The Argument, a new center-left media outlet, recently published this poll:
Some commenters online noted that the question here is a little vaguely worded: what qualifies as a “political” view? Could it be that conservatives are equally likely to cut off family members, but don’t view their reasons as “political”? Maybe, though that doesn’t explain the gap between Harris voters and nonvoters. This result is fairly consistent with prior polling. Data from the Survey Center on American Life a few years ago showed that people who identify as “very liberal” were considerably more likely to say they had stopped talking to a family member over politics, even when compared to people who identify as “somewhat liberal.”
The Argument’s Lakshya Jain has this to say about it:
I think liberals have got to understand that we, as a constituency, are very much unlike the rest of America. It’s not just that we’re different from Trump voters — it’s that we’re very different from people who don’t vote as well. The findings about who was more likely to cut off friends and family over politics really underscored this for me, because Harris voters were the only group that was even close to evenly split on that. That’s not a statement that we’re wrong, but it is a statement that the rest of Americans view and interact with the world very differently than we do. Knowing this, I wonder if some of us should start thinking about the implications, because it also underscores the “shrinking tent” critique we’ve heard about Democrats lately.
Jain seems to be making the argument that this is an indicator of liberal insularity: people on the left are less willing to engage with their political opponents, to the point that they’d rather cut off family members than bear spending time with people they disagree with. This tendency, he implies, could be harming Democrats’ political chances.
I think that’s a questionable analysis for a couple of reasons. First, there’s a very salient variable this poll leaves out: age. It’s clear that young people are more likely to identify as Democrats and liberals than older people. It’s also clear that younger people are more willing to curtail relationships due to politics. It’s possible that at least some of the discrepancy in The Argument’s poll is the result of younger people being more willing to cut off older family members than the other way around. In fact, some polling has found this exact trend. In a survey conducted last year, it was found that while liberals were more willing to cut ties than conservatives, there were large differences between age groups, to the point where Gen Z conservatives were more likely to cut ties than older liberals.
But there’s another problem with Jain’s conclusion, one so obvious that only a pundit could miss it: maybe conservatives are simply less tolerable than liberals. Jain and other commentators keep thinking about this issue as reflecting on liberals, who they conclude based on the data are more willing to cut off family members due to political disputes. But the results can be read the other way. Perhaps conservatives are so viscerally unpleasant that they cause more people to cut them out of their lives?
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