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I think you are correct that the Democratic Party is much more socially acceptable to support, and that especially today, the penalties for holding the "wrong"
by qq66 10y ago
I think you are correct that the Democratic Party is much more socially acceptable to support, and that especially today, the penalties for holding the "wrong" opinion are severe and cause people to retreat to the anonymity of venues like Reddit and the voting booth.
However, telephone polling generally matches actual election results closely enough to assume that people feel a similar level of anonymity in the voting booth as they do in a telephone poll. The dismal polling results for Trump in the Bay Area are not because of secret Trump voters, it's because even conservatives don't want to vote for a candidate whose capability, sanity, behavior, and temperament are so clearly unequal to the job at hand.
- ubernostrum 10y agoAlso, "conservative" today increasingly means "socially conservative" which in turn often means "evangelical Christian", to such an extent that the terms are usefully interchangeable. This is the result of a direct and honest strategy of courting socially-conservative religious people who believe the country is being dragged "in the wrong direction" by people with "a radical social agenda". While there are people who disagree with the general mainstream of socially-liberal belief in this country who aren't motivated primarily by religious beliefs, they are rare enough compared to the religious majority to not be worth mentioning most of the time.