From The New York Times:
Trump Has Become Just Another Disappointing Politician
Ms. Anderson, a contributing Opinion writer, is a Republican pollster and a moderator of Opinion’s series of focus groups.
In 1992, James Carville’s famous refrain — “It’s the economy, stupid” — compressed into four words what it might have taken a political scientist 400 words to explain: When family budgets feel tight, voters often go shopping for a new party to run things.
So as we approach the 2026 midterm elections, it’s hardly a unique insight for a pollster like me to say the election will hinge on the issues of our fragile economy and the high cost of living. Arguably, pocketbook issues led Donald Trump back to the White House for a second term: Poll after poll in 2024 showed the economy as the top issue and tended to show him with a significant advantage on who was more trusted to handle it.
Today, President Trump and Republicans haven’t merely lost that advantage; they’re underwater on the cost-of-living issue by an eight-point margin. And this year a second issue has been rising in my polling, ranking below the cost of living but ahead of other concerns. It’s not just the economy: “It’s the corruption,” too.
Voters don’t think the economy is working for them, and they think it’s being rigged more and more in favor of a precious few who are cozied up to our nation’s leaders. The combination of these two worries is putting Mr. Trump and Republicans in a terrible position on the eve of an election.
It’s also eating away at the winning brand that Mr. Trump cultivated over many years.
When Gallup asked Republicans back in 2016 what made Mr. Trump appealing, one in six alluded to his experience as a businessman. This was a product of his years in the public eye as a real estate mogul and as the star of “The Apprentice.” The top response? Mr. Trump was an “outsider.” A decade ago, that branding was understandable: He had never held elected office and was quite obviously not beloved by the G.O.P. establishment. His brand was so strong that in 2023, more than six years after he first took the oath of office, he was still considered an “outsider” by nearly seven in 10 Republicans.
Some of his voters are wondering if that’s still true. Robert, one of the Trump-voting Texas swing voters in a recent Times Opinion focus group for which I was a moderator, put it this way: “You used to think that you could count on the Republicans to be able to help out with the economy.” Now, he said, it feels as if “it’s going to be the top class or the certain friends that are getting the benefit of the economy, not the general folks.”
In my own polling, nearly two-thirds of voters say “most politicians are corrupt or just looking out for their own interest.” To borrow a phrase Mr. Trump used to be particularly fond of, voters think there’s a swamp that needs a lot of draining. Republicans howled, rightly, when President Bill Clinton was alleged to have traded stays in the Lincoln Bedroom for campaign contributions. They raised hell over Hunter Biden’s unseemly income streams during his father’s vice presidency.
For years, Mr. Trump got a lot of mileage out of his supporters thinking of him as a singular figure — a tycoon who put his glitzy life on hold in order to fix a broken Washington. Today, they see headlines about memecoin scams, inexplicable pardons and the enormous wealth that the president’s family and close associates are accumulating, and some of them are beginning to draw a different conclusion.
It would be one thing if Americans thought Mr. Trump were focused on fixing the economy and just hadn’t had enough time to deliver results. Sometimes voters give points for effort: In 2012, my research on young voters found that though they felt President Barack Obama’s economic record was lackluster, they still gave him credit for “trying.”
No comments:
Post a Comment