Lessons for the Resistance a Year and a Half Out from the Inauguration

Six months ago, I posted a blog entitled Lessons for the Resistance at the End of Year One, analyzing the Quinnipiac Poll.  Now is a good time to revisit that analysis as we run up to the mid-terms and begin to look toward 2020.

In January 2017, President Trump’s approval numbers were 36% Approval/44% Disapproval/19% Neither or Don’t Know.  In January 2018, the numbers at 36% Approval/59% Disapproval/5% Neither or Don't Know.  On July 24, 2018, six months after the January 2018 poll, the numbers remain essentially unmoved.  They are now at 38% Approval/58% Disapproval/4% Neither or Don’t Know. https://poll.qu.edu/images/polling/us/us07242018_ufgp12.pdf/  The small changes since January are not statistically significant.

Remember that Trump received 46% of the popular vote in 2016; so 20% of those who voted for him were likely in the Neither or Don’t Know column of Approval by Inauguration.  It appears that while Trump has kept his core base of approval since the Inauguration (and even increased it a small amount) (36%-38%), most of those withholding judgment at the time of the Inauguration now disapprove -- and have disapproved for a very long time.  A candidate who receives 46% of the popular vote, and then loses 20% of that support before he even takes office (and does not regain much of it) is in a terrible electoral position.  The fact that he has made virtually no gains from his January 2017 popularity is devastating  for Trump and his allies, unless Trump can turn that around, or so depress a huge portion of the 58%-59% of the electorate who disapprove that they abandon politics altogether.  The latter tactic appears to be the one that the Trump/Giuliani/Miller/Bannon team is pursuing with great vigor.

What I wrote six months ago is still true, and the events of that period reinforce it:

“Democrats should not get overconfident.  It will take hard work and good candidates to save the nation from Trumpism.  Trump is pulling out every page of the authoritarian’s cookbook in inflaming and motivating his [slightly more than]1/3 base, in seeking to undermine people’s confidence in all American institutions, and in seeking to convince the 3/5  . . . of the electorate who are fed up with him that they should just give up in the face of his awesomeness.  He will lie and mislead and then lie again.  Not just The Big Lie.  But The Big Lies.  His theory is that Americans are just as gullible as Germans were in 1933.

“Trump and [his collaborators] try to divide us; we cannot let them succeed.  Whatever issues may divide the 3/5, they are dwarfed by what the current Administration is doing to us.  To quote Ben Franklin, who, in 1787, told a citizen that the Constitutional Convention had given America “a Republic, if you can keep it,” also warned a dozen years earlier that “we must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”

Efforts by some Establishment Democrats to demonize Social Democrats and efforts by some Social Democrats to demonize Establishment Democrats are foolish in the face of the threat posed by Trump.  To use the Game of Thrones trope, "Winter is Coming."  Indeed, it is already here.