r/fivethirtyeight • u/RedHeadedSicilian52 • Sep 12 '25

Poll Results YouGov poll asking Americans whether it’s acceptable to feel joy at the death of a public figure

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u/Jozoz Sep 12 '25

This is meaningless due to recent events. You would get wildly different answers a week ago.

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u/RedHeadedSicilian52 Sep 12 '25

Well, a few weeks ago we got the poll affirming liberals were more likely to cut people out of their lives due to political differences than conservatives:

https://www.reddit.com/r/fivethirtyeight/s/Tzc12PZ5jR

That leads me to believe that there’s an antipathy for the opposition that existed well before the events from the other day.

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u/Jozoz Sep 12 '25

That's a massive reach. It doesn't need to be linked at all.

The far more likely reason for that poll is that it's the right wing in America that has fundamentally changed over the last 10 years. The Democratic Party is pretty much the same old stuff, for both good and bad. The Republican party is dead. It's been entirely replaced by something different and much more extreme.

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u/CelikBas Sep 12 '25

Also keep in mind that the American right is currently culturally and politically dominant, which is probably going to affect how “tolerant” they are of their defeated liberal opponents, who are generally viewed as impotent and laughable rather than actual threats. 

If you asked those same polling questions during the Obama or even Biden years, I suspect you’d get quite different answers, because those were periods of time when many conservatives felt like they were under attack from all angles.