The Green New Deal plan got zero votes in the Senate this week. Z-E-R-O. Yet progressives continue to claim people “like” the plan, with the help of the liberal media.
Not a single Democrat senator voted in favor of the Green New Deal, with 43 voting “present” on March 26. According to USA Today, a handful of Democrats joined the Republicans in voting against it in the procedural vote — killing it “for now.”
USA Today reported the results on the front page March 27, saying “Green New Deal withers away in Senate.” In spite of the plan’s failure to even get a single Democratic senator officially on board, The New York Times ran an op-ed that day promoting it.
The op-ed from left-wing Data for Progress co-founder Sean McElwee claimed, “People Actually Like the Green New Deal. The group is one of the progressive activist groups promoting such a plan and put out its own GND blueprint in 2018.
The subhead continued, “Mitch McConnell’s show vote in the Senate on Tuesday rejected the plan, but Republicans may come to regret their mockery.”
McElwee claimed that although his group is “a liberal organization that is supportive of the Green New Deal, we don’t let that cloud our polling.” He claimed their polls showed that the plan wasn’t “toxic” and touted “Forty-six percent of likely voters supported the policy and 34 percent opposed it. (The rest were unsure.)”
That isn’t even a majority! And tucked later into his op-ed it became clear that some of the most essential elements of a Green New Deal such as getting rid of all fossil fuels are actually unpopular. The disliked elements he acknowledged included a “full shift to electric cars” and “phasing out of all power plants.”
It’s ridiculous for a headline to claim “People Actually Like” the plan with caveats like that.
He also whined that Fox News and the “Republican propaganda machine has already reshaped the narrative” against the Green New Deal, but insisted such a plan is “the future of the Democratic Party.”
His group, Data for Progress, is a project of the left-wing Tides Advocacy (formerly The Advocacy Fund). According to a piece McElwee and long-time progressive activist Mark Egerman co-wrote for Dissent Magazine, they could envision a “point at which” left-wing billionaire George Soros “would be to the right of the center of the Democratic Party.”
They were criticizing the “power of monied interests” to the left and continued, “For now though, the main threat money poses to the left is largely through the Kochs and corporate PACs, rather than the insufficient liberalism of major donors.”
