Isn't gallup one of those pollsters that still uses landline surveying? That's got to skew the numbers.

Also people not being remotely politcally engaged doesn't help much either.

"I vote democrat because the alternative are shitty and racist, but I am worried about this DEI, CRT, CBT, Trans stuff my weird uncle posted on Facebook"

I would bet it has a lot to do with everyone to the left of Attila the Hun being labelled as extremist liberals. There's almost never any pushback that someone like Biden or Obama are actually quite tame and run of the mill liberals and even AOC wouldn't qualify as an extremist.

People here don't know what extreme leftists even are. They are so fucking brainwashed that they think feeding school children is the same thing as authoritarian communism.

I straight don’t buy that these results accurately reflect the opinion of non boomer voters.

There was an article up on Slate Star Codex some time back talking about ingroups.

It's a long, kinda rambling thing, though I think that it's a worthwhile read. But one specific chunk of it talks about how there is an absolutely staggering tendency for people to become segregated into groups of politically-like-minded people. That tends to result in people having a very hard time believing that people with different political views even exist, because they don't interact much at all.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/

:::spoiler Relevant section

There are certain theories of dark matter where it barely interacts with the regular world at all, such that we could have a dark matter planet exactly co-incident with Earth and never know. Maybe dark matter people are walking all around us and through us, maybe my house is in the Times Square of a great dark matter city, maybe a few meters away from me a dark matter blogger is writing on his dark matter computer about how weird it would be if there was a light matter person he couldn’t see right next to him.

This is sort of how I feel about conservatives.

I don’t mean the sort of light-matter conservatives who go around complaining about Big Government and occasionally voting for Romney. I see those guys all the time. What I mean is – well, take creationists. According to Gallup polls, about 46% of Americans are creationists. Not just in the sense of believing God helped guide evolution. I mean they think evolution is a vile atheist lie and God created humans exactly as they exist right now. That’s half the country.

And I don’t have a single one of those people in my social circle. It’s not because I’m deliberately avoiding them; I’m pretty live-and-let-live politically, I wouldn’t ostracize someone just for some weird beliefs. And yet, even though I probably know about a hundred fifty people, I am pretty confident that not one of them is creationist. Odds of this happening by chance? 1/2^150 = 1/10^45 = approximately the chance of picking a particular atom if you are randomly selecting among all the atoms on Earth.

About forty percent of Americans want to ban gay marriage. I think if I really stretch it, maybe ten of my top hundred fifty friends might fall into this group. This is less astronomically unlikely; the odds are a mere one to one hundred quintillion against.

People like to talk about social bubbles, but that doesn’t even begin to cover one hundred quintillion. The only metaphor that seems really appropriate is the bizarre dark matter world.

I live in a Republican congressional district in a state with a Republican governor. The conservatives are definitely out there. They drive on the same roads as I do, live in the same neighborhoods. But they might as well be made of dark matter. I never meet them.

To be fair, I spend a lot of my time inside on my computer. I’m browsing sites like Reddit.

Recently, there was a thread on Reddit asking – Redditors Against Gay Marriage, What Is Your Best Supporting Argument? A Reddit user who didn’t understand how anybody could be against gay marriage honestly wanted to know how other people who were against it justified their position. He figured he might as well ask one of the largest sites on the Internet, with an estimated user base in the tens of millions.

It soon became clear that nobody there was actually against gay marriage.

There were a bunch of posts saying “I of course support gay marriage but here are some reasons some other people might be against it,” a bunch of others saying “my argument against gay marriage is the government shouldn’t be involved in the marriage business at all”, and several more saying “why would you even ask this question, there’s no possible good argument and you’re wasting your time”. About halfway through the thread someone started saying homosexuality was unnatural and I thought they were going to be the first one to actually answer the question, but at the end they added “But it’s not my place to decide what is or isn’t natural, I’m still pro-gay marriage.”

In a thread with 10,401 comments, a thread specifically asking for people against gay marriage, I was eventually able to find two people who came out and opposed it, way near the bottom. Their posts started with “I know I’m going to be downvoted to hell for this…”

But I’m not only on Reddit. I also hang out on LW.

On last year’s survey, I found that of American LWers who identify with one of the two major political parties, 80% are Democrat and 20% Republican, which actually sounds pretty balanced compared to some of these other examples.

But it doesn’t last. Pretty much all of those “Republicans” are libertarians who consider the GOP the lesser of two evils. When allowed to choose “libertarian” as an alternative, only 4% of visitors continued to identify as conservative. But that’s still…some. Right?

