Will Trump’s meanness spur U.S. resurgence of kindness?
If you are appalled by the chaos, division and meanness of the Trump presidency, if you are tired of the lies he and his apparatchiks tell, take heart. Most of your fellow Americans feel the same way.
There is a condescending habit in the nation’s capital of seeing voters as detached and indifferent to day-to-day workings of government.
The folks who promised to drain the swamp are guilty of a particularly pernicious form of this elitism. President Trump’s defenders regularly claim his base is so blindly loyal that nothing he says or does will ever drive its members away.
But news from across the country should shatter these illusions. A large majority of voters, including many erstwhile Trump supporters, are rebelling. The evidence is overwhelming that Trump’s foes are as determined and motivated as any opposition in recent memory.
This message was already delivered in elections in November and December. The latest tidings are from Wisconsin, which led the way toward the style of politics Trump exploited to get to the White House, even though he fared poorly there in the 2016 primaries.
In the rural 10th Senate District in the state’s western reaches, Democrat Patty Schachtner defeated Republican Assemblyman Adam Jarchow by an impressive 9 percentage points in a special election Tuesday. Consider that Trump carried the district by 17 points (up from a 6-point margin for Mitt Romney in 2012) and that the seat had been Republican for 17 years.
It was, as my Washington Post colleague Dave Weigel noted, the Democrats’ 34th legislative pickup from the Republicans since Trump’s election. Republicans have flipped just four.
Wisconsin matters, and not simply because it was, along with Michigan and Pennsylvania, one of the states that gave Trump his Electoral College victory. It is also where American progressivism took root at the turn of the last century, but where conservatives have staged a dramatic realignment of popular sentiments over a short period.
Democrats won it in every presidential election from 1988 to 2012. Hillary Clinton’s strategists took the state for granted in 2016. What they missed were trends brilliantly analyzed by Katherine J. Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, in her prophetic book, “The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.” It was published eight months before the 2016 vote.
As the title suggests, the conservative resurgence Walker engineered was built on a backlash in the countryside against Milwaukee and Madison.
But backlash politics provokes a backlash of its own, and in an interview Wednesday, Cramer said the voters are weary of division. “Wisconsinites believe in ‘Wisconsin Nice,’” she said, “and they really dislike ‘us versus them’ politics.”
With Washington engulfed in controversy over Trump’s hate-filled comments, Republicans would do well to note the costs of unkind politics.
A Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday found Trump with a dismal 38 percent approval rating. Only 29 percent strongly approved of his performance, while 49 percent strongly disapproved. Intensity of feeling is important to voter turnout, especially in midterms.
Predicting November’s elections in January is, of course, a fool’s game. But failing to see the depth of the loathing for Trump is a form of political malpractice. He has given nice a chance to prevail.