Double Trouble
Trump’s struggling, but Dems are in free-fall
BOTH fans and foes of President Trump have come to share a similar presumption about him — that, like Elphaba, the heroine of the Broadway musical “Wicked,” he defies gravity.
He won even though nearly 61 percent of the American people said they disapproved of him on Election Day. He scored only 36 percent approval — which is where he is even today in the FiveThirtyEight.com average, despite seven months of horrendous press and the Russia investigation.
Just as the flying Elphaba declares that she’ll match her enemies “in reknown” and “nobody ... is ever gonna bring me down,” so too did Trump tweet yesterday that “after 200 days, rarely has any Administration achieved what we have achieved . . . not even close! Don’t believe the Fake News Suppression Polls!”
This ludicrous grandiosity heartens his supporters and depresses his opponents, who fear he knows things about the workings of the electorate they do not — that he possesses a kind of Elphaba-like magic.
Anyone else would be fighting for his political life with an independent counsel dogging him, White House senior staff dropping like flies, the legislative failure of his party’s health-care reform efforts and the like. His foes think he should’ve been run out of office already, and his supporters might even secretly be surprised it hasn’t happened — which explains why Trump still intimidates or heartens them.
I don’t think he should. The idea he hasn’t been hurt by the roiling quality of his presidency is false. He has been damaged — not beyond salvation, to be sure, but significantly. The FiveThirtyEight chart measuring his approval rating (through poll aggregation) tells the story.
On his first day in office, Trump was at 45 percent approval and 41 percent disapproval. Fourteen days later, his approval and disapproval numbers were equal at 44.8 percent. Ever since, his approval has declined pretty steadily to its current level just above 36 percent.
This means, overall, he’s down 20 percent since taking office. That’s not defying gravity. That’s obeying the laws of gravity.
It’s bad. He has the lowest approval rating at this point in his presidency of anyone since such measurements have been taken — including the never-evenelected Gerald Ford, whose numbers took a colossal hit in 1974 after his controversial pardon of Richard Nixon.
And yet, it is said, Trump still has the overwhelming support of Republicans. That’s true. Gallup has him at 82 percent. But Gallup had him at 89 percent on Election Day. That’s a 7 percent decline. One poll had him at 74 percent with Republicans, which would represent a 15-point drop, and that’s horrible.
There’s no magic here. Trump is an unconventional politician and he has a passionate follow- ing, but he’s injuring himself. If he weren’t weaker than he was before, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wouldn’t have openly complained this week that Trump’s unrealistic expectations had helped doom healthcare reform. McConnell would have been too frightened to do so. All that said, honest Democrats and liberals are freaked out by Trump in part because they have been grappling with the incontrovertible evidence that they seem to have the opposite of magic working for them.
It’s not just the realization that the Obama era ended with a shrunken Democratic Party — more than 1,000 fewer state and local elected officials than in 2009, not to mention 63 lost House seats, 11 fewer senators and a grand total of 15 governor’s mansions.
It’s that their horrible candidate managed to lose the presidency while winning 3 million more votes — because she only won 20 states. It’s that if you look at a map of the United States, the entire country is painted Trump Red save for blue hot spots around major cities spotted throughout the land.
The geographical distribution of Democratic votes is horrendous; they’re clustered in ways that all but ensure the party cannot win back the Senate in November 2018 and may lose several seats. Dave Wasserman wrote a much-discussed piece for 538 in which he laid out how the small numerical advantage Hillary scored on Election Day has masked the overall threat to Democrats, which is that if things don’t change, they may not take back the Senate for a very, very long time.
Wasserman tweeted: “If more than 50% of your ’16 voters lived in just 9 states 94 of America’s 3,141 counties . . . you’re probably not a healthy national party.”
So Trump is in bad shape and the Democrats are in bad shape and here come the North Koreans — whose missiles really do seem to be defying gravity, don’t they?