From another great in-depth YouGov poll comes percentages people, by selected demographic characteristics, who favor the US Census asking people whether or not they are American citizens. “Not sure” responses, constituting 14% of the total pool, are excluded. The graph thus shows the percentages who support the question being asked while the residual values indicate opposition to its inclusion:

Some populist, president Trump, caving on an issue that isn’t only wildly popular with his base but is also supported by a large majority of independents, a plurality of non-whites, and even a sizable minority of Democrats–the same Democrats who voted for him in 2016 but may not do so again in 2020.

Though the poll doesn’t break respondents down by both partisan affiliation and race, it’s easy to deduce from these results that white liberals–like, say, Jared and Ivanka–are the biggest opponents of the citizenship question being included.

The two post-debate polls that have been conducted indicate as much. Combining results from CNN and Quinnipiac yields the following:

Biden — 22%
Harris — 18.5%
Warren — 14.5%
Sanders — 13.5%

Buttigieg is in a distant fifth, at 3.5%, and the rest of the field is at 3% or less. Mayor Pete was well prepared and sounded sober and sincere in his responses. He was also arguably the least explicitly Woke candidate in the field–and it looks like he doesn’t have a chance. We’re in the midst of The Great Awokening. This isn’t a time for calmly reading from the lectern, it’s a time for writhing on the floor and speaking in tongues.

Elizabeth Warren has a serious black problem. The Quinnipiac poll specifically reported on black support (the CNN poll only drilled down to “white” and “non-white”). Black support shakes out as follows:

Biden — 31%
Harris — 27%
Sanders — 16%
Booker — 5%
Warren — 4%

Expect Harris to keep courting this electorally crucial demographic. Biden’s only parry is the Obama-Biden administration’s legacy. Will Obama implicitly endorse one of them while it matters? I suspect the former president will not. That’s what eight years of loyal service gets Biden–a snub! In fairness, had Obama’s VP been someone not in the running, Harris could reasonably expect to receive Obama’s support. His residual appreciation of Biden’s service will probably cause Obama to stay mum.

Speaking of, ratings on who is perceived to be the best on the four most pressing political issues (CNN again):

If not for the evergreen subject of race relations, it’d be Biden banging on about the economy and Sanders harping on health care. Harris wouldn’t even be in the conversation. But they’re white, she’s not, and race matters–a lot. So the smart money is now on Harris.

Don’t expect us to feel sorry for you, Joe. This is the future you chose.

As an aside, the primaries will probably be at their nastiest if it comes down to Harris and Warren.

I stand by my previous assertion that Trump’s toughest potential matchup is Biden while his easiest is Warren. The percentages of voters who approve of Trump’s presidential performance while simultaneously maintaining a favorable opinion of the following Democrats (from CNN):

Biden — 22%
Sanders — 13%
Warren — 7%
Harris — 7%

By a 61%-36% margin, registered Democrats support government-provided health insurance for “undocumented immigrants”. That’s correct–most Democrats think anyone, from anywhere in the world, should be able to receive free medical care in America if he can get here.

Isn’t the humanitarian thing to do, then, to arrange charter flights to bring the global poor from every corner of the globe to an ER near you? … I really hope there aren’t any Democrat staffers reading this!

For those who feel compelled to attend public protests and rallies, there are a hundred ways things can go wrong and only one way things can go right. To realize the latter, a person has to be willing to take one for the team and capture it happening on video.

Public sympathy will always be on the side of the perceived non-violent victim of violence. The claim to self-defense is no defense in these situations, as said self-defense will be edited to look like offense. And if there’s no video, it didn’t happen–or worse, it happened in a way completely at odds from how it actually took place.

That’s how Trump supporters were made to look like thuggish instigators with such frequency during the 2016 presidential campaign even though they were on the receiving end of a lot more violence than they delivered.

Andy Ngo managed to do everything right. He showed up with a camera–no inflammatory signs, no taunting behaviors, just a camera–and he was criminally assaulted and abused. He now has corporate media figures like Jake Tapper publicly taking his side and Senator Ted Cruz is very publicly calling for a federal investigation. If the mayor of Portland ends up being found at fault, the city may become the next Oberlin and Ngo may become America’s next millionaire.

The alt-right engaged in violence–whether it was self-defensive in nature or not is irrelevant–that resulted in someone’s death in Charlottesville, and that was the end of the alt-right. Antifa’s end will come about in the same way.

