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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025

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John Grillington, lifelong center-right suburbanite, has voting preferences indistinguishable from a literal neo-nazi

Tbh there’s a pretty good chance he voted Obama at least once.

While he is a fictional archetype, he is representative of a number of people I know in real life. The general pattern is that he has fairly moderate (albeit nebulous) policy preferences but doesn't engage with politics very much and is strongly negatively polarized against anything vaguely left-wing. He definitely didn't vote for Obama.

Yeah, at least 50% of the people I run into who meet that description voted for Obama in ‘08. Granted, this could be filter bubble effect- having ‘moderate’ policy preferences is much more left wing than average round here. But also, mathematically, Obama had to get votes from plenty of these people to win Indiana and North Carolina.