Are Cracks Showing in Trump's Toxic Base?

As I suspect a majority of Americans bask in the glow of having seen Trump go down to defeat on his idiotic border wall stunt and government shutdown, some polls suggest there is even more reason to smile: cracks seem to have developed in some of Trump's base.  It's not that his base has relaxed its anti-immigrant hatred but rather that some have perhaps finally realized that Trump is a buffoon and that they have been played. The only cause Trump believes in is him self and satiating is unquenchable ego.  Nothing and no one else matters.  And now, those played for fools are perhaps belatedly realizing they were played from the beginning.  Yes, Trump is a racist and homophobe, but his calls for open racism and attacks on the LGBT community have been aimed at playing those best motivated by hatred of others, not due to any sincere belief or principles.  A column in The Atlantic looks at perhaps telltale cracks in Trump's base of support.  Here are excerpts:

On Friday, President Donald Trump announced a deal with Democrats to reopen the government, ending the longest shutdown in U.S. history. The deal was a concession to reality: Trump was not winning the battle over the shutdown in public opinion, he had not persuaded Democrats to fund the wall he wanted, and he had no plan to change that.

The unfavorable polling is not news. Since the early days of the shutdown, more Americans have blamed Trump than Democrats for the government’s closure, which is not altogether surprising since, in December, the president preemptively claimed responsibility. But over the past week, there have been signs that the shutdown has hurt Trump even with his base supporters . . .

In a CBS poll, seven in 10 voters said a border wall was not worth the shutdown, and respondents rated House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s handling of negotiations higher than Trump’s, 47–35. An Associated Press/NORC poll found that 60 percent held Trump responsible for the shutdown, versus 31 percent who blamed Democrats. For months, Trump’s overall approval rating has been an object of fascination for pundits. . . . Almost nothing—not the steady drumbeat of damning news on the Russia investigation, not the chaos of the White House, and neither a strong economy nor a volatile stock market—seemed able to dislodge it. The American people had apparently made up their minds about Trump, and the four in 10 who approved weren’t going to change their minds, come hell or high water.

Yet the shutdown seems to have broken that equilibrium. Trump hit his highest disapproval on record in the Morning Consult poll, at 57 percent. CBS found 59 percent disapproval. In the AP-NORC poll, Trump’s approval tanked from 42 percent a month ago to 34 percent.

What’s interesting is not just that the approval rate is finally budging, but why—and with whom. Trump has long been happy to withstand the opprobrium of the press, elites, and much of the country. . . . As my colleague Ron Brownstein has demonstrated, [Trump] the president has opted for political tactics meant to shore up his base. Shutting down the government over the wall was a part of that philosophy. The administration concluded that the wall was such an important issue for his base that it was worth whatever political blowback that might come from other quarters to get it done. In practice, however, weakened standing among that base accounts for Trump’s slumping approval. The NPR/NewsHour/Marist poll finds that Trump’s approval is down among suburban men, white evangelicals, and men without a college degree, all key segments of his constituency.

In the Politico/Morning Consult poll, Trump’s disapproval increased among evangelicals, non-college-educated voters, and those who voted for Trump in 2016, compared with a poll in early January. Meanwhile, the number who blamed Trump for the shutdown increased (slightly) among all three groups. . . . They haven’t changed their minds about the need for the wall; they’re just losing their faith in Trump and are fed up with the shutdown.

Nevertheless, the slippage in backing even among Trump’s base since the start of the shutdown calls into question the wisdom of the president’s calculation that the wall was an effective pander to his core supporters. It’s not just that Trump’s belief that Democrats would cave was out of touch with reality—even more dangerously for him, he was out of touch with the base.

Voter Hatred of Trump Out Weights a Positive Economy

Ten months ago the Republicans were confident that their give away to the rich tax cuts and a good economy would assure them of electoral success in the 2018 midterm elections. Now, the picture is something far from what was envisioned - Ted Cruz may lose his senate reelection bid to Beto O'Rourke and things at the House level are bleak.  Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan sold out average Americans and have happily assisted in normalizing the reprehensible.  Thankfully, voters for the most part realize this and polls indicate that 60% want a Democrat Congress to restrain Trump.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at how GOP bragging about the economy may do little to save many of them.  Here are highlights: 

The last time American consumers were this confident, September 11 was just a random date on the calendar. And it isn’t hard to see U.S. workers are feeling upbeat. In July, there were 659,000 more job openings than Americans looking for jobs. In August, the U.S. saw its best month of nominal wage growth in nine years. The percentage of Americans involuntarily stuck in part-time employment is smaller than it’s been for a decade. Unemployment is hovering near mid-century lows.

By all appearances, the Gods of the Macroeconomy are doing all they can to save the GOP’s congressional majorities. And they’re failing, miserably.

In recent weeks, as the “Trump economy” was reaching new heights, Donald Trump’s approval rating dipped below 40 percent in FiveThirtyEight’s poll of polls for the first time since late February. Eight of the last eight live-interview surveys have found [Trump's] the president’s approval rating to be in decline. Meanwhile, Democrats have opened up a near-double-digit lead in the generic congressional ballot.

Overall, the American people’s assessment of [Trump] their president has been remarkably steady throughout the Trump era. Odds are that the recent decline is a fleeting reaction to John McCain’s funeral, or ephemeral headlines about White House dysfunction, or else, just a bit of statistical noise. 

But that still wouldn’t be good news for Trump or his party. The fact that [Trump's] the president’s approval rating has held steady (which is to say, has held steadily low) — amid improving economic conditions — suggests that the economy won’t save the GOP this November, no matter how good the good times get.

