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Report: Dem pollsters worried that attacks on Trump not sticking

Report: Dem pollsters worried that attacks on Trump not sticking

The Teflon Don?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06-ZlBYEnRQ

If we judged elections that are over a year (congressional midterms) and three years (presidential) away based on current approval ratings and popularity polling, Donald Trump would seem done for.

Indeed, that is the prevailing media narrative.

Though there was a recent blip upward, Trumps favorability and job approval numbers are poor.

Here is a chart of Trump’s job approval ratings from 538 based on a composite of all polls:

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/

Here is a Real Clear Politics chart of favorability, a slightly different measure but clocking in very close to job approval numbers:

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/trump_favorableunfavorable-5493.html

This is giving Democrats and The Resistance much cheer. But the people who do internal polling, voter interviewing and focus groups for Democrats don’t have much cheer. What do they know that the public polling about approval and favorability are not telling us?

Politico reports, Teflon Don confounds Democrats:

Data from a range of focus groups and internal polls in swing states paint a difficult picture for the Democratic Party heading into the 2018 midterms and 2020 presidential election. It suggests that Democrats are naive if they believe Trump’s historically low approval numbers mean a landslide is coming….

The research, conducted by private firms and for Democratic campaign arms, is rarely made public but was described to POLITICO in interviews with a dozen top operatives who’ve been analyzing the results coming in.

“If that’s the attitude that’s driving the Democratic Party, we’re going to drive right into the ocean,” said Anson Kaye, a strategist at media firm GMMB who worked on the Obama and Clinton campaigns and is in conversations with potential clients for next year.

Worse news, they worry: Many of the ideas party leaders have latched onto in an attempt to appeal to their lost voters — free college tuition, raising the minimum wage to $15, even Medicare for all — test poorly among voters outside the base. The people in these polls and focus groups tend to see those proposals as empty promises, at best.

Pollsters are shocked by how many voters describe themselves as “exhausted” by the constant chaos surrounding Trump, and they find that there’s strong support for a Congress that provides a check on him rather than voting for his agenda most of the time. But he is still viewed as an outsider shaking up the system, which people in the various surveys say they like, and which Democrats don’t stack up well against.

This could reflect that the unprecedented media, Democrat and NeverTrump Republican attacks are not working, and may be backfiring. Sure, people may say they don’t like the job Trump is doing and may view him unfavorably, but guess what?

Trump’s favorability rating on Election Day 2016 was almost precisely what it is now (a point worse, actually).

This is a good opportunity for me to repeat what I wrote in late July, Media overplaying its anti-Trump hand – statistics and an anecdote about a lifelong Democrat:

… I had a conversation today that anecdotally supports how out of touch the media is.

The conversation was with someone I’ve known for almost 20 years. He’s a lifelong Rhode Islander and Democrat who has expressed strong hostility to me toward Trump in the past. We speak every couple of months, and I’ve never heard him say a good word about Trump.

The political part of the conversation started by him asking me how the blog was going, and how we must be busy with all the Trump stuff.  I was non-committal, something along the lines of “sure, things are always busy.” I fully expected a truck load of anti-Trump stuff to be dumped on me next. But that didn’t happen.

He then volunteered how frustrated he was with the media, and how they “won’t let Trump do his job.” He said he still doesn’t like Trump, but was very angry at the media particularly the Russia coverage. He said (paraphrasing), give me a break with that meeting, if someone offered any campaign dirt on their opponent, of course they’d take it. The conversation continued for several minutes along the same lines, but he kept coming back to Trump not being permitted to “do his job.”

It’s just an anecdote. But it’s meaningful to me because this friend was the last person I would have expected to have such a reaction to media coverage of Trump.

Between the statistical disconnect between media coverage and what matters to people, and this anecdote, I think 2018 may not be the Democrat romp many people are predicting.

It seems that the Dem pollsters, interviewers and focus-groupers were talking to people like my friend. My conversation may have been anecdotal, but enough anecdotes make for a Democrat problem.

Victor Davis Hansen has a great post at National Review, Two Resistances. The basic thesis is that the Media-Dem-NeverTrump Resistance gets all the attention, but the real resistance is an uprising against elites, so much so that Trump is an acceptable antidote:

Yet in contrast to the media-driven “Resistance,” there is a more authentic ongoing resistance that Trump himself capitalized on, but hardly originated. It is a pushback against the corporate and government conglomerate of identity-politics McCarthyism, and elite coastal globalism, in which everything from going to a football game and hearing the national anthem, to watching a tennis match, to visiting a cemetery or park, to keeping up with the news of horrific weather devastation is calibrated by politics. Or rather what bothers most Americans is politics now defined as nonstop sermonizing in which a rich athlete, a Pajama Boy activist, a demagogic politician, or a quarter-educated billionaire movie star lectures less fortunate Americans on the various deplorable racists, sexists, homophobes, and Islamophobes among them.

There is a populist and growing resistance to the Orwellian idea that free speech is hate speech, that equality of opportunity is defined only by equality of result, and that identity politics determines the degree of government-mandated penance and reparations….

And sometimes they vote for flawed candidates like Donald Trump, whose virtue of saying almost anything to anyone at any time is considered a sort of harsh medicine that targets the malady of identity-driven political correctness, a chemotherapy to stop metastasizing malignancy.

So there’s something going on here that the Dem insiders are picking up that rings true: People don’t have to like Trump to vote for him. And the more people attack him hysterically and unreasonably, the more they help him.

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Comments

“You can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”

Yes, Trump is teflon – but the technique is so easy. It just takes courage and willingness to fight back for what you believe.

