From Mediaite: SHOCK POLL: Majority of Trump Voters Now in Favor of Seceding from the Union
A shocking new poll from the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia reveals that over half of Trump voters surveyed, and 41% of Biden voters, are in favor of blue and/or red states seceding from the union. Yeah, it’s gotten that bad.
The idea that the nation’s political divide has become so toxic that we should prepare from some sort of “national divorce” has largely been left to clever thought experiments best left for dinner parties and ironically detached columns. However, we’ve now arrived at a point where more than half of Trump voters “somewhat agree” that the time for secession is nigh.
Yeah, I expect this is a lot like the Brexit polling: leaving sounds great to some folks until you get down to brass tacks about what “leaving” means.
You’re going to probably not like losing access to the ports of Los Angeles and New York, and you don’t get to take the US Army and Navy with you, so that means you don’t get the naval shipyards either.
You’re going to wind up having to redraw territories in order to make an even remotely just separation and there’s still going to be tons of people of either inclination on the wrong side of their respective line.Report
Maybe we could get Obama to campaign against it, the way he campaigned against Brexit.Report
And bluntly, okay Texas secedes. Then Austin, Houston, and San Antonio (and possibly Dallas) secede from Texas and rejoin the US.
There aren’t “red” and “blue” states.
And despite how they sneer at the cities, rural areas depend on them for survival.
For starters, Houston’s ICU’s wouldn’t be full except for all the folks from rural areas who have been carted in for COVID.Report
On the one hand I’m unsurprised – when you are a lefty living in Red country things like this get said ALL the time. On the other hand, you’d think Republican politicians might sit up and take note that their own often poll-averse constituents want to rob them of their national political power – and that if we did split states along red and blue lines the red states wouldn’t have blue states propping them up economically. Never mind what you do with the purple states.Report
“the red states wouldn’t have blue states propping them up economically”
There are too many wild cards to make any kind of prediction about that. I mean, if there were a split, I know I’d move. Would you? A lot depends on the different scenarios, but let’s say 15% of the former US population would move. Split currencies, with urbanized versus rural inflation rates. No idea what would happen to food prices. (Like, actually, no idea. Like, the US agricultural market is so distorted by policy that no one has any idea what would happen under a regime change.) Trade policy? Debt responsibility? Treaties?
Beyond that, I see a ratcheting effect in your comment, as if to say, we don’t want to split, but I think it’d be a good idea. It’s easy to see how that could turn into pro-split in four years.Report
Serious question. Are there voices of reason on the right I’m not aware of? Not the Never Trumpers, but other conservatives of influence making a case for working through these things together?Report
I’d have to understand your taxonomy. I don’t think there are many people of either party who are out there passionately talking about compromise. Likewise, I don’t see many passionately talking about sustaining the Union, because that’s really not a question on the table. There are a lot of people on the right who want to win on the issues and think they’ve got a reasonably fair chance to do so. My hunch is, they constitute a solid majority of the right. I assume that a good 20% of all people (on either/no side) polled will pick the angriest option the pollster gives them no matter what. How many of those people on the right will vote for the most conservative option they’re given in 2022? Most of them.
ETA: Ick, this comment is so rambling. Too much ground to cover.Report
I guess I mean a force or faction of significance that realizes the Reagan moment has passed but that also isn’t too keen on destroying institutions just for the sake of one man’s vanity project. Obviously these things play out differently in right and left but if I had to give you a parallel on the other side it would be something like the heterodox liberal breakaways gaining traction via Substack and Patreon. There’s obviously still a broad swathe of the larger leftosphere that feels it isn’t being served well by its side’s official narrative but is also in no danger of becoming Republican. I guess I’m asking if something like that exists on the other side. Important dissidents that are not perceived as RINOs or whatever the nomenclature is.Report
SO far as I can tell, the Never Trumpers/Lincoln Project sign-ons are as close as you get, and they have been labeled RINOs by the Trumpists and blackballed.
At the rank and file level, I know a good many conservatives who are reregistering as Independents and lamenting the loss of their Republican party roots.Report
“On the one hand I’m unsurprised – when you are a lefty living in Red country things like this get said ALL the time.”
agreed. i mentally file it under “i’m moving to canada” temper tantrums and just wait for the topic to change. or giggle, which doesn’t land great. but like, bruh, if you’re going to say redonkulous things then, like, duh? (this also doesn’t land great)
the amount of chaos involved in a massive change like a secession is not something which as been fully thought out even a teeny little bit. it’s emoting on a very silly scale about something which, if possible, would be quite serious indeed.
ETA – it’s also a poll of 2000 people, which weirdly enough didn’t make it into many writeups in the first graf.Report
In my opinion, this is the result of an assault on the United States. By both foreign powers and some at home abetting them. I realize this sounds conspiracy theory ish, and yet, the Internet Research Agency, for instance, is a very real thing, with a mission statement that comprises doing exactly this to us.
In contrast, Rupert Murdoch, for instance, does it for money. He’s not even American, what does he care? You know, in lots of countries there are laws insisting that large media have local ownership. Maybe we should do that?
I mean, we could have come together to fight a threat that has killed more Americans than WW1, WW2, Korea, and Vietnam put together did. External threats have a way of uniting people. But no, we had to turn it into a culture war.
I’m in a bad mood for a lot of reasons today. This doesn’t help it.Report
I dunno. My wife periodically says if they want to leave we should let them. But i think we all know that the real divide is urban/rural, not the color coding CNN uses on election night. Even in the deep south the cities are pretty blue and it can get quite red in the sticks in any state, no matter the make up of the Congressional delegation. I think we’re all stuck together, which is fine by me.Report
If you try to take your ball and go home every time something doesn’t go your way, you can’t have a democracy. I have lived with many, many things not going my way. I think they can do the same.