From the large YouGov survey tapped earlier this week, the following graphs show net sentiment among Americans towards thirteen other countries, by race and by partisan affiliation. Net sentiment is calculated by taking the percentages who identify a country as an “ally” and multiplying by two, taking the percentages who identify a country as “friendly”, subtracting the percentages who identify a country as “unfriendly”, and subtracting twice the percentages who identify a country as an “enemy”. “Not sure” responses neither add to or subtract from the totals:

The broad takeaway is that there is a lot more conformity among the public on foreign policy than on the domestic side of things. White Republicans are Israel’s best friend while blacks are least friendly, though still positively inclined on net. The two remaining members of the “Axis of Evil” from nearly twenty years ago remain the most despised today. Japan was the great industrial threat a generation ago but does as well as western European countries do today. Here is to hoping the same is possible with China.

The night was clearly Kamala’s. “As the only black person on stage, I would like to speak on the issue of race.” And then she tossed and gored Biden, who, being a pale white male, had no way to counter. A prediction made here several months ago has held up well:

Biden, whose POC cred comes exclusively from holding the vice-presidency during Obama’s time in office, isn’t even trying to maneuver towards more favorable terrain. He is charging up the hill into a fortified opposition that is waiting for him. During the primary debates, Biden is going to make a sorry contrast to Kamala Harris when the subjects are waaaaycism, misogyny, and the other assorted forms of putative badwhite bigotry in America–and on the left, those subjects crowd out almost everything else. The optics, as they say, are going to be bad for Biden.

On at least one occasion, Biden referred to the “Obama-Biden administration”. Yeah, the Obama-Biden administration–said no one, ever… until last night, in desperation.

If Buttigieg moves into the top position as a result of Biden’s takedown, it’ll be short-lived. Harris will be able to dispatch him just as easily as she did Biden in the next debate. Though several candidates made appeals to the LGBTQ community–and that’s the only version of the acronym I recall hearing, five letters, no symbols, so I guess it’s the officially approved designation again–they have nothing like the electoral clout blacks do.

Yesterday morning, Harris was a distant fifth in the betting markets. She has now edged ahead of Biden to take the lead:

Despite getting shafted badly on speaking time, Andrew Yang dominated online polling on who won the second debate. Tulsi Gabbard similarly dominated online polling from the first night.

This is a phenomenon that extends all the way back to 2008, when Ron Paul regularly won online polls by large margins. He did it again in 2012, and then Trump did so in 2016. Now it’s Tulsi’s turn (when she and Yang share the stage in the future, she is likely to win because though Yang is anti-war, it’s a side issue for him while it’s Tulsi’s centerpiece).

The virtual support anti-war candidates receive is embarrassing for the bipartisan War Party, so it’s sloughed off as being unscientific and therefore meaningless–fair-ish, and credible enough with Ron Paul but made less so with Trump–or, more recently, as being attributable to malevolent Russian bots.

Though more than half of the twenty Democrat candidates who took stage this week are white men, only three of the candidates shown above with any chance of winning are white men. Biden and Sanders are relics, only in contention because of time served. If they were a generation younger, they’d be bumping along at the bottom of the market alongside the other forgettable white men who are down there now. Buttigieg has a workaround on account of being gay, but I suspect that is largely due to the novelty factor. Now that it has been done, it’s not going to be enough to climb more than a step or two up the oppression pyramid in the future.

I’ve long predicted that John Kerry will turn out to be the last white man nominated as a Democrat presidential candidate of the United States (as currently constituted). After this election cycle completes, I think that assessment will seem obviously correct to nearly everybody and 2024–or 2028, if a Democrat wins in 2020–will confirm it to be the case.

– Was immigration good for American Indians?
– Were the Founding Fathers white supremacists?
– Polls show women are less pro-choice than men. Why do you think that is?
– Should American citizens be able to speak English?
– Should your party nominate another white person? Isn’t important that the nominee reflects the voters it represents?
– Do you like socialism?
– Which country is America’s greatest ally?

Each one of those is a figurative nuclear bomb that would leave a crater where the candidate who did anything other than obfuscate like hell to avoid giving any semblance of an answer had been standing.

Other suggestions?

As it happened, the toughest question I caught in the first debate was “what do you say to voters who are afraid you’ll take away their guns?” Sigh.

