Thirteen percent of registered Democrats told pollsters that Americans focus too much on remembering September 11. Not too little. Too much. YouGov released the numbers on Monday — ten days before the 25th anniversary of the deadliest attack on American soil.
Nearly 3,000 people were murdered that morning. Apparently that's getting a little stale for some folks.
The YouGov survey, conducted August 20-23 among 1,098 adult U.S. citizens with a margin of error of 4.1 percentage points, asked Americans whether the country focuses too much, too little, or about the right amount on remembering 9/11. Among Republicans, 43% said we focus too little. Among Democrats, only 19% felt the same — and that 13% said we're overdoing it.
The split gets wider when you ask about making September 11 a national holiday. Sixty-two percent of Republicans supported the idea. Only 43% of Democrats agreed. Apparently memorializing the day nearly 3,000 Americans were incinerated, crushed, or forced to jump from 100 stories is a bridge too far for a majority of one party's voters.
But the real number — the one that tells you everything about where the Democratic base has drifted — is buried further down in the poll. YouGov asked respondents which ideology has been responsible for the greatest number of violent attacks in the U.S. Forty-five percent of Democrats said right-wing extremists. Six percent of Republicans agreed with that assessment. Meanwhile, only 14% of Democrats cited Islamic extremism — the ideology that actually planned and executed September 11, the USS Cole bombing, the Fort Hood massacre, the Pulse nightclub shooting, and the San Bernardino attack.
Twenty-nine percent of Republicans cited Islamic extremism. Twenty-six percent of Republicans pointed to left-wing extremists. Two percent of Democrats agreed with that one.
So we have a situation where nearly half of one party's base believes that the greatest violent threat to America comes from their own countrymen on the political right — not from the ideology that produced the worst single-day death toll on American soil since Pearl Harbor. That's not a policy disagreement. That's a completely different threat map.
The poll also found that 72% of Democrats said Muslims have been treated worse than members of other religions since September 11. Only 28% of Republicans agreed. Seventy-one percent of Democrats said the attacks still affect how Muslims are treated "a lot" today — a quarter-century later — compared to 42% of Republicans.
There's a pattern here, and it's not subtle. For a measurable chunk of the Democratic electorate, the legacy of September 11 isn't about the victims, the firefighters who climbed into burning towers, or the intelligence failures that let 19 hijackers board four planes. The legacy is about who's been inconvenienced since. The 3,000 dead have become a footnote in a story about social discomfort.
None of this means every Democrat has forgotten what happened. Plenty haven't. But the direction of the numbers is hard to argue with. When 13% of your voters say the country focuses too much on the deadliest terrorist attack in its history, and 45% think right-wing Americans are a bigger violent threat than the ideology that carried it out, you've crossed from disagreement into revisionism.
The information about Democrats lands just days before the nation marks 25 years since Islamic terrorists hijacked four passenger jets and turned them into weapons. Two hit the World Trade Center. One hit the Pentagon. One was brought down in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, by passengers who decided they'd rather die fighting than let the plane reach its target.
Twenty-five years later, 13% of one party's voters think we should maybe talk about it less. The other 87% might want to ask why.