Long before Donald Trump came down his escalator to a crowd of paid fans, Republicans have been whining about how they can’t get a date. But things have only gotten worse since Fox host Sean Hannity’s cursed “Hannidate” website was removed from the internet more than a decade ago.
According to a new poll conducted by Change Research for Teen Vogue, 76 percent of women between the ages of 18 and 34 said that discovering that a prospective partner identified as a MAGA Republican would be a “red flag” for them. A large majority of men in the same age group, 59 percent, said the same.
The right’s reputation is so bad among young women that a majority of them, 55 percent, said that hearing that a date listens to popular right-wing podcaster Joe Rogan would also be a red flag for them as well.
“Our poll finds that many of the common themes in Rogan’s podcasts, such as being anti-woke and cancel culture, don’t resonate with young women,” Lizette Carpenter, an analyst with Change Research told Flux. “It also shows that women seek shared political values in a prospective partner. There could be other issues at play, but it’s pretty clear that many women view listening to Joe Rogan as a sign that it’s likely not a good match.”
It’s pretty hard to blame women who have this opinion because despite his laughable pretensions of being unaligned politically, Rogan is part of a much larger ecosystem of right-wing libertarians like Jordan Peterson or Tim Pool who market doctrinaire viewpoints as independent thinking. It’s incredibly hilarious seeing hordes of self-styled “independents” constantly regurgitate conventional GOP talking points about how women are stupid, police are always right, trans people don’t exist, and that we need more guns to stop gun violence.
Most people, especially those born in the mid-1990s and afterwards, are sick of the bullshit. None of those beliefs are supported by the facts, and anyone who actually reads things rather than listens to hours of ignorant YouTube blatherers knows this. Likewise, the vast majority of people realize that, contrary to the Fox News spin about antifa, the Republican party is by far the most extreme political party in the United States.
Unfortunately for them, Republicans are so coddled from other perspectives that they simply cannot realize that most people view Donald Trump as a moronic compulsive liar and criminal. It’s the reason that 53 percent of Americans in an AP poll earlier this year said they would “definitely” or “probably” be unlikely to support Trump.
But rather than look inward for why so many people find their willingness to support an extremist political party as utterly repellent, many Republicans are lashing out.
“The policies and these things that are attached to the right whether or not you’re a supporter of Trump have been pre-supposed on you, and it’s like a black mark,” one dateless GOPer told Washingtonian magazine in 2018.
What so many Republicans can’t see is that choosing to publicly and privately associate yourself with the party of Trump is going to make people think less of you—and that they are perfectly within their rights to do so, just as Christian nationalist evangelicals are entitled to do about atheists and Muslims. Anyone claiming that Republicans are being “canceled” by others needs to also be clamoring for evangelicals to start respecting atheists if they want to have any sort of intellectual consistency.
The truth is that everyone is a “values voter,” not just right-wing Christians, and we all have the right to be one. The fact that 71 percent of college student Democrats don’t want to go out with a person who votes for Republican presidential candidates is freedom of association, one of America’s most cherished values.
Republican men who can’t get a date need to realize that it’s their own party that’s holding them back.