The MAGA subset of American culture

One of the things I appreciate about the polling firm YouGov is that they are able to poll a lot of things over a short timeframe. One effect of that is that they can ask unusual questions and get statistically significant responses. And unusual poll questions can lead to unexpected revelations.

Last week, for example, YouGov presented a panel of Americans with 40 “cultural entities,” an umbrella term for celebrities, TV shows, concepts and tchotchkes. Respondents to the poll were asked how they felt about those items — did they love them? Hate them? — and then whether they thought those items were associated with MAGA-supportive Republicans. YouGov has also been tracking self-identification as “MAGA Republicans,” meaning that we can use these numbers to approximate what MAGAworld views as MAGA culture.

There are some caveats here, but let’s ignore those for the moment. Instead, let’s see if you can estimate how MAGA supporters view these cultural items.

How’d you do? Do you have your finger on the pulse of MAGA culture? Did the results comport with how you yourself view those things?

One caveat, of course, is that YouGov selected the 40 items. The options were, by construction, a subset of the available possibilities. So there may be some element of MAGA culture that dominates over everything YouGov presented but is missing from the dataset. Another caveat is that the framing about “MAGA culture” is mine, not YouGov’s, so don’t blame them if you disagree with it.

That said, YouGov did a good job selecting the 40 items. In almost every case, more self-identified MAGA Republicans said they “liked” or “loved” the item than did Americans overall. You can see that below; every dot sits above the dashed diagonal line. The further from the line the dot sits, the bigger the gap between the percentage of MAGA Republicans who liked/loved the item and the percentage of Americans overall who did.

The biggest gap? Well, we’ll get to that.

If we compare the net response by item — subtracting the percentage that “hate” it from those who “love” it — we see that the dots appear to sit more tightly along the diagonal trend line. But there are still some outliers. American flags, for example, have a much bigger love-hate gap among MAGA Republicans.

So do Confederate flags.

So what is MAGA culture? According to MAGA Republicans, it includes American flags, Kid Rock, Clint Eastwood and steak. According to Americans overall, it’s American flags, Kid Rock, Confederate flags and “The Apprentice.”

We might justifiably assume that MAGA Republicans are better judges of what constitutes MAGA culture than people who don’t identify that way. Sometimes, though, our understanding of ourselves is incomplete or willfully blind. So I decided to compare MAGA Republicans’ views of the cultural items with the difference between their views and Americans overall. The theory? That MAGA Republicans might be disproportionately likely to say they like or love something even if they don’t necessarily see that thing as associated with the MAGA universe.

Here are those results.

Podcaster Joe Rogan stands out here. Rogan ranks eighth in the percentage of MAGA Republicans who associate him with MAGA culture but also sees the biggest gap between how liked he is by MAGA Republicans relative to Americans overall. Mel Gibson sees the second-biggest gap, but is only 12th on the MAGA-culture-as-seen-by-MAGA-Republicans list.

Among the items least likely to be seen as MAGA-related by MAGA Republicans are lip fillers, breast implants, hair extensions, high heels and spray tans. That’s no doubt in part because of the overlap between MAGA Republicanism and perceived (or performative) masculinity and in part because men are more likely to identify as MAGA Republicans.

But while those are the least MAGA-linked items as identified by MAGA Republicans, they are not necessarily dismissed by everyone else. Spray tans, for example, are seen as identified with MAGA culture by a fifth of independents, a quarter of all Americans and 4 in 10 Democrats — compared to only 6 percent of MAGA Republicans.

Beauty is in the eye of the partisan beholder, it seems.

Photo: Trump go vroom. (White House photo/Flickr)