Opinion

Democrats Are Really Going To Hate What Voters Consider the Top Threat to Democracy

Becky Noble   |  

Oct 19, 2022

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With just three weeks until the November midterm election, Americans are being asked a lot of questions about the state of the nation by a lot of pollsters who want to be the ones to predict the outcome of election night 2022.

While most pollsters want to know if you are a Republican or Democrat, if the election were held today who would you vote for, and do you think the country is on the right track, a new New York Times/Siena College poll asked some very interesting questions.

Questions that I’m guessing my Democrat friends would rather have not had answered. 

The general consensus among almost everyone polled on whether the country was on the right or wrong track was no, the country is on the wrong track. Of those surveyed, 86% of Republicans said wrong track and 37% of Democrats said the same. What should concern Democrats is that 65% of Independents think the country is on the wrong track.

But there’s one specific question I want to highlight that is really going to blow some minds.

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Here Is Where Things Get A Little Sticky

After the obligatory questions about possible 2024 presidential candidates and how they might fare, (incidentally, Donald Trump would beat Joe Biden 43% to 42%), the poll asked the dreaded question. 

You may have noticed that Democrats have spent a lot of time talking about “threats to democracy” and “saving democracy.” 

You also, being an adult who can detect basic patterns, may have noticed that the media, with very few exceptions, is very liberal. 

So you can imagine how much this is going to sting; out of many possible options, like Donald Trump, the electoral college, the Supreme Court, etc., the media scores as the biggest threat to democracy. 

How. Delicious. 

59% of those polled said the media was a major threat. 84% said it was either a major or minor threat.

Even 38% of Democrats pointed the finger at the media as a major threat.

On the flip side, a rather troubling consideration. Respondents were asked how to “fix democracy” – and 17% responded “We will need to go outside the law to fix our democracy.” 

Our own Kat Anderson covered this topic recently.

Ironically, back in August, a YouGov/Economist poll said that 40% of Americans believed that civil war could be likely within 10 years.

[totalpoll id=”260743″]

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More Bad News For Dems

Abortion and climate change, the two things besides Jan. 6 that Democrats seem to be running on, were far down the list of priorities for respondents.

The NYT/Siena college poll even asked voters about conservative author and commentator Dinesh D’Souza’s movie about election fraud, 2000 Mules. A surprisingly low number of Republicans, just 14%, said they knew a lot about the movie, and just 4% of Democrats.

But those that knew had strong opinions about the content and believability of what was presented in the movie. Of the Republicans that had seen the movie, 58% of Republicans said it was believable, and of course, 52% of Democrats said they were not buying it.