The complete opposite of the rats GOPe.

    notamemberofanyorganizedpolicital in reply to TheFineReport.com. | September 14, 2017 at 1:37 pm

    FYI

    I think this also plays into the “real resistance” – consisting of people willing to vote Trump even if they don’t like him personally.

    “Good Grief – Eleven Months Later and Hillary Clinton Still Bellyaching About Losing…”

    “…Democrat party define itself as Hillary Clinton, Tom Perez, Keith Ellison, Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters.

    There’s nothing about this (Clinton) interview that’s even remotely alright. She lost. It’s eleven months later….”

Didn’t vote for him last time, but sure as hell voting for him this time. I have never seen a candidate that makes so many people so angry, and in government harmony is not what I want. I heavily lean conservative and I still don’t think Trump is conservative, but by the way the media acts you would think he is dyed in the wool. Good enough for me.

    Tom Servo in reply to Shane. | September 13, 2017 at 8:35 pm

    Agree, and another thing – for a short time, all the media outlets were hoping that Trump voters would be outraged that Trump was treating the GOP leadership so “disrespectfully”. Well guess what, Ryan and McConnell have shown themselves to be totally useless incompetents, and right now no one despises them more than conservative voters. Giving up and saying “oh yeah, well I guess Obamacare is law now, nothing we can do.”

    I’m not really ready to say Trump is “good”, but everyone else on the scene today is so much worse!!!! it’s pathetic that we’ve come to this point.

What they don’t want to acknowledge is how F’ing pissed off taxpaying voters really are right now.
What’s the congress critters ratings? Are they above 10% even?
20 trillion in debt. Yeah, that’s sustainable.

Inasmuch as the media’s polls about Trump have been consistently wrong for 2 years, why should we start believing them now?

    CountMontyC in reply to maxmillion. | September 13, 2017 at 9:49 pm

    There are two types of polls. The polls released to the public(many of which are slanted to fit an agenda) and then there are the private polls. These polls are the ones that MUST be accurate so that the candidates can actually run their campaigns intelligently. My guess is that it is these private polls that are upsetting liberal pollsters

      notamemberofanyorganizedpolicital in reply to CountMontyC. | September 14, 2017 at 1:41 pm

      Plus lots of folks have decided to outright lie to the pollsters doing those fake polls used to drive the Communist-Democrat Party Agenda.

    Because those paragons of honesty and integrity ny times and the GOPe say so.

Pelosi Schmelosi | September 13, 2017 at 10:08 pm

Winning!

Seriously. After what we’ve learned in the past year, to pay any attention at all to “the polls” takes a really special kind of stupid.

Polls could be useful … maybe … but not as long as they keep asking the wrong questions. Asking the right questions is the key to getting the right answers. All they’re getting is the answers they want … or, more accurately, the answers they can sell.

    In the times we live in (and probably for the past 60 years), ‘polls’ are probably about as reliable as news as Walter Cronkite was and the ny times is.

    Knives are great too, except when they’re headed straight into your back.

    The left infests the media, and the crying boehners infest the GOP.

    A poll is only as good as the poll-taker is honest.

It’s not just polls asking the wrong question bit polls asking the wrong question to the wrong people to get a wrong conclusion…whivh is the conclusion the democrat propaganda machine (mfm) wants you to believe.

Some of what President Trump does seems childish in its delivery so let’s use some examples from our childhood.

First, if a tree falls in the woods does it make any noise. In this case, if Trump does something good and the media doesn’t report it did it happen. Trump has done more to change government in Washington in the last nine months that Obama did in 8 years and the impact is being noticed by the people but not the media.

Second, I’m rubber and your glue, whatever you say bad about me bounces off and sticks on you. Just ask Marco Rubio and 15 other Republicans and Hillary about this.Now the media is falling for it too.

BTW: Trump hired his pollsters out of Britain and won his campaign.

That one man is much more competent than all the Dumbed Down Democrats and RINO’s put together. Let’s get busy and fire the pseudo-marxists and get our country back.

Politics is downstream of culture. Control the commanding heights of culture and you soon control its government. It follows that our priorities must be matters cultural at least as much as matters political.

The activist Left saw the preeminence of culture eons ago. Everyday Americans are just waking up to it, thanks largely to the left’s surging intolerance and cultural totalitarianism.

So it is that the the left’s unprecedented hysteria over Trump is fed more by cultural than political factors. The prog left has invested all-out in taking the government by manipulating the culture, aka Cultural Marxism. As the quintessential anti-PC/anti-Cultural Marxist warrior, Trump is their worst nightmare. He loves the same America we love, he has the same basic values we have, and he looks out for the everyday people who are us. As such, he strikes at the heart of the left’s strategy for the end-game, its cultural grip on the country.

Quoting VD Hanson, “There is a populist and growing resistance to the Orwellian idea that free speech is hate speech, that equality of opportunity is defined only by equality of result, and that identity politics determines the degree of government-mandated penance and reparations.” http://www.nationalreview.com/article/451072/two-resistances-anti-trump-identity-politics-activists-battle-non-elites

For his cultural assets, we allow Trump substantial latitude on matters political. If he can rescue us from this growing PC tyranny, we will follow him into unfamiliar places.

Trump is our bully to fight their bully.
Until a better culture warrior comes along, it’s Trump 2020. #MAGA

How prevalent might this view be?

As Byron York points out:

“He [Trump] also had a significant amount of support coming from people who had an unfavorable view of him. Of the people that voted for him, 20 percent had an unfavorable view, according to the exit polls.”

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/byron-york-where-is-trump-popular-and-what-does-that-mean-for-2018/article/2633941

There may be a culture vote that is largely untethered to the traditional political vote. The total Trump vote may be the sum of people voting for apples plus people voting for oranges.