Partisanship causes Republicans to justify anti-democratic behavior

The chart in this post is a little hard to parse, but it illustrates a crucial finding from one of the best recent papers on anti-democratic sentiment in America:
⭐️how decades of rising partisanship made an anti-democratic GOP possible.

The paper, from Yale’s Matthew Graham and Milan Svolik, uses a number of methods to examine the effect of partisanship on views of democracy.

This chart shows a particularly interesting one:
a “natural experiment” in Montana’s 2017 at-large House campaign, during which Republican candidate #Greg #Gianforte assaulted reporter Ben Jacobs during an attempted interview just before Election Day.

Because many voters cast their ballots by mail before the assault happened, Graham and Svolik could compare these to the in-person votes after the assault in order to measure how the news of Gianforte’s attack shifted voters’ behavior.

The blue lines represent precincts where Gianforte did worse on Election Day than in mail-in ballots;
the red lines represent the reverse.

What you see is a clear trend:
In Democratic-leaning and centrist precincts, Gianforte suffered a penalty.
But in general, the more right-leaning a precinct was, the less likely he was to suffer
— and the more likely he was to improve on his mail-in numbers.

For Svolik and Graham, this illustrates a broader point:

Extreme partisanship creates the conditions for democratic decline.

If you really care about your side wielding power, you’re more willing to overlook misbehavior in their attempts to win it.

They find evidence that this could apply to partisans of either major party
— but only one party nominates candidates like Trump and Gianforte
(who won not only the 2017 contest but also his reelection bid in 2018 and Montana’s gubernatorial election in 2020).

The head of law enforcement for the department, Dave Loewen, called Mr. Hawkaluk to ask him a favor:

Could he come into headquarters and write up the wolf?
And, oh, yeah, Mr. Loewen added,
the shooter was Governor Gianforte, a famously temperamental man
who in 2017 was sentenced to 40 hours of community service and 20 hours of anger-management classes
for assaulting a reporter the night before he won a seat in the House of Representatives.

Minutes later, Mr. Loewen was told by the leaders of the department that
Mr. Gianforte’s friend, an outspoken trapper named Matt Lumley, should be credited with the kill.
Mr. Loewen called Mr. Hawkaluk to relay that instruction.
The problem: Mr. Gianforte’s name was already in the database as the trapper of record.

“I could read between the lines,” Mr. Hawkaluk recalled.
“I said, ‘Whoever you’re talking to over there better get their story straight, because Gianforte called that in as the trapper of record.”

#BodySlamGuy
#Gianforte #Montana

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/02/us/politics/montana-wolf-killed.html