Of course, there’s no reason why this stimulus had to take the form of massive tax cuts for the wealthy and big increases in military spending. In fact, a couple trillion dollars in wage subsidies for the working class would have almost certainly produced bigger macroeconomic returns, as ordinary Americans spend far more of their disposable income than Robert Mercer does. Just because Trump’s policies have produced improvements in short-term economic performance does not mean that they were good policies.

And many voters appreciate this distinction. A CNN/SSRS poll released Monday found that 69 percent of American voters think the economy is “good” — but only 49 percent approve of the way Trump is managing the economy. And even voters who believe the economy is doing well — and credit Trump for that fact — don’t necessarily support the president or his party. Only 36 percent of the poll’s respondents approved of Trump’s overall job performance, down from 42 percent in August. A separate Washington Post-ABC News poll documents the same phenomenon . . . when asked whether they’d rather have a Democratic Congress “as a check on Trump” — or a Republican one that would “support Trump’s agenda” — 60 percent of voters opted for the former.

[C]urrent polling does suggest that there are firm limits on how much support the GOP can derive from improving material conditions. American voters simply hate Donald Trump more than they like the tightening labor market. It’s not the economy, stupid.

Are Iowa Trump Voters Having Buyer's Remorse?

In many ways Iowa has been surprisingly progressive over the decades be it in public education, women having the right to vote or same sex marriage.  Yet, in 2016, all of that was thrown aside for Donald Trump who carried the state despite promises to seeks to dismantle public education, who is a self-confessed sexual predator and who promised to wage war against LGBT equality. Worse yet, he vowed to pull the USA out of NAFTA which would hit Iowa's agricultural industries extremely hard. Now, as the Washington Post reports, Trump's approval rating in Iowa is in the toilet and the public mood has appeared to shift against Republicans.  Perhaps Iowa voters have discovered that while Trump's calls to racism made them feel good about themselves (the state is over 93% white) as perhaps did his fraudulent calls to support "family values," the true GOP agenda of taking from the 99% to give to the 1% doesn't treat them all that well. Indeed, Democrats are optimistic that the newly passed Trump/GOP tax bill will give them plenty of fodder to run on in November, 2018, and in state elections. Here are article highlights:

Iowa has seemingly soured on the president and his party. The end-of-year Iowa Poll, an industry standard conducted by Des Moines-based Selzer and Co., found Trump with just 35 percent approval in the state. Only 34 percent of Iowans said they would back Republicans for Congress in 2018, and 61 percent said they were turned off by politics altogether.

The discrepancy between the rosy economic picture and the public’s distaste for Trump in Iowa has confounded both parties and complicated one of the major political stories of the decade — the Republican romp through the Midwest.

Why Iowa has turned against Trump and Republicans is a mystery that both parties are eager to figure out ahead of the 2018 midterms, looking to understand whether it’s an aberration or a sign of a greater political trend.

Republicans took charge of Iowa’s legislature last January and since then have advanced the agenda they promised voters — pushing through tax cuts, passing labor rules that require unions to hold fresh elections and maintaining a privatized version of the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion.

Some conservatives saw it as a strong start and suggested polling that showed dark voter moods about Republican governance reflected a cynicism that would fade as the policies took effect.

A swing state for decades, Iowa broke so dramatically in 2016 that Democrats wondered if it had become a demographic write-off. Thirty-one of Iowa’s 99 counties voted for Barack Obama twice, then flipped in 2016 to support Donald Trump. 

For the first half of the year, Democrats looked at Iowa as a cautionary tale. White voters without college degrees had wiped the party out in the eastern part of the state, where it had always won strong. National groups had tied Rep. Rod Blum (R) to Trump, expecting a wipeout in a district that had voted for Obama by 14 points in 2012. But Trump won the district, and Blum, a member of the House Freedom Caucus, became a reliable voter for his agenda.

Now, Iowa Democrats believe they’ve begun the climb back. On Jan. 31, the party easily held a state House seat in the first special election of the Trump era. On Aug. 8, it did the same, but in a southeast Iowa district where Trump had won by 21.3 points. And on Dec. 12, when most national political attention was focused on Alabama, Democrats lost a special state Senate race in red northwest Iowa by nine points. The seat had been so safely Republican that Democrats had not run a candidate in 2010 or 2014.

Jeff Kaufmann, the Iowa GOP chairman who has presided over the Republican surge, did not sugarcoat the matter. . . . .  “I see that Senate race as a wake-up call."

In Iowa, Trump’s trade protectionism was a risk and came during a slump for farmers who depend on open markets. Longtime governor Terry Branstad (R) left Des Moines to become the administration’s ambassador to China, and his successor, Gov. Kim Reynolds (R), has found herself lobbying the administration to go slow on changes to trade policy.

“Whenever we talk about pulling out [of NAFTA], commodity prices are affected immediately, and that will be one of the first casualties that we’ll see,” Reynolds said at a Dec. 19 news conference. “So we’re going to hold them accountable.”

Democrats talked confidently about running against the just-passed tax cut. It was, they said, going to sail right past the sort of Iowans who had trusted the GOP the previous year.

“They’re going to see who the winners and losers are in this, and they’re going to identify the corporations and wealthy people who came out way ahead of their families,” said Nate Boulton, a state senator who is running for governor in 2018.

One can only hope the Iowa Democrats field quality candidates in every race and replicate the ground game that proved so effective in Virginia.