A new poll, unsurprisingly, finds that Republicans overwhelmingly blame Democrats for the shutdown, despite the fact that Individual-1, before the fact, proudly took ownership of any shutdown. Facts don’t mean much on the dark side. But there’s something that doesn’t seem to compute here. Here are the results:
The percentages given don’t add up to 100 because “no opinion” and “neither” are not counted. The overall numbers are fairly close to the numbers for Independents. If one assumes the number of self professed (I’m assuming that’s the only way the pollster knows party affiliations) Democrats and Republicans are roughly equal, you’d think the overall percentage of people blaming the Republicans would be slightly higher than it is, since Democrats are far more unanimous in correctly assigning blame than Republicans are in buying into Fox propaganda.
Anyway, it seems to me it would be helpful if pollsters supplied the percentage of respondents that identify with the parties. I’m sure if you sat down with these numbers and fiddled with them for awhile, dredging up the algebra we all learned years ago, you could come up with a rough estimate of the relative number of Dems, Independents, and Idiots, but, for my own part, I’m way too lazy. Again, at first blush, it looks like these numbers imply that there are more Independents than adhere to either party, and more self professed Republicans than Democrats. It’s hard to believe that the latter conclusion is true in reality. I suspect that the percentage of self professed Republicans is declining, which explains the near unanimity with which those remaining adhere to Herr Trump. There must be a lot of somewhat rational former Republicans that have jumped ship. Could be wrong, of course.
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