live in Midwestern Trump country and I can attest to the fact that anyone who believes Democrats lost the 2016 election because they didn’t have a good economic message or didn’t articulate it well doesn’t live in a place like this or spend time with “real Americans.” They didn’t hear the positive message, they do not care to and there is nothing you can say that will get through to them.
They believe Democrats are evil. You can’t sell policies to people who only see the Devil.
This kind of inability and unwillingness to deal with facts has been a long time coming for the Republican Party, but the Russians are now taking full advantage of a segment of the population who’ve been raised on Right wing Kool-Aid to not trust any news source that isn’t Republican/conservative.
Not being able to hang on to a fact or use a fact to defend ourselves is actually part of Step One of Russian subversion activities against the U.S.; “demoralization.â€
“A person who has been demoralized is unable to accept true information; the facts tell nothing to him,†Yuri Bezmenov, an ex-KGB officer and Soviet defector, said in a 1984 interview.
“The goal of this process is to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite the abundance of information, no one is able to come to a sensible conclusion in the interests of defending themselves, their families, their communities, and their country,” he explained.
“It takes 10-15 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years it requires to educate one generation of students in the country.â€
We are looking at the results of Republican efforts to dumb-down our schools, change history books to fit an inaccurate world view they cultivated and fed to their voters, denigrate intellectualism to the point where an alarming number of citizens can’t think critically, coupled with a steady diet of feel-good, confirmation-bias and assumptions of morally-superior beliefs and a co-opting of Christianity itself tinged Right wing news.
Conservatives will argue that liberals do that too, but it’s time for liberals to stop being guilt-tripped into denying reality. The reality is that only one side of this equation is so far gone from reality that they believe Donald Trump won the popular vote. They also believe a host of false crimes attributed to Hillary Clinton by Right wing news and fake news.
Democrats, liberals, independents and patriotic Republicans can’t afford to play “fair” and “nice” right now. They’ve been doing that for too long, frankly and their calmness and rationality in the face of ongoing Republican assaults on reality has been something to aspire to for leaders but it is also being dangerously exploited now.
Our country is under attack, war has been declared on our democracy. There aren’t two sides to this story. There is only one side.
While the Republican Party isn’t a cult, it is sharing some frightening similarities with cult identifiers. That close-minded cult-thinking is what made us vulnerable to this Russian attack and it is what is covering it up right now.
Hang on to reality like it is your lifeboat. The reality is Donald Trump was chosen by Putin, not the people of this country and any patriot would want this act of war investigated and stopped.
Listen to Sarah on the PoliticusUSA Pod on The Daily newsletter podcast here.
Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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