When I broke the numbers down further, 3 percentage points of those are neoreactionaries, a bizarre sect that wants to be ruled by a king. Only one percent of LWers were normal everyday God-‘n-guns-but-not-George-III conservatives of the type that seem to make up about half of the United States.

It gets worse. My formative years were spent at a university which, if it was similar to other elite universities, had a faculty and a student body that skewed about 90-10 liberal to conservative – and we can bet that, like LW, even those few token conservatives are Mitt Romney types rather than God-n’-guns types. I get my news from vox.com, an Official Liberal Approved Site. Even when I go out to eat, it turns out my favorite restaurant, California Pizza Kitchen, is the most liberal restaurant in the United States.

I inhabit the same geographical area as scores and scores of conservatives. But without meaning to, I have created an outrageously strong bubble, a 10^45 bubble. Conservatives are all around me, yet I am about as likely to have a serious encounter with one as I am a Tibetan lama.

(Less likely, actually. One time a Tibetan lama came to my college and gave a really nice presentation, but if a conservative tried that, people would protest and it would be canceled.) :::

There are millions of Americans who really want a non-crazy conservative to vote for. There are millions of people who just want to have a non-crazy person win an election, so their idea is that the only way the opposition to crazy Republicans to be able to win over some of those people on the right is by moving closer to them. They just want to stop losing to the crazies. There are millions who are OK with gay people but hate that the government spends too much money on everything.

America is a very conservative country, and even the Democrats are basically very conservative.

Those people who complained that the Democrats would have beat Trump if they had just moved more left have no idea how much the rest of the country doesn't feel like them.

Disagree completely. Ask people their thoughts on specific issues and they almost always skew left even if they vote right. They're just completely overwhelmed with biased news.

I don't think this is so much about what the country currently is but rather what is seems like the left is trying to make it become. That's what made them lose the elections and will continue to do so untill the rethoric coming from the left becomes more moderate.

No no, I’m sure one of the world’s oldest polling firms is doing their job wrong. I, as a random Lemmy user, surely know more about poll stratification than they do.

It’s Gallup that’s wrong!!!! /s

Is “Moderate” code for more to the right now?

"Moderate" means "closer to the other party" in US politics.

And the other party in this case is... well...

These words are meaningless. In many countries, to become more liberal is the same thing as becoming more moderate. It’s confusing to me because liberal and moderate mean one thing in the US and something else in the rest of the world. And I live in the US! After all these years, I still don’t quite understand what people mean by liberal, moderate, and conservative.

In casual US discourse, liberal is left. In context, more moderate means becoming more right-wing.

It’s confusing to me because liberal and moderate mean one thing in the US and something else in the rest of the world. And I live in the US!

In the US, "liberal" is associated with New Deal era social liberalism and today is basically used as a synonym for "the left side of the political aisle". This is complicated by two other factors:

• On many (though not all!) topics, I'd say that the center of the European political spectrum is further left than on the US political spectrum.

• Due to sheer chance, the colors are also the reverse of the European conventions. Europe has a set of political colors that get used to "bin" political parties across countries. Light blue is conservative, for example, light red is social-democratic, and so forth. The US used to use red and blue interchangeably, just because red, white, and blue were the colors on the flag and it had a nice theme around elections. They were often used when color-coding maps showing which state each candidate had won in Presidential elections, but there was no consistency. Around, I think, the Bush Jr elections, it became convention to use "red" and "blue" the opposite way they're used in Europe -- "red" is associated with the Republican Party, which is the right side of the aisle, and "blue" with the Democratic Party, the left side of the aisle.

  kagis

  Yeah, Wikipedia says that it was the 2000 elections where we got the colors assigned, so Bush Jr.:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_states_and_blue_states

Oh, and another good bit: while it's not as common in mainstream political discourse, an unqualified "libertarian" in Europe tends to refer to left-libertarianism, and an unqualified "libertarian" in the US tends to refer to right-libertarianism. And making it even more complicated, some people who would probably be called "libertarian" in the US today, like Cato, prefer to identify as "classical liberals" and are grouchy that they got the "liberal" label taken away from them by the social liberal crowd.

If the question of what "liberal" one is using is really confusing -- like, if I'm writing for an audience that is pretty European, and writing something for which this really matters and is talking about the center-left in both the US and Europe, I'll sometimes go out of my way to use "progressive" rather than "liberal", which has more-or-less the same meaning in both Europe and the US.

Exactly. +1 for user name.