73 Percent of Biden Voters Want Pilot Who Said ‘Let’s Go Brandon!’ to be ‘Punished’ — And 39 Percent Want Him Fired

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

According to a new poll, a whopping 73 percent of Biden voters want punishment meted out to the Southwest Airlines pilot who punctuated a flight with the phrase “Let’s go Brandon!”

For the uninitiated, the “Let’s go Brandon!” trend originated when some NASCAR fans at Talladega chanted “Fuck Joe Biden” as race winner Brandon Brown gave a post-race interview, the reporter mistook the chant as a show of support for Brown.

That moment has made “Let’s go Brandon!” a stand-in for the more profane version with opponents of President Joe Biden. But there’s an added dimension. Some conservatives believe that the reporter’s mistake was actually a deliberate and instantaneously-devised effort to cover up what the crowd was really chanting, and use the phrase as a double-edged critique of Biden and the media.

And last week, a Southwest Airlines pilot ended a flight by using the phrase over the intercom, which was heard by a planeload of passengers that included an Associated Press reporter.

Perhaps the buried nugget here is that a major American pollster built an entire survey around the phrase, but since YouGov did the work, here are a few of the poll’s more noteworthy results.

Respondents were asked “On Friday, a pilot for a commercial airline said the phrase ‘Let’s go, Brandon’ to passengers over the intercom during a flight. Do you think the pilot should be penalized for using the phrase, or not?”

Overall, 36 percent responded “yes” and 44 percent said “no,” but among Biden voters, 73 percent wanted to see the pilot punished. For some reason, so did 13 percent of Trump voters.

And when respondents were asked if the pilot should be fired, 39 percent of Biden voters said yes, while an even greater 42 percent said he should not. Among all respondents, only 17 percent wanted the pilot fired, while 63 percent said no, he should not be fired. There were 4 percent of Trump supporters who also thought the guy should get fired, or maybe misunderstood the question.

The less forgiving among these respondents may or may not get their wish, but the airline has initiated an investigation, and as CNN reports, a memo from the United chapter of the Air Line Pilots Association noted that the emergency in-flight transmission system “is not to be used as a personal pulpit,” and that “Anyone making these calls is directly interfering with safety.”