Jen Psaki, former useful idiot for the White House and current useful idiot for MSNBC, can’t believe it. Her party believes that it’s peachy keen when Democrats question elections, but when Republicans do, it’s shocking. And appalling.
Psaki also has a hard time swallowing the notion that voters would be more concerned with their checkbooks more than punishing “election deniers.” But that’s what a recent New York Times/Siena poll revealed.
And Psaki is stunned.
Holy moly siena/NYT poll “more than a third of independent voters and a smaller but noteworthy contingent of Democrats said they were open to supporting candidates who reject the legitimacy of the 2020 election…” as they focus on economic issues
— Jen Psaki (@jrpsaki) October 18, 2022
According to the poll, some 4 in 10 voters are open to voting for someone who questioned the results of the 2020 election. That breaks down into 71% of Republicans, 37% of independents, and 12% of Democrats who don’t have an issue with “election deniers.” (For the record, those totals include those who were “very” or “somewhat” open to voting for such a candidate.)
A lot of the trouble here is that “election denier” has about the same power as “homophobic” does anymore. Just because someone doesn’t agree that homosexuality is proper or moral doesn’t mean that he or she is actually afraid of gay people, which is what “homophobic” suggests.
In the same way, someone who agrees that the 2020 presidential election wasn’t quite on the up-and-up doesn’t necessarily “deny” the election. But “election denier” is the newest Democrat epithet for someone who doesn’t play along and act like Joe Biden is the greatest president since Barack Obama.
Related: Which Age Group is Most Likely to Vote GOP in 2022? Gen-Xers, of Course!
Interestingly enough, the poll also shows that 71% of voters believe that “Democracy is under threat,” even though that can mean markedly different things to different people — and for people like Psaki, it means that Democrats losing power is the threat.
“I don’t believe that their opinion on whether or not the election was quote unquote stolen is important,” said one independent voter to the New York Times. “I’m far more concerned about their stance on policies that actually matter.”
“I’m more concerned about how you feel about the Second Amendment,” the independent voter continued. “How do you feel about the First Amendment? How do you feel about the state of the economy?”
Of course, we know that Republicans see those kitchen-table issues as most important.
“If we’re just talking about freedom, having freedom, and that we get to have a say in our choices, then I think we still have that,” a Republican voter told the Times. “I think that we need to stop trying to rewrite the Constitution and just reread it.”
Even some Democrats get it. When the Times asked some voters to name the biggest threat to our country in one or two words, one Democrat replied, “Inflation and taxes.”
If the economy weren’t so bad — and so easy to pin on the Democrats — we might have more margin to talk about both real and imagined threats to our nation, and the Democrats might have more of a change. But the truth of the matter is that the biggest threat to our nation right now is that Americans’ paychecks aren’t going as far, and that’s how most people are basing their votes. Sorry, Jen, that’s just the reality, but you can “deny” it if you want to.
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