Republicans living in an evidence free world is just not true

[Sadader]

Well Bernie Sanders isn’t the Democratic party. Hillary and Obama were undeniably more truthful (and paid far more attention to evidence) than the Republican party of their time. And Clinton especially was by far the greatest candidate on economics out of the field. Hell, she was the Brookings Institution as a person.

And it’s misinformed to say that raising the minimum wage (which the literature for isn’t conclusive) or going for tax hikes is “living an an evidence free world”. Evaluating those policies isn’t a matter of scientific evidence; it’s normative, and based on personal views and preferences on things like inequality. You can’t say they’re objectively wrong to think that (sonething like) more equality is worth the trade off of lower economic growth. But Bernie has proven that he’s doesn’t care about evidence (the primaries really demonstrated how ridiculous he was - see this), so I agree and really worry for the future of the Democrats if they keep going in his direction.

[Sadader]

Yes a tax she proposed got Amazon to stop expanding in Seattle.

You say that as if Amazon continuing to expand in Seattle is A. Necessarily a good thing and B. the most important thing.

A. It is
B. It is important

75% of republicans live in an evidence-free world. So do 40% of democrats.

80%-90% of all Americans live in an evidence-free world.

Yep, honestly I think to the answer to this is that almost all voters are terrible and don’t care about evidence on most things. I’m not trying to “both-sides” it, but I really doubt that Sanders stans read up on minimum wage empirical literature, or most GOPers read Climage change studies.

So the Democrat party has been better in recent years (especially post-Dubya) mostly just because the establishment has been more in charge, and so has been more ingrained with academia and scientific consensus, as opposed to the full-populist GOP (since around 2009).