Americans’ Revulsion for Trump Is Underappreciated
Stanley
B. Greenberg
March
24, 2020
The
Atlantic
The
release on Friday of an ABC News/Ipsos
poll indicating that 55 percent of Americans approved of Donald
Trump’s handling of the coronavirus—12 points higher than the previous
week—prompted another round of fatalistic chatter in certain quarters of the
political establishment. Shocked by Trump’s victory in 2016, some left-leaning
commentators and rank-and-file Democrats alike have been steeling themselves
for his reelection in 2020, noting that most presidents win second terms; that,
at least before the pandemic, the economy was humming along; and more recently
that, during moments of national disaster, Americans tend to rally around the
leader they have.
But
these nuggets of conventional political wisdom obscure something
fundamental—something that even Democrats have trouble seeing: The United
States is in revolt against Donald Trump, and the likely Democratic nominee,
former Vice President Joe Biden, already holds a daunting lead over
Trump in the battleground states that will decide the 2020 election. By way
of disclosure, I am a Democratic pollster; for professional and personal
reasons alike, I want Democratic candidates to succeed. But no matter what, I
also want candidates and party operatives to base decisions—such as where and
how to campaign—on an accurate view of the political landscape. At the moment,
Democrats are underestimating their own strength and misperceiving the sources
of it.
Every
time Americans have gone to the polls since Trump took office, they have pushed
back hard against him. The blue wave that began in state elections in 2017 grew
bigger in the 2018 midterms and bigger yet in 2019. Trump focused the
Republican Party’s whole 2018 congressional campaign on immigrant caravans and
the border wall, and he lost. Trump held rallies in support of the Republican
gubernatorial candidates on the last nights before elections in the deep-red
states of Kentucky and Louisiana, and they lost. The GOP losses right through
the end of 2019 were produced by dramatic, growing gains for Democrats in the nation’s
suburbs. Democrats took total control of the Virginia legislature, where the
party held on to all the suburban seats it had flipped two years earlier and
gained six more.
Even
so, a CBS News poll taken late last
month found that 65 percent of Americans and more than a third of
Democrats believed that Trump would win reelection. Trump has been confidently
stalking Democrats, holding exuberant rallies in each of the early caucus and
primary states.
For
a time, each week’s voting made Trump’s position look stronger. Bernie Sanders
took a commanding delegate lead after the Nevada caucus, and Democratic leaders
and many others in the anti-Trump world panicked. Sanders was widely viewed as
Trump’s preferred opponent, and he looked unstoppable in the nomination battle.
Republicans were rubbing their hands together, eager to spend millions
“educating” the country about Sanders’s long-ago honeymoon in Moscow and his
socialist plans to destroy American health care. Even after Joe Biden stunned
himself and all the political analysts by winning the South Carolina primary by
nearly 30 points, much of the subsequent commentary dwelled on the nearly 30
percent of Sanders voters who were not certain they would vote for the eventual
nominee. The New York Times soon published a
front-page story on the socialist podcast Chapo Trap
House and a broader movement calling itself the “Dirtbag
Left,” which embraced Sanders and attacked his Democratic opponents. The
alienation of people like these would reelect Trump, supporters of other
Democratic candidates feared.
But
Democratic voters took over the nominating process and changed everything. No
group of voters felt more threatened by Donald Trump than African Americans,
and no group was more determined to see him defeated. When a stunning 61
percent of black voters in South Carolina chose Joe Biden, other Democrats
got the message. Turnout surged on Super Tuesday, led by Texas with a 45
percent increase over 2016 and Virginia with a 70 percent increase, for the highest
turnout in state history. The increase was led by African Americans and voters
in the suburbs. Two weeks later in Michigan, Tim Alberta declared in Politico,
“Democratic turnout exploded,” led by a 45 percent increase in the state’s
richest county.
Trump
has nationalized our politics around himself and his job performance, and that
has created a nine-point headwind for the Republican Party. While the
pessimists obsess over any of Trump’s most favorable polls, particularly in the
Electoral College battleground states, Trump has never raised his approval
rating above the low 40s in FiveThirtyEight’s
average of public polls; 52 to 53 percent disapprove of his performance in
office. And that remains true during the current crisis.
Trump
has improved his numbers with the evangelical Christians, Tea Party supporters,
and observant Catholics who make up the core of his Republican Party, but it is
a diminished party. The percentage of people identifying as Republican since
Trump took office has dropped from 39 to 36 percent, according to an NBC
News/Wall Street Journal poll.
Trump has pushed moderates out of the party, and those moderates are changing
their voting patterns accordingly.
Fully 5 percent of the voters in the South
Carolina Democratic primary had previously voted in the state’s Republican
primary. In Michigan, Republican strategists tried to make sense of the 56
percent increase in Democratic turnout in Livingston County, a white,
college-educated, upper-class community that Trump won by 30 points. Republicans
are shedding voters.
Why
don’t supposedly savvy people see the revolt that’s happening before their very
eyes?
Well,
everyone should pay less attention to the interviews with Trump voters at his
rallies—of course people who attend his events still support him—and more to
the fundamental changes in public attitudes that undercut Republican prospects.
