According to the CBS News/YouGov poll of Virginia released this morning, Hillary Clinton holds a solid 8-point lead (45%-37%) over Donald Trump among likely voters, with Gary “Sun Will Consume Earth in a Few Billion Years So Burn Lots of Coal” Johnson at 7% and nutty Jill Stein at 1% (which is 1% too high if you ask me). Voters for Clinton and Trump are pretty well locked in, although believe it or not – after an interminable presidential campaign – there still are some (16%-17%) who say they could change their mind.
Another interesting finding is that only a minority of Trump and Clinton voters are supporting their candidate mainly because the voters LIKE their candidate. Instead, they’re either voting for Trump or Clinton because of party loyalty or out of opposition to the other candidate. In the case of Trump, for instance, only 38% of his voters say their main reason to support him is that they like him, while 15% go with party loyalty and a whopping 46% mostly oppose Hillary Clinton (yes, years of lies about her in the right-wing media have paid off).
Anyway, there are a lot more details you can see here. For a minute, though, I just want to focus on the following table on how Virginians feel about major issues. This table fascinates me, because it shows how bad a job: a) people do in determining what is really something to be “scared” of and what isn’t; and b) what an absolutely horrendous, irresponsible job that media has done for years in whipping up fears about certain things and not others. For instance:
In fact, by FAR the most threatening thing on this list is global warming, as it constitutes both a massive CURRENT menace as well as a potentially planet-trashing FUTURE catastrophe. Yet only 20% of Virginians say they are “scared” about this, while 28% aren’t even bothered by it? Amazing.
As for the two items Virginians are MOST scared about – terrorism (50%) and the national debt (43%) – I can’t even express how absurd that is. In fact, You’re more likely to be fatally crushed by furniture than killed by a terrorist — that’s right, falling furniture! LOL But think about; how many times do you see the media reporting on the dangers of falling furniture – let alone the big killers of Americans, like heart disease, cancer, strokes, car accidents, gun violence, etc, etc. – compared to their obsession with terrorism, particularly the right wingnuts’ favored (albeit bigoted and utterly nonsensical) phrase “Islamic terrorism?”
As for the national debt, again, people are scared of it…why? Sure, it’s an issue, but it’s quite manageable, as evidenced by super-low interest rates, also the fact that the deficit has plummeted under President Obama, the fact that the current debt/GDP ratio “is quite manageable,” and that the budget deficit is eminently fixable.
Finally, I think we’ve identified Trump voters in the 21% who say they are “scared” of “cultural change.” Translate “cultural change” to “growth in the share of non-whites and non-evangelical-Christians in the population,” and you pretty much have put your finger on one of the main drivers behind Trump’s support. And yeah, that’s “deplorable.”
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