Time to stomp on this myth and the concern trolls who promote it.
It is time to get real about this–how many of you Blue Oregonians know a registered Republican? Or someone registered outside a major party?
When I read comments like this and people saying that people need to get out of their “liberal comfort zone” I wonder how much right-wing mythology these folks have bought into.
Even in Multnomah County a quarter of the voters in 2004 voted for George W. Bush. Just under half of the registered voters in the county at the time were Democrats. About 20% were registered Republicans. Another 24% or so were registered independent.
If one out of every five voters in the county — the most Democratic county in the state by far — is a Republican and one out of every four voters in the county voted for Bush, if you know ten random people who vote from around the county then you are likely to know a couple who voted for Bush and are Republicans. Neighbors, co-workers, etc. This idea that Democrats live in some sort of hermetic dome encapsulated in the hometown of Lars Larsen, where Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly have had devoted radio audiences for years is just bizarre.
That’s just Multnomah County. The odds are even higher in the rest of the state.
Oh, and what about people’s families? One of the quintessential stories of the ’60s was the “generation gap”: long screaming matches over the dining room table about the Vietnam War and Nixon. Are all those parents dead already? Did all the kids from that generation turn into hippies? (The answer is “no”). Do the people who push this myth think liberals don’t have siblings or uncles or cousins or some other family member whose politics don’t agree with theirs? There’s a long tradition of jokes about households where spouses cancel out their votes, and I’ve known at least a couple of those couples personally.
47% of the voters in the state voted for Bush in 2004. If you’ve got family in the rest of the state, there’s an awfully good chance (if they voted) that some of them voted Republican. And if you’ve got family who voted in the rest of the country — since he presumably won the election with more than 50% — the odds are even higher.
Why is it that the “realists” always think it’s other people who live in a bubble and not the other way around?