Study Shows Conservatives Outnumber Progressives 3 to 1
New Study Is Bad News For Progressive Activists as it shows 80% of Americans think political correctness is a problem. It shows that progressive activists only make up 8% of the country but conservatives make up 25%.Even more interesting for those focused on social justice and diversity is that the "politically disengaged" group actually shares its values and concerns with conservatives. This probably explains why media companies and politicians that chase social justice and progressive issues don't do that well
Support the show (http://timcast.com/donate)
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
A new study has come out by a group called Hidden Tribes using data from YouGov, and the findings are extremely interesting.
For one, 80% of the U.S.
population finds political correctness to be a problem.
Among progressive activists, 30% actually think political correctness is a problem.
That was one of the weirdest things the study showed.
But it also shows that progressives only make up 8% of the U.S.
population, and they are overwhelmingly white and wealthy.
I've often asked myself, why is it that media companies keep laying people off?
Why are they doing so poorly?
But then you can see the Daily Wire doing better than ever.
They get three or four times the engagements of the top left-wing publication on Facebook.
You can see Fox News, three times the ratings of CNN and MSNBC combined.
Why is that?
I think the reason is fairly obvious when you look at this data.
Progressives make up a tiny minority of the country, and conservatives make up around 25%.
But interestingly, Disengaged individuals, people who are not political, share their values with conservatives.
So it's no surprise that Republicans dominated all three branches of government.
Now, does this mean they're going to retain the House in the midterms?
I have no idea.
But this data shows us that when media companies, when politicians chase this tiny minority, they're going after people who aren't going to get them elected.
The Atlantic actually wrote a story about it.
So the first thing we want to look at is just how many Americans and just why Americans don't like political correctness.
But before we get started, please head over to Patreon.com forward slash TimCast to help support my work.
Patrons are the backbone of the content I create, so if you like these videos, and you like the videos on my second channel, please go to Patreon.com forward slash TimCast to support my work.
The Report!
Hidden Tribes, a study of America's polarized landscape.
This is the basis for an article by The Atlantic, which we're going to start with first.
They say, Americans strongly dislike PC culture.
Youth isn't a good proxy for support of political correctness, and race isn't either.
On social media, the country seems to divide into two neat camps.
Call them the woke and the resentful.
Team resentment is manned, pun very much intended, by people who are predominantly old and almost exclusively white.
Team Woke is young, likely to be female, and predominantly black, brown, or Asian, though white allies do their dutiful part.
These teams are roughly equal in number, and they disagree most vehemently, as well as most routinely, about the catch-all known as political correctness.
Reality is nothing like this, as scholars Stephen Hawkins, Daniel Yudkin, Miriam Juan-Torres, and Tim Dixon argue in a report published Wednesday, Hidden Tribes, A Study of America's Polarized Landscape.
Most Americans don't fit into either of these camps.
They also share more common ground than the daily fights on social media might suggest, including a general aversion to PC culture.
They say most members of the exhausted majority, and then some, dislike political correctness.
Among the general population, a full 80% believe that political correctness is a problem in our country.
Even young people are uncomfortable with it, including 74% of ages 24 to 29 and 79% under the age of 24.
On this particular issue, the woke are in a clear minority across all ages.
When talking about progressives, they say, what does this group look like compared with the rest of the nationally representative polling sample?
Progressive activists are much more likely to be rich, highly educated, and white.
They are nearly twice as likely as the average to make more than $100,000 a year.
They are nearly three times as likely to have a postgraduate degree.
And while 12% of the overall sample in the study is African American, only 3% of progressive activists are.
With the exception of the small tribe of devoted conservatives, progressive activists are the most racially homogenous group in the country.
Have you ever wondered why Antifa tends to be white people?
Well, this study shows us.
Progressive activists are the most racially homogenous group, aside from devout conservatives.
Devout conservatives only make up 6% of this country, however.
Now, the article from The Atlantic is really interesting, but when you actually look at this report, it's actually way more interesting.
First, let's take a look at the actual hidden tribes.
Progressive activists, 8%.
