Zero Percent of Republican Voters Are Concerned About Climate Change?
A ‘head in the sand’ polling result
This one is a little crazy, but what isn’t this year? While scanning recent polls I came across one where voters were asked what issues concerned them most. As expected the economy and the border were high on the Republican list, while women’s reproductive rights were up there with Democrats. No news there.
But one number stood out for me, a number you seldom see in polls. Zero. That was how climate issues ranked with Republicans.
Beyond my usual disclaimer about polls, this still struck me as a really strange sign of the tribal divide we have amongst voters, a divide that seems strangely removed from reality. Have the two factors that might explain this really taken that strong a hold on an entire party?
Those two factors are the spending and lying by the fossil fuels industry, and the distrust of science, i.e. facts, that seems to have infected the right, who apparently prefer to only believe things that concur with what they want, vs reality.
Denial, in other words, but denial on a massive scale and a massively dangerous scale. To me, it verifies the depressing reality that these deniers no longer pay any attention to reality and facts, even when they are watching…