Tangentially:

Tulsi winning the Drudge poll shouldn’t shock. The avatar of the populist movement is an isolationist at heart. https://t.co/R1hnUdXN1M

— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) June 27, 2019

If “isolationist” is a dog whistle for anti-Semitic and everyone who is critical of deadly wars is an isolationist, what does that tell us abo–uh, never mind. I support starving Yemeni children, pinky swear, just leave me alone!

The replacements are primarily visual and audible in nature now, but tactile stimulation is just around the corner. In fact, it has already moved passed the seminal (heh) stage. The percentages of men who have ever paid for (or have ever been paid for) sex is on the decline:

Orthogonally, I suspect it unlikely anyone will find this particularly surprising:

The parenthetical “been paid for” is obviously more relevant among gays than among straights, though I wonder what percentage of gay men who have ever been paid for sex have themselves never actually paid for it. I suspect that figure is small, but that’s not based on anything more than my own cis-intuition.

GSS variables used: SEXORNT, YEAR, EVPAIDSX, SEX(1)

YouGov released the results of in-depth opinion polling a few days ago. It contains quite a few items of interest, so what follows is a brief discussion of them.

– Hispanics express the most satisfaction with the direction the US is going. Net positive direction scores–computed by taking the percentages who say the US is headed in the right direction and subtracting from it the percentages who say the country is off track–by race/ethnicity:

Hispanics: +3
Whites: -11
Others: -12
Blacks: -48

The histrionics about concentration camps is red meat for status-signalling NPR listeners who never set foot outside a super zip, but Hispanics in the US know the door is open, illegals who make it here get to stay, and that they will increasingly be treated indistinguishably from actual American citizens–free health care, voting rights, entire cities where the same non-English languages they speak is spoken by nearly everyone else, etc. It’s hard to blame them for being happy about the country becoming more racially and culturally familiar to them with each passing day.

– The skids really are greased for war on Iran. Imperial fatigue and Trump’s latent instincts against disastrous military interventionism may yet again frustrate hopes in Israel and Saudi Arabia that America will smash up their mutual enemy, but if Persia ends up in the cross hairs, its people aren’t going to get much sympathy from Americans. Percentages who consider the Iranians bad guys (“unfriendly” or “enemy”) with the residuals representing percentages who see Iranians as good guys (“friendly” or “ally”), by selected demographic characteristics:

This is the worst performance of any other of the twelve countries the poll inquired about. China and Russia do considerably better. Even North Korea does modestly so.

Parenthetically, of the over 300 respondents aged 65 or older–people old enough to remember the hostage crisis–not a single person considered Iran a friend or an ally.

– The Sinitic historians of the future who write The Decline and Fall of the Western World will do well to return time and again to the theme of collapsing levels of trust in the major institutions of Western society. Only among those aged 65 and older does a majority trust the US government’s accounting of recent attacks on commercial shipping in the Persian Gulf. Among those under the age of 45, the USG doesn’t even get a plurality of credulity, let alone a majority:

– White Democrats are big proponents of increasing the amount of legal immigration into the US. The survey doesn’t explicitly break results out by both race and political orientation, but deducing it from the results that are presented is easy to do. Net appetite for more legal immigration–calculated by taking percentages who want more and subtracting from it percentages who want less–by race/ethnicity and partisan affiliation:

Whites: 0
Blacks: +4
Hispanics: – 5
Others: +6

Democrats: +26
Independents: -2
Republicans: -27

Given that 90%+ of the Republican sample is presumably white and most non-whites self-identify as Democrats, this suggests the score for white Democrats to be something like +30 while the score for non-white Democrats is around +10.

As an aside, just 19% of Trump voters want to see legal immigration increased, the president’s calls for increasing it notwithstanding.

– Opposition to Border Wall Strongest Among Blacks, Part XXVIII–the percentages opposed to a wall subtracted from the percentages in favor of it, by race/ethnicity:

Whites: +9
Blacks: -39
Hispanics: -2
Others: -4

Blacks are similarly the least likely to support deportation of illegal aliens, the most likely to support legalizing their residency statuses, etc. None of the items under consideration mention anything about Republicans or Donald Trump, either–they are strictly policy questions.

– Bill de Blasio must be one of the least popular politicians in the country. His net favorability rating is negative even among Democrats. Net favorability ratings–percentages favorable minus percentages unfavorable–for the communist mayor:

Democrats: -4
Independents: -26
Republicans: -44

Of the 25 candidates the survey asked about, the only other Democrat who turns in this poor a performance among members of his own party–let alone among independents and Republicans, where both do worse still–is Woke Capitalist Howard Schultz.

