WHAT IF DEMOCRATS ARE THE NORMAL AMERICANS?

Greg Sargent writes:

It has been repeated so often that it’s become an accepted maxim: The country is “deeply polarized” over the government response to covid-19. This has become the new “culture war.” Americans now inhabit “two separate realities.” And so forth.

The new focus of this claim is the national battle that has erupted over mask mandates...

But what if the country isn’t actually that divided over the idea? ...

Two new polls suggest this possibility...

A new Politico/Morning Consult poll, for instance, finds large majorities of registered voters either strongly or somewhat support their local governments requiring masks for offices (64 percent), for indoor dining (61 percent), at gyms (62 percent) and at entertainment venues (65 percent)....

“We are finding across demographics that there is majority support for mask mandates,” Robin Graziano, a pollster for Morning Consult, told me.

Meanwhile, a new Kaiser Family Foundation poll finds that 63 percent of parents of school-age children say unvaccinated students and staff should be required to wear masks while they’re in school....

In both polls, however, only minorities of Republican respondents support the mask mandates, even as majorities of independents (and Democrats) support them....

“Republicans are really the only outliers here, with majorities of Republicans consistently opposed,” Graziano of Morning Consult told me.

I've told you over and over and over again for years that this country is divided into two groups: Republicans and Americans. On guns, on abortion, on the minimum wage, on climate change, on the Iraq War in Bush's second term, on Trump, and now on COVID, Democrats and independents have largely been in agreement. It's Republicans who are the outliers. It's Republicans who stand in the way of consensus. It's Republicans who won't let us have nice things.

And yet Republicans say they're the only real Americans -- and the mainstream media, with its endless safaris into Ohio and Pennsylvania diners full of sullen white men in ball caps and goatees, clearly agrees.

Enough. It's time for the influencers in our political world to recognize who's out of step here. Republicans are the ones who won't compromise. Republicans are the ones who create polarization. Polarization is their brand. The rest of us just want to live together as Americans. And we could, if it weren't for Republicans.