The Most Hated President Ever? Also The Most Loved

Chances are, if you're a DWT reader, you're a Trump hater through and through. Unless you're a Republican. Rank-and file Republicans love Trump-- they really do. A recent poll shows that if Romney runs against Trump in 2020, the Republican primary would yield Trump 75% of the vote... and Romney just 1%. Sit down and take a deep breath. Señor T "commands the second highest 'own party' approval rating of any president at the 500 day mark since World War II, behind only President George W. Bush, after 9/11." He makes it "respectable" to be a racist, which-- let's face it-- has a lot more to do with why anyone, pre-Trump, ever wanted to admit about joining the GOP. Feh... right?

I guess they never really liked anything the GOP stood for anyway-- except the racism and bigotry-- and now Trump is throwing it all way... except the racism and bigotry. Jonathan Swan: "Trump’s hijacking of the formerly conservative GOP is complete-- an astonishing accomplishment. The majority party in America is fully defined by his policies, his popularity with the base, his facts-be-damned mentality, his ability to control and quiet virtually all Republican elected officials.

Everything changed:

• Trump has wiped out a large portion of Obama’s legacy. He’s exited the Paris climate deal; signed major tax cuts, especially for corporations; confirmed an ultra-conservative Supreme Court justice and record numbers of circuit court judges; deregulated like crazy; exited the Iran deal; exited the TPP trade deal; repealed the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate; and moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing it as Israel’s capital.
• New hardline immigration enforcement is in place, including separating children from parents of illegal immigrants. An extraordinary percentage of Trump’s senior staff has quit or been fired.
• Only one campaign original remains on Trump’s staff: social media director Dan Scavino.
• A national security adviser who began with bombastic high hopes of enforcing a new hard line against radical Islam-- Mike Flynn-- is now at personal peril in the Mueller investigation.
• Trump no longer talks about wiping out the national debt by ending “waste, fraud and abuse.”
• Trump no longer talks about shutting down federal agencies.

Nothing changed:

• Family survives despite many premature obituaries about Jared and Ivanka (Javanka).
• Trump still watches a ton of TV, views everything through a media lens, and obsesses over negative coverage.
• Trump still views foreign negotiations as zero-sum games with a clear winner and loser. The scorecard is the bilateral trade deficit; Trump’s hardline instincts on trade and immigration are unchanged from the campaign trail.
• There’s no trillion-dollar infrastructure package.
• Mexico hasn’t paid for the wall-- and Congress has only given Trump a pittance so far.
• The national debt has climbed ever higher under Trump’s stewardship.
• Trump still lies, exaggerates, distorts and responds to paper cuts by butchering his enemies.
• Vice President Pence remains-- and nobody I’ve spoken to has ever seen him criticize or debate the president in any meaningful way.
• Trump has the same media diet: heavy on Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity and Fox & Friends (with a sprinkling of hate-watch channel-surfing to CNN and MSNBC), and the same core diet of print newspapers, led by his hometown New York Times and New York Post.

So... is it actually possible the GOP will retain control of Congress after November? I don't think so, but everyone I know is worried about it. Something called the CBS News Battleground Tracker claims the House is a toss-up. Forget the 40-some-odd seats in state legislatures that have flipped since Trump occupied the Oval Office... they have polls. The tracker predicts 219 Democrats to 216 Republicans-- a one seat majority if the election were held today. But the margin of error is 9 seats, so... way too close to call. It still predicts a twenty-odd gain for the Dems, less than half of what I've been predicting.

The pointless Democratic Party that stands for mostly nothing at all-- a tent too big to be meaningful-- is lucky people don't like Trump and the GOP, because barely half of Democratic Party supporters in swing districts say they are voting for the Democrats because they are for the Democrats. 49% of them are just against Trump and the Republicans. The Democrats are exactly what they've been trying try to be for over a decade-- the lesser of two evils. And identity politics voters prefer Democrats, of course (like the gender gap)

Republican supporters actually like what the GOP stands for-- shhhhh... that racism and bigotry we talked about above.

While Democrats may be poised to make gains, more than half of voters don't think either party in Congress has been trying to address the things they care about. Partisans think their own party is trying at least some to address their concerns, but few partisans think they are doing a lot on that. Right now, the GOP has a slight edge with independents, some of whom like the president's policies-- but not the way he handles himself personally. About a quarter of them aren't sure who'll they vote for.

Overall, voters in these competitive districts want to hear a lot from congressional candidates on health care, jobs and wages, and immigration.

Democrats and Republicans have different priorities. Most Republicans want to hear a lot about immigration, followed by jobs and wages, and health care. Nearly two-thirds of Republicans say the arrival of new immigrants has changed the area where they live, and most say it's for the worse.

For Democrats, they want candidates to focus on health care a lot, as well as income inequality, education and teacher salaries, and jobs. They are more likely than Republicans to say unemployment and the availability of good jobs is a problem where they live.

Alan Grayson made a good point: "Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does politics. When you don’t say much of anything about what you will do if you are elected, then the other side does it for you. That’s why the GOP is telling everyone who will listen that the only thing that the Democrats will do if they win the election is to raise taxes 'on you, on me, and on that fellow behind the tree.'" We need this guy back in Congress... badly.

Levi Tillemann, the progressive candidate running against Trump rubber stamp Mike Coffman in the Denver suburbs, has to get through a DCCC conservaDem, Jason Crow, before he can get to Coffman. Crow is a typical nothing candidate, a New Dem who would go to Washington and be a careerist waste of a seat. Tillemann is looking for real reform-- and that means reform of the Democratic Party. This morning he put it like this: "Today Democrats in Washington seem to lack all conviction while Trump’s cronies are full of passionate intensity. Democrats need to fight for something-- we need to fight for justice and opportunity. We can’t sell out workers, families, and marginalized communities to corporate donors and Wall Street. I say enough is enough. It’s time for change."

Professional Republican operatives are still very worried, of course. Charlie Black, a veteran GOP consultant told the NY Times yesterday that Trumpanzee "is like a suicide bomber: He could still blow himself up the day before the election and ruin everything." Let's hope. since there's more of a chance of that happening than there is of Pelosi and her leadership team supporting popular and effective congressional candidates or even putting forward and propagating a meaningful platform for Democratic candidates to run on.