Poll: Americans Believe Republicans Are Better at Preserving Democracy Than Democrats
A new Fox News poll shows that more Americans trust Republicans than Democrats when it comes to preserving the nation’s democracy.
Put aside for a moment that we are a constitutional republic.
The findings of the survey must be perplexing to Democrats who have done their best over these last 18 months or so to brand Republicans as insurrectionists or Jim Crow white supremacists or at least tolerant of both.
Participants in the Fox poll were asked which political party would “do a better job” concerning several issues.
One was the “preservation of American democracy.” Forty-six percent of respondents said Republicans would do a better job, 45 percent answered Democrats, 3 percent said both parties would do equally well, and 6 percent said they didn’t know.
The survey was conducted from Friday to Monday — the days immediately following the first Jan. 6 committee hearing — and consisted of 1,002 registered voters randomly sampled nationwide with a margin of error of +/- 3 percent.
This is going to cause some heads on Twitter to absolutely explode
Republicans are winning the “preserve Democracy” argument with votershttps://t.co/BeZaeYMQLU pic.twitter.com/hdX5oC0AZT
— Logan Dobson (@LoganDobson) June 16, 2022
During that first day of Jan. 6 hearings, committee chairman Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi said that then-President Donald Trump — a Republican, of course — was at the center of a conspiracy to “subvert American democracy.”
“The cause of our democracy remains in danger. The conspiracy to thwart the will of the people is not over,” he added. “Jan. 6 and the lies that led to insurrection have put two and a half centuries of constitutional democracy at risk.”
To be clear, we live in a constitutional republic, not a democracy. Hence we have three branches of government, with power divided between them, checks and balances, etc.
Further, the Constitution only delegates certain enumerated powers to the federal government and includes a Bill of Rights, which lists the liberties the central government cannot lawfully infringe upon.
In saying U.S. democracy is still in danger, Thompson seemed to be referencing the Democrats’ other favorite talking point besides Jan. 6: that Republicans are perpetrators of the “big lie” that the 2020 elections lacked integrity.
However, the vast majority of Americans have at least some concerns stemming from the 2020 elections.
An ABC News/Ipsos poll released on the first anniversary of the Jan. 6 incursion this year showed only 20 percent of respondents said they were “very confident” in the integrity of the U.S. electoral system overall. Another 39 percent said they were “somewhat confident,” 27 percent “not so confident” and 14 percent “not confident at all.”
So 80 percent of those surveyed had some level of concern about the integrity of our elections.
When asked whether Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election was legitimate, 33 percent said they felt his victory was “not legitimate.”
Regardless, Democrats, including Biden himself, have hammered Republicans’ election reform legislation implemented at the state level.
Biden repeatedly called the changes made to Georgia’s election law “Jim Crow 2.0.”
Yet last month, far more Georgians cast ballots in the state’s primary elections, including for Democrat Stacey Abrams, than voted in the last gubernatorial primary in 2018.
Americans know when politicians are trying to play them for political gain. That’s what the Jan. 6 committee and the “Jim Crow 2.0” stuff are all about.
And having evaluated everything that has happened these last couple of years, more trust Republicans than Democrats to preserve our way of life.
A version of this article originally appeared on Patriot Project.
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