Why these two? From a variety of conversations, Woke and "Intellectual Dark Web" (IDW) are the two *intellectual* positions people seem to most often have in mind when they refer to "radicals" on other side, and most often have admitted (to me) closet support for one or other.
It's useful to contrast sentiments about these two rather than their respective direct-action/populist street level supporters (desired or not) because they are sets of ideas rather than sets of he-said/she-said trigger events.
A possibly worthwhile exercise for people on both sides to ask is: why are there so many people willing to offer closet support but not card-carrying support? And why are there so many people in neutral and adversarial?
Note that there is no necessary anti-correlation here. I know from anecdotal evidence that many people voted adversarial on BOTH polls. These are the "dislike radicals on both sides" people.
It's certainly possible to improve how I probed these sentiments. Someone suggested I should have asked about "closet adversary" which is a very good suggestion, but I felt neutral was a more important option to present, and that "adversarial" covered it well enough.
But the broad conclusions are fairly unmistakeable: the polarization is real, there are strong incentives for preference falsification on both sides (the closet support option) and there is significant active *dislike* for each side.
If you're a card-carrying partisan of either Woke/IDW, you're probably inclined to think of a) the closet supporters (23-27%) as either vulnerable or cowardly b) the adversaries as fundamentally evil (29-33%) and neutrals as apathetic assholes (29% - 30%).
I have opinions on all of this of course, but I'm limiting myself to drawing obvious and conservative conclusions from the polls here. One thing I'd caution against: I wouldn't dismiss these polls as unscientific twitter bullshit with a blackbox algorithm in the sampling.
I've been doing this long enough (and am better at it than you probably realize) that I have a decent sense of what the twitter gods do and do not distort with how polls show up in feeds. If you are inclined to dismiss because "methodology" you're likely wrong.
I'll throw one speculative question out for you all to ask yourselves based on anecdotal evidence, that the poll DOESN'T shed light on: Who is falsifying their preferences about supporting these idea sets?
It is tempting to draw the caricatured obvious conclusion: that the closet supporters of IDW are all mediocre white males afraid of vulnerability to woke, and the closet woke supporters are all code-switching women and minorities in white-male-dominated situations...
I would strongly advise against drawing that conclusion. From my own anecdotal evidence I know for a fact that the picture is a good deal muddier than that. There are unexpected people in the preference-falsifying sets on both sides.
have you written/articulated this “sense” anywhere yet? i imagine such observations/intuitions would be valuable to a lot of people, since my guess is most people running polls don’t think that deeply about the methodology (but would value from having some heuristics around it)