Sen. Mitt Romney has really upset liberal comedian and HBO host John Oliver. Last week, the Utah Republican cleared up what he was thinking in the wake of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death and the speculation about whether Republicans would move to fill the seat on the Supreme Court.
His written statement committed to allowing the Senate to proceed on a hearing for whoever was nominated (we now know this is Amy Coney Barrett), and then, he spoke to TV cameras and posited the United States is a center-right country and that it is not a “written in the stars” that the Supreme Court would always skew liberal. On his Sunday night show, Oliver, who became an American citizen in 2019 (Congratulations!), rejected the suggestion that the U.S. is a “center-right country” in the strongest terms possible.
As usual, Oliver is wrong, and he probably knows better.
So what did Romney say to draw the ire of HBO’s Duke of the Righteously Indignant Monologue? He said, “My liberal friends have over many decades gotten very used to the idea of having a liberal court, and that’s not written in the stars. It’s also appropriate for a nation, which is, if you will, center-right to have a court which reflects a center-right point of view.”
This light-touch suggestion that the U.S. is not a left-wing polity really seemed to baffle Oliver, who responded, “What the hell are you talking about, Mitt?” Oliver then proceeded to rebuff Romney with a slew of research that doesn’t show what he seems to think it shows.
Oliver started with a Jan. 7 poll by Gallup on political party preferences, which shows that 47% of people align with the Democratic Party, compared to the GOP’s 42%, and shows the number for self-identified “independents” is steadily on the rise. Democratic and Republican identification began to drop in 2008 for the first time since 2003, with a spike in people choosing the “independent” label. This has persisted into 2020 and can be understood to reflect a realignment of the Democratic Party under former President Barack Obama, shifting the party to become notably more liberal than ever before. That led Democrats with lingering conservative sensibilities to pack their bags and move to political no man’s land.
If Oliver had just scrolled down a bit, he might have seen a Jan. 9 Gallup poll titled, “The U.S. Remained Center-Right, Ideologically, in 2019.” You’d almost be embarrassed for Oliver if you didn’t feel confident that his writers saw this and just chose to ignore it for the sake of firing up the audience.
It’s very simple research. The Republican Party is more homogeneous than the Democratic Party in terms of its voters identifying as consistently “conservative.” The Democratic Party is larger and growing fast, with its “liberal” wing nearly doubling in size since the 1990s, but it still courts an important block of self-described “conservative” voters who don’t feel at home in the Republican Party. This is due to a mix of demographic reasons related to race, age, and a suite of divisive policy issues.
It’s plain as day. More people identify as conservative than liberal, but some of those people are part of the Democratic Party coalition because of how polarized the two parties have become. That’s locked in voters who feel partisan identity is too important to give up, and the ones who do drop their party affiliation will say they’re independent but, in reality, tend to be soft Republicans.
Next, Oliver distorted what support for Roe v. Wade suggests about views on the red-hot question of abortion access. He pulled a handful of recent surveys that show people largely do not support overturning Roe v. Wade and are in favor of legal abortion. About 61% of people continue to say that abortion should be legal, with only 38% expressing support for abolishing abortion, according to the Pew Research Center.
To suggest that this is a measure of America not being center-right willfully misses the point of how the abortion debate plays out. The divide on the issue is happening at the margins, with the Democratic Party rapidly taking an absolutist position with limitless access to abortion, even extending it to third-trimester terminations. This is wildly unpopular. Culture is shifting away from the rigid criminalization of abortion and toward a consensus around Roe v. Wade, but people still largely believe that life begins at conception, not the birth canal. This is clearly indicative of a center-right view of the issue. Don’t arrest doctors and women, but limit the conditions in which an abortion can be performed.
The cognitive dissonance continues with Oliver glazing over what it means for most people to support “Medicare for All,” according to a May 27 Kaiser Family Foundation study. It’s true that when asked point-blank about Medicare for All, a narrow majority of people say they favor it. The same research found that favorable reactions to this policy dropped 14% if you called it “single-payer” or, even worse, “socialized medicine.” The study goes on to say its polling also “shows many people falsely assume they would be able to keep their current health insurance under a single-payer plan, suggesting another potential area for decreased support.”
This means Oliver’s appeal that the U.S. is center-left on healthcare, with 56% breaking in favor of Medicare for All, is highly tenuous.
What Romney said is largely considered to be common sense, and it is backed by the very institutions, media organizations, and academics that Oliver dishonestly deploys as evidence to the contrary. The very polarized and limiting vessels of the Republican and Democratic parties are not proper measures of judging whether the country is center-right or center-left. There are holes in the assertion that the U.S. will always be center-right, and the Republican Party of President Trump is in many ways exceeding its mandate to re-balance the conservative-liberal paradigm. But Romney didn’t take to TV and say Oliver didn’t know what he was talking about.
Oliver did. And Oliver is either willfully lying or doesn’t understand this country.
Stephen Kent is the spokesman for Young Voices, host of Beltway Banthas: Star Wars, Politics, and More podcast, and a political commentator on Fox Business, BlazeTV, and Fox 5 DC.