David A.Graham/Atlantic:
The Longer Trump Stays in Office, the More Americans Oppose His Views
The president is reshaping Americans’ political views, just not the way he intended.
But the Trump era has also radicalized Democrats, and especially white Democrats, who by some measures are actually more liberal on race than fellow Democrats who are minorities. Reuters found that more Democrats say blacks are treated unfairly at work and by the police than in 2016—remarkable given how coverage of police violence toward African Americans has dropped in the past few years—while Republican attitudes have remained unchanged.
Meanwhile, opinion shifts like the ones on race appear elsewhere. Consider immigration, which is Trump’s signature issue—though it is also inextricable from race, especially given Trump’s focus on and rhetoric about Hispanic immigration.
Reuters found that white Americans are 19 percent more supportive of a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants than they were four years ago, and slightly less supportive of increased deportations. Other polls find related results. A record-high number of Americans—75 percent—said in 2018 that immigration is good for the United States. Although the Trump administration took steps last week to limit even legal immigration, the Trump presidency has seen an increase in the number of Americans who support more legal immigration—not just among Democrats, but even slightly among Republicans.
The last few week’s freefall in logic and temperament has not gone unnoticed. For example, Trump lied about support for background checks. He’s the reason they are not getting this overwhelmingly popular issue done. He is incapable of draining the swamp. He is bested by lobbyists. Whatever take you want to walk away with, he is a failure.
“The intensity of opposition to the president in polls is only hardening. If we see 2018-like turnout, those numbers are likely to be very accurate” says this Charlie Cook piece:
Axios:
Trump's shaky policy legacy
A great deal of President Trump’s policy record — on issues like health care, energy and even immigration — would need a second term to fully take root, and could be easily reversed if he doesn’t get one.
Why it matters: Trump is doing a lot: He has upended American politics, and his appointment of conservative judges will reverberate well beyond his presidency. But if — if — he were to be a one-term president, the substantive policy changes he’d leave behind could be short-lived.
The big picture: Trump has scored few big legislative wins so far, and will instead head into 2020 with a policy record that comes largely from executive action, like regulations to expand bare-bones health insurance plans and roll back Obama-era energy standards.
- But many of those actions would be at risk if he loses in 2020. (This is not a prediction that Trump will be a one-term president; only an acknowledgment that that’s 1 of the 2 possible outcomes of the election.)
- A Democratic president could reverse many of Trump’s decisions just as easily as he reversed some of Barack Obama’s. Other steps that would normally be harder to reverse may not be fully cemented by January 2021.
Bruce Gyory/Bulwark:
New Polls Show That Trump Should Be Afraid. Very Very Afraid.
It's not that his approval rating is low (although it is). It's that his disapproval rating is so high.
In terms of the events driving this decline in Trump’s public prestige, other results were even more telling than Trump’s job approval ratings. Only 37 percent of voters told Fox News that they supported Trump’s handling of the shootings in El Paso and Dayton, and 46 percent felt that Trump had made the country less safe. The NBC/WSJ poll put the approval for Trump’s handling of the aftermath of the El Paso and Dayton shootings at 36 percent.
Even worse for Trump was that 56 percent of voters told the Fox News pollster that they felt that Trump had either a great deal or some blame for the mass shootings plaguing America in the last few years (including 34 percent who attributed “a great deal of blame” to Trump). And among those who assigned a “great deal of blame” to Trump were: 40 percent of women, 39 percent of suburban women and 59 percent of black voters (51 percent of all non-white voters). When a third of the nation is blaming their president for such violence, , that erodes the currency of the pledge in Trump’s inaugural address—”This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,”—even if that pledge was predicated on an inaccurate reading of violent crime statistics.
And so it is little wonder that Trump lost the head-to-head matchups against Biden, Sanders, Warren and Harris in the Fox News poll. Worst of all for Trump, he didn’t even reach 39 percent in any head to head matchups. In effect, Trump was running below his job approval levels. That is the political equivalent of (dare we say it?) an inverted yield curve in the bond markets.
Magellan Strategies:
The Extraordinary 2018 Election in Colorado
This post-election survey of unaffiliated voters, along with observations of voter turnout in Colorado, can only be described as extraordinary. It was extraordinary because in the past 20 years never has one political party been so overwhelmingly rejected at every level of representative government by the electorate. It was extraordinary because unaffiliated voters, the largest and fastest growing affiliation in our state, participated in a mid-term election at a level that has never happened to before.
Time will tell if the 2018 election was an acceleration of the Republican Party’s waning ability to win statewide elections in Colorado, or a sobering period of clarity that sparked a new direction for the GOP.
There is an abundance of survey data and voter trends to show the rise of unaffiliated voters and how they think and vote, and all Colorado Republicans should be worried. There is a very real probability that 2018 will be known as the election when it became apparent that the Republican Party no longer has the voter registration numbers to be competitive in Colorado. For the past 10 years there have been warning signs in voter registration and turnout trends, resulting finally this year in a historic Democratic wave bigger than 2006 or 2008.