But what they call is the exhausted majority includes traditional liberals, passive liberals, the politically disengaged, and moderates.
And the right is comprised of traditional conservatives and devoted conservatives.
When they refer to the wings, we can see that the right wing is 25%, whereas the left wing is 8%.
And this is important when you realize the values of these groups.
While traditional liberals and passive liberals agree on a lot of liberal positions, they disagree a lot with progressive activists.
The politically disengaged, moderates, conservatives, and devoted conservatives are focused on much of the same issues.
Now I want to point out there is a ton of data in this report that I'm not going to be able to cover.
I'm going to focus on some key issues, but I will include a link to this study in the description below so you can read it for yourself.
I want to try to focus on things that I think are potentially shocking to most people that go against what most would assume.
So in this section it says, the polarization of opinion between the opposing ends of the spectrum is very clear from the issues that different groups prioritize.
After the issue of poor leadership, progressive activists rank climate change and economic inequality next, both issues that rank high on the liberal agenda.
These are both considerably higher than the average, 18% and 12% respectively.
The devoted conservatives and traditional conservatives identify different concerns, immigration, terrorism, and jobs.
The politically disengaged group resemble the conservatives in their focus on jobs, immigration, and terrorism.
What this means, as far as I can tell, is it's bad news for liberals, for the left.
Politically disengaged people make up 26% of this country.
Then you have moderates, traditional, and devoted conservatives.
When you add this group together, you get 66% of the country.
Now, the politically disengaged and moderates are part of the exhausted majority.
But if, from this point on, you have people that are focused on jobs, immigration, terrorism, the economy, etc., then these are the people who are likely to vote for politicians who advocate for such things.
When you have people on the left, the Democrats, talking about health care, they talk about income inequality, and they talk about open borders, they are now at odds with 66% of the country.
And this says to me why many media companies can't sustain themselves, and why all three branches of the government have been dominated by the Republicans.
In my experience, the media companies I have worked with Have chased after this demographic, specifically progressive activists.
And I have told these companies time and time again, you are going after a tiny minority.
Most people do not care for these specific issues.
You're looking at all of these people, 92% of the country, who are not focused on political correctness and progressive activism.
So as these media companies start to produce this kind of content, they built themselves an echo chamber, and it's no surprise then that Hillary Clinton was projected to win, but ended up losing.
Many of the digital media companies that produce political content are overly progressive, when 92% of the country is not.
And it was actually this section which shocked me the most.
America is sharply divided in its views on racial bias and policing.
While a narrow majority of Americans believe that police are unfair towards black citizens, that does not necessarily translate into support of Black Lives Matter.
51% of Americans believe that the police are often more violent towards African Americans than other groups.
Yet, 56% of Americans also believe that the Black Lives Matter movement has made racial tensions worse.
Only 44% of Americans say that Black Lives Matter has brought attention to important issues.
Again, I'm going to include a link to this report because there's 160 pages and I can't go through all of it.
But I have another article which I found to be particularly interesting when it talks about the moral foundations of America.
This story is from the Foundation for Economic Education, Why Conservatives Can't Understand Liberals and Vice Versa.
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt says many people today live in a moral matrix.
They recognized five moral foundations, care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity.
However, liberals only recognize the first two, care and fairness, where conservatives can recognize all five.
Now they say this doesn't mean that either group was better or worse than the other.
What it means is that those who are in the liberal section are more concerned about care and fairness.
They don't recognize these, and this means they will chase progress at all costs, and on the extreme end, would actually chase progress even if it meant the end of society, the end of order.
Conservatives, on the other hand, are much more concerned with stability, and they do recognize all five.
While they are concerned with care and fairness, because they recognize loyalty, authority, and sanctity, they are much more concerned with maintaining order.
On the extreme end of the right, this means they would sacrifice the weak if it meant protecting order and stability.
Now, some people have argued that either extreme is equally bad.
You don't want extremes.
But if the liberals want to chase progress at all costs, they could actually end up creating more harm and less fairness in the long run.
And the same could be said for the extreme right.
