As Campaign Season 2021-22 beckons, the annual Vanderbilt University poll on social and political issues statewide shows that there is an enormous gulf between the attitudes of Democrats and Republicans. The poll, released on Tuesday of this week, demonstrates the following results about several hot-button issues:
• About 71 percent of Republicans and 30 percent of political independents agree with the statement that “Joe Biden stole the 2020 presidential election.”
• Overall, 74 percent of Republicans agreed with the statement that the pandemic “is largely over and things should go back to the way they were,” while only 14 percent of Democrats did.
• On the matter of the COVID-19 vaccines, 60 percent of Republicans and 94 percent of Democrats said they had already been vaccinated or plan to be. Thirty-seven percent of Republicans and 30 percent of independents said they had no such plans.
• Asked about President Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan, only 29 percent of Republicans approved of it, while 96 percent of Democrats approved. But when neither President Biden’s name nor his American Jobs Plan were asked about, Republican approval for infrastructure doubled to 59 percent, while the same percentage of Democrats approved (96 percent).
• Apropos “critical race theory,” 90 percent of Democrats and only 29 percent of Republicans agree with the statement that the legacy of slavery affects the position of Black people in American society today a great deal or a fair amount. Separately, 51 percent of Republicans and 18 percent of Democrats feel race relations in the U.S. are generally good.
• A majority of Republicans (57 percent) and a small minority of Democrats (8 percent) approve of making it legal for those 21 and over to carry a handgun without a permit — the numbers reflecting fairly accurately how Republicans and Democrats in the legislature voted on Governor Bill Lee’s open-carry bill this year.
• On “cancel culture,” 60 percent of Democrats agreed with the practice of withdrawing support from public figures and companies after they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive, while only 17 percent of Republicans did so.
The survey of 1,000 residents in Tennessee was conducted between May 3rd and May 20th, with an estimated margin of error of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points. The statewide poll is conducted annually by Vanderbilt University’s Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions (CSDI) and is directed by John G. Geer and Josh Clinton.
• When state Representative Antonio Parkinson (D-District 98) stood with fellow office-holders — City Councilman Martavius Jones, state Representative Joe Towns Jr. (D-District 84), and state Representative Jesse Chism (D-District 85) — in I Am a Man Plaza on Friday and called for prosecution of the Confederate sympathizer who had harassed activist/County Commissioner Tami Sawyer, the aim was to communicate both a sense of solidarity with Sawyer and one of urgency, and to do so, as Parkinson put it, on behalf of Black males in general.
Results were not long in coming. Within a short time after the press conference, the Sheriff’s Department issued a warrant charging George “K-Rack” Johnson with misdemeanor assault. Johnson, a member of a privately organized crew exhuming the remains of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, had verbal exchanges with Sawyer earlier last week, threatening her, she alleges, as she was conducting a press conference on the perimeter of Health Sciences Park (formerly Forrest Park), expressing satisfaction with the fact of the ongoing exhumation, with the decline of Forrest from his bronze eminence, and, in a larger sense, with the fall of the Confederacy as a cause.
And Johnson’s gibes were, in a sense, late salvos of resistance from that same lost cause, well past Appomattox, and he and Sawyer, in her role as avenger, may well figure in some courtroom reprise, which she is bound to win, or at least not to lose. Think of it as justice, or think of it as yet another re-enactment.
