Just after Christmas dinner, my father-in-law, a WWII vet totally in the tank for Trump and anyone else that Fox News conjures up as being good for ‘Murica, pulled me aside and asked me frankly, “Really, do you think that he’ll be good for the economy?” I had to break it to him has kindly as I could: “Nope, it’s all smoke and mirrors.” He had a very dejected look on his face, knowing that he’d been had, and not liking it, but accepting it.
It seems that folks like my father-in-law are waking up and smelling the stench of Trump’s rancid coffee in droves. Not only are Trump’s job approval ratings plummeting, as seen in HuffPost’s recent aggregate infographic, but the in-the-tank-for-Republicans pollsters are starting to show support tanking in a big way also.
Rasmussen was showing a fairly large gap between its estimate of Trump approval and that of Gallup, a conservative mainstream polling outfit. But Rasmussen’s most recent polls are showing Trump with a -10 percent net disapproval, only two percentage points away from Gallup. None of these pollsters are showing Trump with a positive rating, now, although Reuters/Ipsos, a stalwart friend of Wall Street global economy interests, refuses to give up on support for Agent Orange with a tie rating.
Whether recent polling data points represent a permanent trend is hard to tell, but the rapid shift, shown even before the collapse of Trumpcare being rammed through the House, indicates that a large chunk of Trump swing voters get that they’ve been had. People who’ve been swindled like this don’t forget too easily, so I expect this to mature into a solid trend, all things being equal.
These swing votes are the forgotten and frightened Americans, as opposed to the solid 30-40 percent of Americans who generally never had a clue and wouldn’t know where to find one if it walked up to them and smacked them on the lips. That’s why I find Rassmussen’s polling rather interesting: these angry and frightened Americans were undersampled in Dem-leaning polls in the 2016 election, and that showed in the final results, while Rasmussen seems to track them pretty well, if but with a good dose of over-optimism in their sampling corrections at times.
I suspect that this is more than a case of a broken clock being right twice a day — I am pretty confident that Rasmussen is worth watching as an indicator as to what Rust Belt voters are thinking about their next vote. That’s an opportunity, not a certainty, so it seems to indicate that the time is right to hit this demographic hard with messaging and hopeful candidates, while there’s a window of opportunity to cement their thinking for 2018 and beyond. Let’s hope so — and work for it!