That last one deserves a healthy dose of skepticism. But what does it mean for Republicans tout Green (R-Ga.) as the face of the party? do you think?
Surveys show that big Americans don’t have much respect for Green, at least for now. Perhaps less noticeable is that even her Republicans don’t seem to have much affection for her.
An Economist/YouGov poll earlier this month found that 26% of Americans had a favorable opinion of Green, compared with 41% who had a negative opinion. The left has a much stronger reaction than the right. Only 18% of Republicans had a “very favorable” opinion of her, compared to almost half (47%) of Democrats who had a “very unfavorable” opinion. .
The poll has tested more than a dozen congressmen and 2024 presidential candidates in recent weeks. Green’s numbers were better than just his one of them.
The numbers mirror a poll in late 2021 that found that only one in 10 Americans trusted Greene at least “a lot”, while more than four in 10 said she Even Republicans distrusted her by just three percentage points.
And in a poll for the summer of 2021, 36% favored her, compared with 17%.
Filling out the photo is Green’s early poll in Congress in 2021, which Nathaniel Rakik of FiveThirtyEight compiled data on some of the most divisive GOP members. Green’s net image rating is , Congressmen Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Josh Hawley (R-MO.), and Congressmen Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and Madison Cawthorn (RN.C.). Among her eight members of Congress that Rakich separated, her numbers outnumbered Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). (It is common for party leaders to be widely unpopular.)
The Boebert comparison is notable for another reason: her intriguing brand of “ungartainment.”
What’s lesser known is that a similar approach appears to have alienated voters in Green’s constituency as well.
Compared to the results of the 2020 presidential election in the same constituency, if all congressional elections in 2022 were Democrats vs. Republicans in their usual format (e.g., not ranked choice ballots), Green’s performance was the third worst among Republicans. Her district also ranked in the top 10 for her Democratic transition. And this was a situation where the Republican majority was significantly higher than in 2020, even though she’s from the red district of the South.
See the 2020 presidential election results below and The Post’s graphics team’s map of the 2022 midterm election results to get an idea of how extraordinary the shift was. Her district is the blue arrow district in the northwestern corner of Georgia, circled by a red arrow.
Of course, Green still wins because her district is totally uncompetitive. That means she’s likely to be in Congress for as long as she wants. And now that she’s got an important vote at the conference, and McCarthy needs nearly every vote and any ally he can get, he’s come to welcome her.
But increasingly, whatever she does, she promotes a vaccine conspiracy theory Offering hot takes on 9/11, space lasers, and/or mass shootings in chaotic subcommittee hearings, or in Homeland Security Committee hearings, is likely to be tied to the broader Republican Party, It becomes harder to dismiss as abnormal behavior.
And I doubt she’ll test the wisdom of the Republican leadership’s newfound affection for her, especially when her brand of extreme politics seemed to have taken a toll on the party in the 2022 election. There is no room for