jj4211
I understand there’s generally nuance and all for various folks villified through history, but given the last decade of his life, his story became one of the easiest in history to break down into “bad person” without oversimplification or any vaguely acceptable case of moral relativism. More context is informative as a key part of learning of history, but it doesn’t ultimately impact ability to simplify it to “bad person”
In support of that viewpoint, if they were ready to vote but just wanted to vote for someone who touted their interests, they’d have been there for a third party candidate, but they just were no where to be found.
Would be interested to see why people sat it out. To the extent it was something utterly mundane like “couldn’t afford to take any time off work to get it done”.
The more nuanced data: https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/Views_on_Hitler_poll_results.pdf
I was hoping that the ‘not all bad’ would be almost all of it. Unfortunately while it was half of it, a full half said Hitler was as good a guy as he was a bad guy, with an equal number responding unsure, which is likely leaning toward I don’t want to give a socially unacceptable answer.
https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/Views_on_Hitler_poll_results.pdf
12% had the rather less ambiguous responses of ‘he was at least as good as he was bad’. While 12% of folks were of the maybe defensible technicality of ‘well, even the worst person occasionally will do the right thing’, another 12% responded as ‘unsure’, which I would suspect would lean toward “I don’t want to admit a socially unacceptable answer”.
The full poll data: https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/Views_on_Hitler_poll_results.pdf
Do you think of Adolf Hitler as. . . ?
- A completely good person: 1%
- A good person who did some bad things: 4%
- An equally good and bad person: 7%
- A bad person who did some good things: 12%
- A completely bad person : 65%
- Not sure : 12%
So 12% felt he was at least as good as he was bad, 12% fell into the 'well, even a horrible person can do something right, and 12% were somehow not sure…
They wouldn’t need to bother. High risk for relatively little benefit over him nominally being in the position.
If they are going to sideline him in practice, I’d expect more of a Dick Cheney. It’s not like he’s going to stand in the way as long as he gets personally enriched/protected.
If you are talking about the in progress data, you can’t really assume much from it. Different classes of votes get counted at different times. In person versus mail in, urban versus rural. Some places had their urban in real quick, some had their urban in late.
There’s no way the population that voted Trump in by such a wide margin did not also secure the house, which is generally districted in favor of Republicans anyway
I don’t know what the final turnout figures will be, but if it is a lower turnout, I can think of a few:
- 2020 was the easiest year to mail in a ballot ever, and it got harder again as states reinstated various difficulties with mail in ballots.
- So many people didn’t have to go into work in 2020, they had more flexibility to vote however they needed to do it.