New Report Depicts Trump Voters As ‘Angry, Despondent, Powerless’

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Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville, who has been married to conservative consultant Mary Matalin since 1993, has long said that in order to defeat Republicans, Democrats need to understand where their voters are coming from. That includes Donald Trump supporters, who Carville and fellow Democratic strategist Stan Greenberg examined via some focus groups in March.

Carville and Greenberg are the leaders of Democracy Corps, a Democratic polling/research organization. Although its primary goal is to help Democrats win elections, Democracy Corps sometimes studies GOP voters in order to determine why they vote the way they do — its Republican Party Project has been studying trends among the GOP electorate. And in March, Democracy Corps used focus groups to compare diehard Trump voters with “non-Trump conservatives and moderates.”

In a March 26 report, Democracy Corps explained, “We conducted focus groups in March with Trump loyalists in Georgia and Wisconsin and Trump-aligned, non-Trump conservatives and moderates in suburban and rural Georgia, Ohio and Wisconsin. It took a long time to recruit these groups because Trump voters seemed particularly distrustful of outsiders right now, wary of being victimized, and avoided revealing their true position until in a Zoom room with all Trump voters — then, they let it all out.” Continue reading.

Most Trump voters live in states won by Biden

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A colleague posed an interesting question to me Wednesday morning: What was the largest city that supported President Trump over President-elect Joe Biden in last month’s election?

I won’t make you read any further to learn the answer. It was Oklahoma City, the nation’s 25th-largest city.

The answer itself undersells the nuances that a look at the country’s most populous places can reveal. We tend to think of cities as heavily Democratic, and with good reason. They are. There are a lot of reasons for that, which we’ve explored before, including that cities are less densely White than suburban or rural areas and that they have in recent decades been a magnet for younger, college-educated people, who tend to be more liberal. So we aren’t surprised when we hear that the top 24 largest cities backed Biden. It’s what we’d expect. Continue reading.

We Have No More Excuses For Trump Voters

The past several days have offered a kaleidoscope of a Trump-addled America, a telling, if depressing, pastiche: Amy Cooper’s bigoted entitlement; the homicidal tactics of Minneapolis police officers; the knowing encouragement of the president, who has mounted his second campaign on the same foundation of rank prejudices and crude stereotypes as his first. It adds up to a portrait of a nation unwilling to retreat from its racist history, unable to chart a path toward a future that pays tribute to its more egalitarian founding creed.

President Donald J. Trump is merely a symptom, not a cause, not the sickness itself. During his first campaign, I worried less about his outrageous conduct and inflammatory rhetoric — he is, after all, just one malign actor — and more about the millions who danced to his music, rejoiced in his racist diatribes, sang in his chorus.

In 2016, I would not have accused every voter who cast a ballot for Trump of racism. Some were one-percenters bent on protecting their riches; some were lifelong Republicans leery of crossing party lines; some were Bernie Bros who couldn’t curb their misogyny and vote for Hillary Clinton. Still, there were many who eagerly followed after a man who defamed Mexicans, denounced Muslims and claimed that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Continue reading.

Trump’s ‘secret stash’ of voters

Maybe they exist, but it’s hard to tell in the middle of a national health crisis

ANALYSIS — Writing in The Washington Post recently, columnist and veteran political analyst Henry Olsen suggested that we may all be missing something important: President Donald Trump’s showing in head-to-head ballot tests against expected Democratic nominee Joe Biden is lagging his job approval numbers in recent RealClearPolitics polling averages.

After noting the strong relationship between presidential job approval and election outcomes, Olsen wrote: “Biden leads Trump by nearly six points, 48.3 to 42.4 percent, in the most recent RCP average. Trump’s approval rating in the RCP average was 46.0 percent on Wednesday morning. If Trump’s true vote share approximates that, he only trails Biden by about 2 points. If that happens on Election Day, Trump could once again win the Electoral College while losing the popular vote.”

That’s the secret stash of voters that could help the president win a second term, apparently — voters who now say (in the middle of a health care crisis) they approve of the president’s job performance but don’t also say they will vote for him in the fall. Continue reading.

