Saturday, November 21, 2015
Only about Six Percent of the Electorate Supports Donald Trump
Donald Trump is the current front-runner among Republican presidential candidates. Some take this to be a very scary sign about the tastes of the republic.
It is helpful to remember, therefore, that all that really means is that a quarter of Republicans favor him now, at this early stage. And Republicans make up only a quarter of the electorate. A quarter of a quarter is about six percent of the whole.
Moreover, unlike most of the other Republican (or Democratic) candidates, Trump has very high negatives. Almost twice as many people have an unfavorable view of him as have a favorable view.
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And yet Republicans control both houses of Congress, 60% of the governorships and State legislatures. I suppose that that means that independent voters see that the GOP is the better protector of their interests than the wacky left of Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and the President.
Donald Trump is not all Republicans. In fact, he is not an especially typical Republican.
Absolutely correct. In fact, he is dangerous because of his atypicality. He speaks to hidden emotions of middle America that other politicians--of both parties--refuse to acknowledge, or if they do, to denigrate. Common people seem to believe that because he actually and accurately speaks to their fears and their concerns, when so many others ignore them, he is the only candidate speaking the truth.
Hitler spoke similarly to the veterans of WWI, and we know where that went. I do not suggest that Mr. Trump is Hitlerian in political philosophy, but his message to disaffected Americans--tired of being lied to by social-liberal politicians from LBJ to Nixon and Carter and now the President, and Senators Clinton and Sanders--resonates in a way that Hitler's rang true his comrades from the trenches. The Republicans take care of the upper end of the economic ladder and the Democrats do the same for the lower end, especially those who are due no political loyalty--non-citizens who have criminally invited themselves into the country, claiming what they see as "their share" of the nation's treasure. Both parties have effectively abandoned the people in the middle who are nonetheless called upon to pay the bills.
Trump is President Reagan--the greatest President of the second half of the 20th Century, and one of the top 5 or 6 in our history--without Reagan's moral fiber, patriotism, and innate honesty. And in that, heis dangerous.
I think the closest analogy for Donald Trump is Sylvio Berlusconi, a disastrous politician who kept getting re-elected on petite bourgeois nativist votes.
I think it's true that Donald Trump brings up some well-founded fears and concerns, but I don't think he's actually equipped to help them. He's stubbornly antagonistic, and many of these issues he brings up - especially the cultural ones - will require solidarity to solve wisely and peacefully.
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