– YouGov did an interesting thing, especially given the large Democrat field–it asked prospective Democrat primary voters who they were considering voting for and allowed them to select as many names as they wanted. The top five overall:

Biden: 52%
Warren: 45%
Harris: 38%
Sanders: 35%
Buttigieg: 34%

The top five candidates under consideration by the coveted black vote:

Biden: 68%
Harris: 44%
Sanders: 38%
Warren: 30%
Booker: 25%

And the top five among women:

Biden: 54%
Warren: 45%
Harris: 39%
Sanders: 34%
Buttigieg: 30%

Takeaways from this?

Don’t count Kamala out. Yeah, I’m on the ropes because of my early prediction that she’d claim the nomination, but if uncle Joe takes a fall–figuratively or literally–she is demographically well-positioned to take advantage of the space his exit will create.

Sanders, in contrast, is like Ron Paul in 2008 or 2012–he has a devoted base that will put him in second or third place in a lot of states, but he isn’t anybody’s second or third choice. While the other tier-one candidates will benefit from the lesser knowns dropping out, Sanders won’t. There’s no path to the nomination for him.

Speaking of candidates with no chance, Beto O’Rourke has been and continues to be an entirely astroturfed candidate with no organic support and no natural constituency.

On the other hand, Warren does have a real chance. Trump must be giddy about the prospect of her nomination.

She strikes me as the opponent who gives him the best chance of reelection. She’s another northeastern liberal, vinegar-drinking scold with zero hipness. To the extent that she energizes anyone, it’s the pussyhat-wearers who are already charged up by the prospect of throwing the sexist orange pig out of the White House. They’ll be at the polls no matter who the Democrat nominee is. She doesn’t gin up the POC ascendancy like Harris could but she doesn’t present the same threat to steal blue collar whites away from Trump that Biden does, either. And Trump has a devastating auto-response to all her Woke attacks on him: “Oh this is funny folks, the fake Indian is going to lecture me on diversity!”

– Of the 15 issues asked about, immigration is ranked most important among Republicans by the widest margin I’ve yet seen in polls like this–29% list it as the most important issue, with the economy coming in a distant second at 18%. Among independents, immigration (14%) is second-most important after health care (16%).

A question about whether or not gay pride parades are sexualized? Could there really be uncertainty about that?

Way back in the dark ages of the late oughts, when Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton expressed hidebound opposition to same-sex marriage and retrograde support for marriage traditionally defined, people who asserted that normalizing homosexuality would lead down a slippery slope to normalizing pedophilia were harshly censured for alleged hateful fear-mongering. They were way off base, of course, their concerns totally unfounded!

Relatedly, the percentages of married people who have cheated on their spouses, the percentages of people who think there is nothing inherently wrong with teenagers aged 14 to 16 having sex with one another, and the percentages of people who have no moral qualms about abortion, by sexual orientation:

Cisregression remains a stubborn problem in The Current Year. More parades are needed. And don’t forget to bring the children!

GSS variables used: EVSTRAY(1-2), TEENSEX(1)(2-4), ABMORAL(1-2), SEXORNT(1-2)(3)

The percentages of adult men up to the age of 40 who had not had sex at all during the previous year, by selected demographics:

Jews get a bad rap for putative sexual perversion, but that reeks of jealousy to me! Parenthetically, it’s worth noting that the Jewish sample (n = 89) is the smallest one queried.

Black male/white female pairings are three times as frequent as white male/black female pairings, while white male/Asian female pairings are similarly three times as frequent as Asian male/white female pairings. As a consequence, black men and Asian women have the most dating privilege, white men and white women a middling amount, and Asian men and black women the least. That’s only part of the story, though, because there are legions of sexless Japanese men in 99+% Japan today.

Rather visit Old Faithful a couple of times a week or trek through the savannah searching for exciting new water holes at the risk of coming up dry? Marriage or bachelorhood, then.

It’s nice to come across something that isn’t strongly influenced by political orientation every now and then.

These responses are taken from 2000 through 2018 so the uptick in celibacy that has corresponded with (or is part of) The Great Awokening is tempered in this presentation.

GSS variables used: AGE(18-40), SEXFREQ(0), YEAR(2000-2018), RACECEN1(1)(2)(4-10), HISPANIC(1)(2-50), RELIG(1-2,4-13)(3), PARTYID(0-1)(2-4,7)(5-6), MARITAL(1)(3-4)(5), SEX(1)