‘Other-blamers’: Psychology expert explains how Trump hijacks voters’ brains with his abusive personality style

AlterNet logoEarlier this year, President Donald Trump gave an interview to Breitbart News, boasting about the “toughness” of his supporters.

“I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump – I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad,” he said.

Critics worried that the President was sending coded signals that might inspire violence among his supporters. A week later, nearly 50 people died after a shooter attacked two Mosques in New Zealand.

View the complete July 3 article by Tana Ganeva from Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.

Wisconsin swing voters turn on Trump: ‘He’s a dirty crook that lies, cheats and steals’

Swing voters in Wisconsin — which was crucial to Donald Trump’s 2016 election win — have had enough of the president and his “lies.”

The president barely won the state, where he got about 22,000 more votes than Hillary Clinton, and some voters who had previously backed Barack Obama before casting ballots for Trump are unhappy with their choice, reported Axios.

“I think he’s a dirty crook that lies, cheats, and steals when he can,” said George Engelmann, a 49-year-old Obama/Trump voter. “There’s just a plethora of things that are still coming out.”

View the complete March 18 article by Travis Gettys from Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.

Has the shutdown changed Trump’s political standing?

Credit: Jim Watson, AFP, Getty Images

The president’s political base seems to be staying put, but the danger for him is outside that realm

ANALYSIS — Even Donald Trump knows he is in a disturbingly deep political hole.

That’s why he went on television Saturday to offer his version of a “compromise” to Democrats. He is trying to blame House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her party for the partial government shutdown and to paint them as intransigent and extreme.

But after decades in the public spotlight — and two years in the White House — the president has his own well-earned reputation. Americans either love him or hate him.

View the complete January 22 article by Stuart Rothenberg on The Roll Call website here.

Trump Voters On His Shutdown: ‘What The [Expletive] Were We Thinking?’

Trump is losing support with his own voters over his government shutdown. Trump’s voters think the Trump Shutdown is “ridiculous.” They are “sick” of his border wall. And they now regret voting for Trump, asking “What the [expletive] were we thinking?”

Here’s what Trump voters had to say about his shutdown:

“What the [expletive] were we thinking?” – Trump voter

“It’s silly. It’s destructive.” – Trump voter Continue reading “Trump Voters On His Shutdown: ‘What The [Expletive] Were We Thinking?’”

Is Trump country really better off under Trump? No. It’s falling further behind.

President Trump at a rally in Fort Wayne, Ind., on Nov. 5. Credit: Jim Watson, AFP, Getty Images

Two years have passed since Donald Trump made his famous campaign promise in disaffected regions across the country: “We are going to start winning again!” For many voters who felt that they had lost ground in recent decades, the candidate argued, a vote for him would be rewarded with renewed prosperity and prominence.

It was a classic campaign promise, overly ambitious and cleverly vague. What exactly did “winning” mean? Certainly, many reporters believed voters perceived the promise as an economic one. So let’s measure the promise’s success that way. How have Trump voters fared economically, compared with Hillary Clinton voters?

Not noticeably better, according to the data. By most measures, my latest research shows, Trump counties — and especially counties with higher proportions of Trump voters — continue to fall farther behind the rest of the country economically. The story of our economy, like the story of our politics, continues to be a story of division and divergence.

View the complete November 18 article by Anthony W. Orlando on The Washington Post website here.

Here’s Why the New BBC Report on Trump’s Predatory Behavior Won’t Sway His Evangelical Followers

The following article by Alex Henderson was posted on the AlterNet.org website July 12, 2018:

Far-right white evangelicals who hate the poor as much as they hate abortion, porn and same-sex marriage.

Credit: Gage Skidmore

It’s no secret that President Trump is wildly unpopular in Europe, and a 30-minute BBC report that aired earlier this week as part of the “BBC Panorama” series is unlikely to improve his image overseas.

Titled “Trump: Is the President a Sex Pest?,” the report contains anecdotes describing Trump’s creepy behavior around women in the 1980s and 1990s. One of the women interviewed, Barbara Pilling, alleged that when she met Trump at a party in New York City in the late 1980s and told him she was only 17, he responded, “Oh, great. So, you’re not too old and not too young. That’s just great.”

Pilling recalled, “I felt I was in the presence of a shark.”

View the original article on the AlterNet.org website here.