I hope they are just being mouthy. I’m afraid that it’s more than that.Report
I think it mostly comes from naivete of what it really would mean.Report
Many of the proponents of “divorce” are not being mouthy and they think that it would work out just fine because 1) they control the food; 2) the military would intervene on their side; and 3) liberals are too busy trying to take everyone’s guns to learn how to shoot. Or so I was told last night. Which means they are misreading the likely outcomes badly.Report
Rural California just voted to make a shock jock governor, so right you are.Report
I wouldn’t want to see a split, and I can’t imagine many scenarios which could occur in my lifetime that would lead me to support it. But I’ve never been able to articulate a set of principles that would endorse the Declaration of Independence and forbid secession.Report
Disclosure: Writing as someone who asserts their retirement hobby is exploration of the research question, “Are there conditions under which the 13-state American West, plus-or-minus edge bits, could successfully become an independent country?”
The closest we have in writing to “We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor” is three-quarters of the states decide they would be better off in some radically different configuration and call a convention. You just don’t write “If enough of you are willing to die, well, off you go” into the organizing document. Resolution of the slavery question went the first route. We came surprisingly close to the second over the issue of popular election of US Senators, led by western states.
If there are such conditions, they are not some generic cross-region urban-vs-rural split. For example, it will not be rural Georgia and rural Colorado deciding that they need to separate from Atlanta and Denver. Far more likely to see suburban Georgia saying “We need nuclear to keep the lights on and not burn the planet down,” and suburban Colorado saying, “Fine, so long as there’s a guarantee you can’t bury the spent fuel in our back yard.” Or New York saying, “Here’s the deed and the revenue streams for the national forests, and the Bonneville and Western power authorities’ grids: manage the fire, and water, and power as you see fit.”Report
I think we agree that any scenario that doesn’t look like Mad Max would involve state secession. I don’t see a secession movement leading to a convention, but I could see a heated convention proposing a flurry of amendments including a mechanism for secession. But the details of that mechanism would greatly influence the look of the countries that would result.Report
I’m gaming this out and it’s currently wandering towards brinksmanship.Report
For the right-wing, that means fundraising that amounts to stealing a fleet of their trucks.Report
I’m unmoved. It’s keyboard warrior behavior. The major constituencies of the right are too comfortable and too elderly to actually try this stuff in meat space. Mass revolution and the like is the province of the young and the poor and most right wingers are neither.Report
It’s the “41% of Biden voters” that has me gaming it out, for the record.
Something something “Divorce or Something”.Report
Eh, some non-small % on the left and right is ready to emigrate to Canada or Hungary every time an election cycle goes sour (they don’t). As others have noted; there aren’t truly red or blue states; there’re blue highly populated small regions and red sparsely populated vast regions the two fading into each other in purple small cities and suburbs. You can’t draw lines between that.Report
Purple America.Report
Actually, there really isn’t a fantasy destination for right-wingers. A few think Australia, and some like what they’re hearing about Eastern Europe (mostly that the NYT calls those governments “backwards”). But righties tend to idealize more rural places in America.Report
This should be taken seriously but not literally.
That is, the Trumpists are vowing to destroy what they can’t rule.
They are refusing to accept the legitimacy of any government, any institution, any power center not controlled by them.Report
BingoReport
Related:
Far-Right Boogaloo Admits Posing as BLM Supporter While Shooting Up Minneapolis Cop Station
https://www.thedailybeast.com/far-right-boogaloo-ivan-harrison-hunter-admits-posing-as-blm-supporter-during-minneapolis-george-floyd-riot?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4Report
We have a poll which says 52% of Trump voters and 41% of Biden voters want to break up the union?
Sounds like a bad poll.Report
Is that any worse ten the polling two weeks ago (which Fox News conveniently burried) by Fox News that says 56% of Americans approve of the Build Back Better $3.5 Trillion dollar plan?
Buried on page 8 of this:
https://static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2021/09/Fox_September-12-15_National_Topline_September-19-Release.pdfReport
Faict he “Build Back Better” plan isn’t defined enough for Congress to vote on. This would be the same Congress who has no problems creating plans which have lots of TBD.
In both cases we’re looking at political theater.
The moment a plan is defined and people find out “Oh sh*t, my relatives are going to be in another country? I’m Red and I’m going to be living in a Blue Country!?!” Then that’s a problem.
And even that ignores “My company will lose easy access to other state’s markets” and “I personally will become poorer with this”.
It’s a bad poll designed to create headlines. It doesn’t map to how much support there really is for doing this in any realistic way.Report
Funny, but I can find plenty of detail on the Plan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Build_Back_Better_Plan (and its links to the American Jobs Plan and American Families Plan which have the actual provisions). That suggests to me that Fox News – and anyone else – can poll on it.
So yeah, it may not be thought through by the respondents like you would want but that doesn’t make it a bad poll – in either case.Report
Somehow I very much doubt splitting the union is defined enough to put into wiki.
Edit: Also your “plenty of detail” is a vague vision statement.Report
If, as i suggested, you drill through to the individual plans via their links you find a wealth of information.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jobs_PlanReport
I suspect there’s a ratchet effect, where during the first two years after a presidential election, 10% of the loser’s supporters move toward secession, and 5% of the winner’s supporters back off from it. I also think that every poll should start out with this question, a “choose one of these”:
A. I’m angry
B. I’m mad
C. I’m very mad
D. I’m very very mad
And throw out all the surveys that have a D. These people are too interested in conveying to the pollster that they’re very very mad.Report