Ignore the approval polls. They’re mostly trash and it doesn’t negate the fact that President Donald Trump is on track to be re-elected. For those who aren’t brainwashed liberals, this shouldn’t come as a shock. We have a Democratic Party that is making 2020 a year about destroying hundreds of millions of private health insurance plans, giving illegal aliens health care, decriminalizing border crossing, bashing cops, especially Immigration and Customs Enforcement, raising taxes, and killing jobs. Oh, and beheading those evil billionaires because envy is such an appealing characteristic in candidates. Also, pushing laws that would permit abortion up until the moment of birth and having taxpayers bear some of the cost is also not popular.
You’ll hear a lot of talk about squishy moderate Republicans fleeing the party and ceding key territory to the Democrats. It happened in 2018 and 2019. That’s how Democrats retook Congress…because soft, moderate Republicans in suburbia didn’t like his rhetoric or Twitter usage. They’re traitors and no better than the Democrats. And when they crawl back, bloodied and beaten, because Democrats are not their friends, they should be left out in the cold. What’s that saying from House of Cards, “we’ll cleave you from the herd and watch you die in the wilderness.”
Yet, as Salena Zito, who has documented the populist rise in American politics, noted, not all suburbs are equal and the ones around mostly working-class cities will be key in deciding whether Donald Trump gets another term in office. So far, the level of Trump support has not faded and many of these folks aren’t lifelong Republicans. As reported back in 2016, many are Obama voters who flipped for Trump and they number in the millions. Zito has crisscrossed the country, along with fellow writer Brad Todd, interviewing these people, getting a glimpse into their lives. The chasm between the two Americas is very real. For those on the Left Coast or along the Acela Corridor who simply cannot understand how Trump won, it’s because you’re not the majority of the country. And yeah, you haven’t met anyone from these parts, which is why I’m fairly confident Trump will win with a fine showing in the final Electoral College tally (via NY Post):
It’s tempting to think of 2018 as an across-the-board “Blue Wave.”
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) November 22, 2019
But a fact that seems quite relevant now: Republicans *gained* two Senate seats.
And, the Trump Loyalist count has risen even more (no McCain, Flake, Corker, etc.)
Have long believed (even aside from this poll) that Wisconsin will be the toughest state for Dems to get back of the MI/PA/WI trio. https://t.co/vmkFOBMFe0
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) November 20, 2019
Conservative ideology alone did not unite this coalition. What did was conservatism fused with a populist distrust of big institutions including the media, DC politicians, Hollywood and corporations, all based in ZIP codes far removed from the people they supposedly serve.
Three years later, all 24 of the people we interviewed for “The Great Revolt” (except two we’ve been unable to reach) told us they have not wavered in their political allegiances.
Polls echo this dynamic. Earlier this month, Cook Political Report election analyst Amy Walter crunched numbers from a recent New York Times/Siena poll to show that Trump’s edge in the Electoral College remains the same or has even grown a bit since 2016 in places like Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and even Minnesota, which he lost by a hair.
“It is 2016 all over again,” wrote Walter, and she’s not wrong. In many ways, our political climate is like the movie “Groundhog Day” — every day. If you woke up after Trump’s election feeling optimistic about the future, you likely still do. And if you didn’t, your hair is probably still on fire and nothing will extinguish it until the president is removed from the White House.
[…]
According to post-election polls, college grads living in areas where people have an above-average education broke sharply against Trump, while college graduates living in communities with below-average education narrowly supported him. In short, not all suburban voters are equal.
The suburbs around Erie, home of the state’s poorest ZIP code, are less educated than most. Though the county had not turned red for a presidential candidate since Reagan and had even supported Obama by 58 percent in 2012, it handed Trump a surprising two-percentage-point win over Clinton.
In 2020, Trump will likely get routed again in the suburbs of Chicago and Los Angeles, but the suburbs surrounding more working-class cities like Erie and Detroit are the ones that will decide his fate.
[…]
Cindy Hutchins, 58, a lifelong Democrat who lives in Michigan, flipped her party allegiance from Democrat to Republican in 2016. She fell into our “Rough Rebounder” archetype — someone who has struggled in life personally and professionally but found a way to persevere despite the circumstances.
[…]
“I’d vote for him again in a heartbeat,” she says from her home in bucolic Lake County, Michigan, which was once one of the most reliably blue counties in Northern Michigan until 2016. It’s one of the few places in America so Democratic it supported landslide loser George McGovern in 1972. And yet Trump took that county by 59 percent.
Yeah, Democrats think they have this in the bag. They don’t. The impeachment hearings aren’t going to end the Trump presidency. The Republican Senate will not convict, it will burn valuable time for Bernie Sanders, Liz Warren, and maybe Kamala Harris (if her campaign hasn’t folded by then) who will be forced off the campaign trail for the trial. Some Democrats know the end I think. With a solid economy, Trump will win. This is their best shot to take him out—and all because some partisan Democratic CIA agent heard some bad things about this July phone call Trump had with the Ukrainians. It’s pathetic. If you want to beat Trump, have a better trade agenda, job-creating agenda, and, oh, I don’t know—promise to enforce our immigration laws and you can see that Trump coalition start to fray. These aren’t hardcore Republicans, folks. But Democrats are too liberal, too crazy, and too stupid to realize this.
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