The signature policies that are cheered at every Trump rally are unpopular with
most Americans.
Trump’s
reelection campaign is premised on voters embracing an “America first” vision
on trade and immigration, a defense of the traditional family with a male
breadwinner, and a battle for the forgotten working class. But the percentage
of Americans who believe that free trade between the United States and other countries
is mostly a good thing has jumped from 43 to 56 percent in three
years—reaching 67 percent among Democrats. The percentage who believe that
foreign trade is an opportunity for economic growth rather than a “threat to
the economy” has jumped from about 60 to 80 percent since Trump took
office. His tariffs and trade war have united much of the country against him.
As
he demanded that Congress fund a border wall with Mexico, pushed migrants into
new camps inside and outside the U.S., and dramatically reduced legal
immigration, Americans suddenly embraced immigrants and America’s immigrant
history. The percentage offering a warm response to the phrase immigrants
to the U.S. grew from 52 percent in January 2019 to
59 percent in July and spiked in September to 67 percent.
Women
started the revolt against Trump’s America the day after his inauguration, and
their opposition continues to deepen. In 2018, Democrats increased their
margins relative to 2016 by more than double digits with white college-educated
women—Hillary Clinton’s base—but also with white unmarried women and white
working-class women. In 2018, black women turned out to vote in record numbers
and gave Republicans only 7 percent of their votes.
The
women’s wave grew to a potential tsunami when I began testing the leading
Democratic candidates against Trump in the 2020 presidential contest earlier
this month. With Joe Biden as the candidate, Trump won only 4 percent of
African American women. He lost Hispanic women by 25 points, white unmarried
women by 18, white college women by 14, and white Millennial women by 12—all at
historic highs for Democrats.
Yet
while the revulsion that women and suburbanites show toward Trump registers
with elite commentators and Democratic operatives, the role that working-class
voters have played in Republicans’ recent electoral troubles mostly does not.
The
white working class forms 46 percent of registered voters; most are women.
Although these voters’ excitement and hopes made Trump’s 2016 victory possible,
they were demonstrably disillusioned just a year into Trump’s presidency. They
pulled back when the Republicans proposed big cuts in domestic spending,
Medicare, and Medicaid and made health insurance more uncertain and expensive,
while slashing taxes for corporations and their lobbyists. In the midterms,
Democrats ran on cutting prescription-drug costs, building infrastructure, and
limiting the role of big money, and a portion of the white working class joined
the revolt. The 13-point shift against Trump was three times stronger than the
shift in the suburbs that got everyone’s attention.
Trump
won white working-class women by 27 points in 2016. But at the end of 2019,
Biden was running dead even with Trump nationally. Eight months before the
election, Democracy Corps—of which I am a co-founder—and the Center for Voter
Information conducted a survey in the battleground states that gave Trump his
Electoral College victory. (Trump won them by 1.3 points in 2016.) Our recent
findings showed Biden trailing Trump with white working-class women by just
eight points in a head-to-head contest. These numbers herald an earthquake, but
they have not penetrated elite commentators’ calculations about whether Trump
will win in 2020.
When
President Barack Obama urged voters to “build on the progress” by supporting
Hillary Clinton in 2016, he underestimated how much working-class voters felt
Democrats had pushed their concerns out of sight. Democratic presidents
championed NAFTA and presided over the outsourcing of jobs; bank bailouts, lost
homes and wages, and mandatory health insurance further alienated working
people; and Clinton did not hide her closeness with Wall Street or her
discomfort campaigning to win working-class and rural communities. So working
people had lots of reasons to consider voting for Donald Trump, who said he was
battling for the “forgotten Americans,” but shocked Clinton supporters could
see only the race cards he played to great effect the second he got off the
escalator at Trump Tower. Now the failure of political elites to see the role
working people played in the Democratic victories of 2018 makes them believe that
Trump is headed for reelection.
Earlier
this year, I assembled an online sample of 250 Democratic base and swing voters
to watch the president’s State of the Union address. They reacted second by
second to his words and claims and, afterward, drew conclusions about the
president. They turned their thumbs down when Trump hailed the “great American
comeback.” He lost white working-class men and women on the comeback of jobs
and income and “the state of the union is stronger than ever.” After listening
to the president for more than an hour, 63 percent said he’s “governing for
billionaires and big money elites.” The elites may not see working people, but
working people see Donald Trump.
Perhaps
sensing the danger to the incumbent, Republican leaders in Congress appear
willing to approve a massive stimulus plan in response to the coronavirus—a
stimulus significantly larger than the one they ravaged Obama for pushing
through. That could raise Trump’s prospects—but the potentially catastrophic
human consequences of COVID-19 could also work against him. Trump, one can
safely assume, will do almost anything to get reelected, and my fellow
Democrats will do all they can to defeat him. But they also need to take into
account this basic fact: Large portions of the electorate, knowing what the
stakes are, have been rebelling against Trump for three years and are eager to
finish off his vision of America.
Stanley
B. Greenberg is a pollster who worked for Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Tony
Blair, and Nelson Mandela. He is the author of R.I.P. G.O.P.: How the New
America is Dooming the Republicans.
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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