Critics pounced on CNN’s Chris Cillizza on Wednesday for claiming that Republicans have become “much more” conservative than Democrats have become more liberal.
In his write-up, Cillizza cited a Pew Research Center report headlined “Yes, It’s Republicans’ Fault Congress Is So Polarized.” According to the report, Democrats have only become “marginally” more liberal since the 1970s. “Republicans have grown significantly more conservative,” he wrote.
Several people responded to Cillizza’s conclusion by saying, “No one believes this,” with some criticizing the study cited by Cillizza.
“During his presidential campaign in 2008, Obama supported traditional marriage,” Noam Blum, podcast host and Tablet Magazine’s Chief Technology Officer, said. “Your regular reminder that these studies are utter nonsense. The study anchors get to decide what is centrist, conservative, and liberal, and they can use that to get any result they want. Garbage goes in, garbage goes out” according to Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
“There is no value judgment here; moving left represents a large portion of the Democratic voter base, and they won the White House in 2008, 2012, and 2020. But let’s not pretend that a typical Democrat from the 1970s would recognize today’s party “Riedl went on.
Others, like author John Daly, put it more simply: “uh, no.”
The report was “hilariously stupid,” according to Dan Gainor of the Media Research Center. Cilizza also wrote that Congress as a whole has shifted to the right, citing Pew Research Center findings that the House and Senate are “demonstrably more conservative” than the governing body was in the 1970s.
“Not only have Republicans moved faster and further to the ideological right than Democrats have moved to the left,” Cilizza wrote, “but they have also made the entire House and Senate more conservative over the last 50 years.”
Conservatives have argued that progressive Democratic Party members wielded undue influence over President Biden during his first year in office, despite the fact that Biden presented himself as more of a centrist than competitors like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., during the 2020 presidential campaign.
The Democratic Party’s progressive wing has clashed with the party’s more moderate members on a number of issues, the most serious of which is the upcoming social spending bill and infrastructure package. The two bills became linked early in 2021, and as Congress prepared to vote on the infrastructure bill, the moderate and progressive wings of the Democratic Party appeared to clash, as the social spending bill was to be voted on at the same time.
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, D-New York, has stated that she will vote no on infrastructure in October if Democrats do not provide the text of the social spending bill.
“I don’t see how I can vote to increase US climate emissions ethically,” Ocasio-Cortez said at the time, referring to the infrastructure bill. “We’ve had a framework in place for six months. We require text.”
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., stated in June 2021 that the Democratic Party was “dynamic” and not a “lock-step rubber stamp.”
However, one member of The Squad, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., felt compelled to deliver a response to Biden’s first State of the Union address, despite the fact that Biden has not seemed to go far enough to the left on some policy initiatives.
