Nearly Half Of US Liberals Do Not Want To Be Around Trump Supporters, Poll Finds
A new poll has revealed that nearly half of American liberals do not want to be in the same company as Trump supporters. Not only that, a majority of Americans find it stressful to discuss politics with an individual who has a differing opinion on Trump.
A recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, an effort to attempt to gauge how current political trends might affect personal relationships, has found that 47 percent of Democratic Party liberals say that if they found out a friend had voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, that vote would put a strain on their relationship. As the Independent points out, this is a carryover from the “distaste” engendered by the Trump campaign among liberals and a testament to how tribal (read: partisan) the political left actually has become.
A further breakdown of the data indicates that white and more educated Democratic liberals are more likely to admit to feeling averse to being friends with Trump supporters.
As partisan as politics are purported to be, the same cannot be said of Republicans and their views of friends who they later found had voted for Democratic Party challenger Hillary Clinton. In fact, the poll revealed that only 13 percent of Republicans said that discovering a friend had voted for Clinton in November would put a strain on their relationship.
Even so, a majority — nearly six out of 10 Americans — find it “stressful and frustrating” to talk about politics with someone who has an opposing opinion of Trump. In fact, 59 percent of Americans polled agreed on this point. Women were more likely than men to feel stressed and frustrated (64 percent to 30 percent who said it was “interesting and informative” to talk politics with a person with an opposing opinion on Donald Trump). Still, 54 percent of men found it stressful and frustrating to talk politics with those with a different opinion on Trump (39 percent found such discourse interesting and informative).
It is pointed out by the Independent that a Pew Research Center poll last year revealed 47 percent of Hillary Clinton supporters did not have any friends that (at the time) would vote for Donald Trump. Only 31 percent of conservatives polled said they did not know anyone who was supportive of Clinton’s candidacy.
This is somewhat a reflection of what is referred to as the “liberal bubble,” the concept that a good many liberals tend to live in areas that are highly concentrated with others who have similar ideologies. The results of the Trump-supporters-as-viewed-by-liberals Pew research poll also bolster the idea that liberals are maintaining the attitudes where, as pointed out by an analysis by Five Thirty-eight, not only did supporters of Clinton exist in a world of perpetuating confirmation biases up until the actual election but, effectively, continue to do so by keeping their collective distance from Trump supporters.
[Featured Image by Patrick Semansky/AP Images]
