Among Republicans, 82% say they have a close friend who is a member of the other party, compared with 64% of Democrats, according to the NBC News poll.
Despite a polarized, partisan political environment, most voters who consider themselves a member of a party say they have a close friend on the other side of the aisle, according to the latest national NBC News poll.
Self-identified moderate Republicans (87%) were 8 points more likely to say they have a close Democratic friend than conservative Republicans (79%). By the same token, moderate Democrats (78%) were 21 points more likely to say they have a close friend who is a Republican than liberal Democrats (57%).
Among voters categorized as “core” GOP supporters, 77% have a close Democratic friend, while 90% of “soft” Republican voters do. There was a similar gap between “core” Democratic voters, at 57%, and “soft” Democrats, at 73%, when it comes to having a close Republican friend.
I don’t think it’s good, I think it’s unavoidable. For decades the right has been a party of, for lack of a better term, evil. However, they’d hidden it under a cloak of libertarianism/freedom and religiosity. This gave them plausible deniability. Sure, some voters were responding to dog whistles or were otherwise drawn in by the undercurrent of evil, but it was forgivable to vote conservative because the cloak gave them plausible deniability.
Trump threw away the cloak. He’ll bring out a fragment of it and wave it around when someone points out hypocrisy, but it’s so transparently performative that the plausible deniability is gone. Those in power on the right are openly greedy, hateful, petty, dishonest, racist, authoritarian, fascist, etc. Anyone who still supports them has to either be so ignorant and frustrating to deal with that they aren’t worth your time or so willfully ignorant that they are difficult to forgive.
I still think they can figure it out, but the leopard will likely need to eat their face and the faces of everyone they love and go on a villainous “This was my plan all along mwahahahah” speech before that happens. Or Trump will just say “AI, Fake News” and they’ll find more loved ones’ faces to feed them.