See Monday’s APR for a Rachel Bitecofer summary, supported by this CO data. Trump may activate the base but he activates Ds and D-leaning indies even more (hence, huge turnout). That’s something to build on, but you need a candidate that motivates younger voters as well as older voters to get yourself a wave.
NBC:
Trump, QAnon and an impending judgment day: Behind the Facebook-fueled rise of The Epoch Times
Started almost two decades ago with a stated mission to “provide information to Chinese communities to help immigrants assimilate into American society,” The Epoch Times now wields one of the biggest social media followings of any news outlet.
By the numbers, there is no bigger advocate of President Donald Trump on Facebook than The Epoch Times.
The small New York-based nonprofit news outlet has spent more than $1.5 million on about 11,000 pro-Trump advertisements in the last six months, according to data from Facebook’s advertising archive — more than any organization outside of the Trump campaign itself, and more than most Democratic presidential candidates have spent on their own campaigns.
Those video ads — in which unidentified spokespeople thumb through a newspaper to praise Trump, peddle conspiracy theories about the “Deep State,” and criticize “fake news” media — strike a familiar tone in the online conservative news ecosystem. The Epoch Times looks like many of the conservative outlets that have gained followings in recent years.
But it isn’t.
Behind the scenes, the media outlet’s ownership and operation is closely tied to Falun Gong, a Chinese spiritual community with the stated goal of taking down China’s government.
The invisible stuff we are fighting against.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
Here comes another Trump cave. It will showcase his worst instincts.
A real push on guns could appeal to those voters, but not just because they might generally support combating gun violence. As Democratic strategist Bruce Gyory points out, the confluence of Trump’s conspicuous public racism (his attacks on nonwhite lawmakers) along with the mass shootings might convince the middle of the country that Trump has become a meaningful threat to public safety and civil peace.
If so, Gyory notes, Trump’s base likely will not be enough to save him, even given his structural electoral college edge. Acting on guns might help mitigate this developing picture of Trump. Whether that substantively shouldmitigate this picture in a world where Trump’s racist displays keep actively harming the country is another matter; the point is Trump might theoretically have an irresistible political motive to act.
But Trump appears to see the costs of acting as more prohibitive. As the New York Times reports, Trump’s move toward backing down suggests he’s “capitulating to the views of his populist white and working-class political base” after the NRA “flooded” the White House and Congress with “phone calls.”
It’s not clear that the “populist” components of Trump’s base are deeply preoccupied with expansive interpretations of gun rights. But the Trump base and the more traditional GOP base are often hard to disentangle.
Philip Bump/WaPo:
The specific nostalgia Biden wants to evoke? Nov. 7, 2016.
Jill Biden’s comments were both clumsy and a bit dismissive. But it’s not her making a mistake. It’s just an awkward presentation of the pitch coming from the campaign more broadly.
“Yes,” she says, “your candidate might be better on, I don’t know, health care than Joe is, but you’ve got to look at who’s going to win this election. And maybe you have to swallow a little bit and say, ‘Okay, I personally like so-and-so better,’ but your bottom line has to be that we have to beat Trump.” ...
You can see the challenge here. If Clinton lost because blue-collar voters rejected her but would embrace Biden, his electability case is solid. If Clinton lost because Democrats didn't feel motivated to vote for her, things get trickier. Especially if the pitch is “give up on your priorities and vote Biden.” If Biden is up by a modest margin on Election Day 2020 and polling suggests he'll win, how urgently will people who were meh on his candidacy get to the polls?
Mind you, this is not a bad strategy for Biden. Democrats have spent almost three years re-litigating 2016 and arguing over how Trump managed to get elected. Biden is saying, almost explicitly, that he will do what Clinton didn’t, just four years later.
There’s just one question: Can he?
Laugh if you want, it’s a potent argument (and so far, Biden has been underestimated). But he’ll have to motivate people.
Hope for the future. For now, the vote for Trump is too solid.
Sahil Kapur/Bloomberg:
Yes, Trump Can Win Re-Election. But He’s Right to Worry
Trump, if 2016 is a guide, will run a nasty campaign, full of derisive caricature of his opponents. It helped him then, but it’s still to be seen whether that will help him as much now that he’s a known quantity.
Biden pollster and adviser John Anzalone said 2020 will be different because a President Trump was merely a hypothetical to voters then, whereas now he’s a “reality that haunts them.”
USA Today:
Immigration lawyers: We saw what's happening at the US-Mexico border. It's a tragic farce
There is no due process in Mexico for asylum seekers, just endless obstacles to staying alive, finding an attorney and communicating with authorities.
Many of the asylum seekers we met with had been kidnapped (some had been kidnapped multiple times) or had managed to escape attempted kidnappings as cartels, gangs, and corrupt government officials easily target them. Multiple women have reported being sexually assaulted and raped upon their return to Mexico. Some of the families stated they had even seen their kidnappers circling the neighborhood. They now refuse to leave the shelter, except for their court dates, some of which are set three to four months into the future. This court date is the first time they have an opportunity to ask for an interview with an asylum officer.
Things are not much better when they finally arrive in immigration court in El Paso. Immigration court hearings are open to the public, but the government has limited the number of observers, making transparency a joke