Skip to main content

Ours is not to reason why

By



Nationally, Trump continues to poll poorly, but if you look at key states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio, Trump surprisingly polls evenly or ahead of Democratic candidates.  Ohio has long been a toss-up state but Michigan and Wisconsin are traditionally Democratic states.  Midwest voters claim to have voted for Democratic candidates in the midterms but say they will return to Trump in 2020.

Some said they prefer a split government, so voted for Democrats to check Trump's executive power in the midterms.  If they don't like all the power Trump wields why vote for him in 2020, and instead vote for Republican Congresspersons to balance a potential Democratic president's power?

The sad truth is many of these persons don't put a lot of thought into how they vote.  It is mostly a reflexive action driven by an emotional response to a candidate, which is why all those fake ads worked so well in 2016.  Trump has been able to shrug off the scandals that surround his administration, as Reagan did in the 80s, by projecting confidence in the face of adversity.  Only if he were to project insecurity and weakness, would his voters abandon him.

I remember an excerpt from one of Oliver Sacks' books in which he described the reactions to a Reagan speech at an assisted living facility.  Most of the elderly persons were emotionally supportive of the president, but one woman showed no interest in the speech on the television.  It turns out she was tone deaf and was unimpressed by Reagan's grammar.  His speech didn't make any sense, she said to Dr. Sacks.

Fortunately for Trump, many of his supporters won't read the transcript as his campaign has encouraged them to do.  If they did, they would find it contradicts much of what he says at rallies.  Better just to market his latest catch phrase as a campaign t-shirt.

The secret to his success has been his ability to turn adversity into a rally cry for his supporters.  The only question is how far this support extends?  If it is as it appears in Wisconsin that some Democratic voters are still willing to cast their lot for Trump in 2020 then Democrats have a lot to worry about.  But, if this unquestioning support is only confined to his base then Trump could be in for a nightmare in November.

I think the Marquette poll is an outlier, although FiveThirtyEight gives the polling group a good score of A/B, even if it has only been predictive 77% of the time.  Polls tend to factor a lot of variables in their sample sizes of the electorate.  Only 700 registered voters were surveyed in Wisconsin.  However, this positive polling has certainly been heard in the White House, as it trumpets the findings across social media. 

However, most polls show Trump trailing the leading Democratic candidates in Midwest states, albeit barely.  This would make sense as his tariffs have had a very negative impact on farmers in this region, with farm foreclosures on the rise in Wisconsin.  However, persons have been known to vote against their best interests before.

Trump's ability to project power is the only thing he has going for him.  Anyone looking at his record would be appalled.  Even conservatives have expressed their frustration at his inability to get any of his signature campaign initiatives through Congress, most notably the wall.  He has had to funnel money from the Pentagon to get what little bit of wall he has managed to erect along the Texas border.  The rest has come from private sources.  Trump has no major trade bill to claim credit for.  His new USMCA deal languishes in Congress, pending revisions proposed by Democrats.   The Great China deal remains on hold three years since his election.  Yet, he can still claim nearly 90% support among Republicans.  So, he continues to play on polarizing social issues like the faux War on Christmas, which he audaciously chose to extend to Thanksgiving at a recent rally, leaving his Friends at Fox flummoxed by what he meant by this.

"Ours is not to reason why," as Alfred Lord Tennyson said, "ours is but to do or die."  This seems to sum up the devotion to Trump pretty well.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
230 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old Order

By
A quarter of a century, however, is time enough to dispel some of the myths that have accumulated around the crisis of the early Thirties and the emergence of the New Deal. There is, for example, the myth that world conditions rather than domestic errors and extravagances were entirely responsible for the depression. There is the myth that the depression was already over, as a consequence of the ministrations of the Hoover Administration, and that it was the loss of confidence resulting from the election of Roosevelt that gave it new life. There is the myth that the roots of what was good in the New Deal were in the Hoover Administration - that Hoover had actually inaugurated the era of government responsibility for the health of the economy and the society. There is the contrasting myth (for myths do not require inner consistency) that the New Deal was alien in origins and in philosophy; that - as Mr. Hoover put it - its philosophy was "the same philosophy of government which...
170 comments
Read more