If they try to protect order to the extent that they sacrifice the weak, you'll end up with disorder and chaos as people rise up to oppose your system.
A good balance needs to be maintained.
Trapped in a moral matrix, these people, Haidt says, reside on both sides of the ideological spectrum.
They exist in what he calls a moral matrix.
If you think that half of America votes Republican because they're blinded, then my message to you is you're trapped in a moral matrix.
You can either take the blue pill and stick to your comforting delusions, or you can take the red pill, learn some moral psychology, and step outside your moral matrix.
So here's an important takeaway from the data I've gone through so far.
Progressive activists make up 8% of the US population.
Among the progressive activists, 30% view political correctness is a problem in this
country.
That means you are left with 4 or 5% of the US population opposing free speech for the
most part.
So when Twitter, Facebook, and these other platforms start to police speech,
They are catering to a ridiculously tiny minority, and probably increasing the percentage of Americans who think political correctness is a problem.
And another important thing to remember.
According to the report, 25% of Americans are traditional or devoted conservatives, and their views are far outside the American mainstream.
Some 8% of Americans are progressive activists, and their views are even less typical.
I want to make sure that I stress, even though I mentioned the politically disengaged are concerned with many of the same things as conservatives, it doesn't mean they're going to vote Republican.
In fact, the study says they might actually vote Democrat.
The point is, when a politician embraces core issues, they're more likely to capture these people.
The study talks about the exhausted majority, and this includes traditional liberals all the way to moderates.
But traditional conservatives and devoted conservatives are the right wing, and they are not part of the exhausted majority.
This is potentially good news for conservatives when you recognize that the study finds traditional and passive liberals are exhausted and in the same group as politically disengaged individuals.
This probably says exactly why Republicans control all three branches of government.
And I want to point out why the polling might be so wrong coming into the midterms.
If progressive activists dominate media, and they do, I worked in media, but they only represent a tiny minority of this country, their vision is skewed.
This is why they said Trump couldn't win the election.
Media is overwhelmingly far left.
It really is.
And I'm not talking about NBC or the AP or PBS.
I'm talking about Vox, Vice, The Verge, Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, etc.
These companies consistently talk about what they think is going on, but they are surrounded by people who are in a tiny, tiny minority of this country.
And that means everything they're seeing is through an extremely distorted lens.
This study is extremely important in my opinion.
And if we don't pay attention to data like this, then, you know, look, you'll end up losing.
It's possible that the conservatives end up sweeping again in the midterms simply because the polling is wrong again.
This is going to be really interesting.
In the 2016 election, everyone got everything wrong.
And now all these polling companies, these pollsters, are saying, That the Democrats are going to take the House, the Republicans will take the Senate.
But I gotta admit, it was less than two years ago, almost two years ago now, that they were dramatically wrong about the election.
Why should I trust them now?
When I look at this data, and I can see that progressive activists are a tiny minority of this country, and I know these media companies are pumping out progressive content day and night, I have to imagine the media companies themselves are in such a tiny minority, they are blind to what is actually going on in this country.
I had some political pundits tell me they really believed Trump would lose.
But once they flew down to North Carolina and walked around and saw nothing but Trump signs, their opinion changed.
And they started to believe the media was completely out of touch.
And that might be what's happening now.
So we'll see.
I think what's going to happen in the midterms is going to be an excellent case study for whether or not these polling companies and the media were able to correct their errors.
I'm not entirely convinced they were able to do so.
But let me know what you think in the comments below.
We'll keep the conversation going.
I don't know what conclusions to draw, necessarily.
Does this mean that conservatives dominate the political landscape?
Well, when it comes to content on social media, they certainly do.
When it comes to Fox News television ratings, they certainly do.
So what does this mean?
They control all three branches of government, they have higher ratings in media, and they make up a larger percentage of this country.
Is that good news?
Not if you're on the left.
So again, comment below, we'll keep the conversation going.
You can follow me on Twitter at TimCast, stay tuned, new videos every day on my channel at 4pm, and more videos coming up on my second channel, youtube.com slash TimCastNews, starting at 6pm.
