Despite enjoying the nation’s highest level of home ownership and lowest level of seasonally adjusted unemployment, 53 percent of New Hampshirites disapprove of Donald Trump’s job performance. In an article for the Associated Press, Hunter Woodall talks to a random sampling of people on the street and hears some of the concerns people have about the president.
One is an Obama/Trump voter.
When Chad Johansen voted for Donald Trump in 2016, he hoped he was picking someone who could help small-business owners compete with bigger companies. But that hasn’t happened, and now the 26-year-old owner of NH iPhone Repair feels what he calls “Trumpgret.”
The Republican president has done little to address health care issues for a small employer, he said, and the Manchester man remains on edge about how Trump’s tariffs could affect his business, which employs fewer than 10 people. Beyond that, he said, unrelenting news about bigotry and racism in the Trump administration is “a turnoff.”
“The president’s supposed to be the face of the United States of America,” said Johansen, who voted for Democrat Barack Obama in 2012. “And supposed to make everyone be proud to be an American and stand up for everyone who is an American. And I don’t feel that President Trump’s doing that. I feel like it’s chaos.”
I’ve been unrelenting over the last four years in talking about how Democrats are not doing enough to address market consolidation and monopoly power. This is why they didn’t win Mr. Johansen’s vote in 2016. Now Johansen can choose someone like Elizabeth Warren who is laser-focused on the issue, but he’s not leaving Trump because he’s excited about the alternatives. He’s just turned off by Trump’s racism, thinks he his economic policies are chaotic, and is ready to punish him for failing to keep his health care promises.
Then there’s the Romney/Trump voter:
Gino Brogna, a 57-year-old chef manager, described himself as a Republican “by nature,” though he isn’t “solely stuck to it.” He didn’t like Democrat Hillary Clinton and recalls feeling as though his 2016 vote for Trump was “something that was necessary.”
It doesn’t feel necessary for him again.
“I don’t think that he’s true to his word on a lot of things,” Brogna said of Trump. “I wouldn’t vote for him again. That’s not going to happen.”
Here, the only expressed regret is that Trump is too dishonest. It’d be interesting to learn which lies are most concerning to Mr. Brogna, but the cumulative effect has been sufficient that he won’t be voting for Trump again.
There’s a narrative on the left that Trump voters are unreachable, deplorable racists who showed through their 2016 support for the man that they have no moral standards. Polls showing the president retaining the support of 90 precent of more of Republicans tends to confirm this opinion. But the truth is that Trump got votes for many different reasons, including from many traditional Democrats who were frustrated about the economy and from Republicans who opted for him only because they had spent a lifetime marinating in anti-Clinton storylines. Trump has taken these voters for granted, and it’s likely to cost him.
The Democratic candidates can help this process along by developing themes that probe the weaknesses Trump has created for himself, but he’s done an excellent job of giving away votes all on his own.
He may be able to bring some new deplorable voters out of the woodwork by sticking to racist “pro-white” themes, and it’s possible that he can consolidate and expand on the “community support” I’ve often described as the driving force behind his huge rural numbers in 2016. Basically, at a certain point, it can be so socially uncomfortable to openly support a Democrat that the numbers tip dramatically in the Republican’s favor. Something similar can happen in our nation’s cities that drives up the numbers for the Democratic candidate. This is how Trump can potentially be reelected using a white ethnic approach.
But his chances of success are badly diminished if he’s not actually holding onto 90 percent of his 2016 voters, and I am certain he will fall far below that number. He has lost the support of soft Democrats and even lifelong Republicans, and it’s not going to be easy to win it back. I think he best chance at this point is that the Democratic nominee will follow suit and do things that lose some of Clinton’s votes. And the only place that can really happen is in the suburbs. New Hampshire is effectively a suburb of Boston, so it’s a good laboratory for watching for this effect.
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And Trump’s approval rating in NH is terrible. He lost the state to Clinton by less than 1/2 a percentage point in 2016. When he took office, his approval rating was a net negative 10 percentage points (41% – 51%). In the latest Civiqs poll it was a net negative 24 points (36% approve – 60% disapprove). https://civiqs.com/results/approve_president_trump?uncertainty=true&annotations=true&zoomIn=true&home_state=New%20Hampshire
It can’t be repeated often enough that 90% of Republicans are going to vote for Trump. What matters more is what everyone else does.
I can’t find it right now, but if I recall correctly, Hoover won nearly 90% of the Republican vote in 1932. It’s just that Roosevelt won everyone else. Losing 10-15% of your party’s base can be disastrous for an incumbent running for reelection.
P. S. New Hampshire is a funky state, politically speaking. Check out Politico’s 2016 presidential election county map: https://www.politico.com/2016-election/results/map/president/new-hampshire/
Hillsborough & Rockingham counties account for over half the state’s residents, are closest to Boston, and went for Trump in 2016. Trump also won the largely rural northeastern counties (Coos, Carroll, and Belknap), as well as Sullivan county (narrowly) on the central VT border.
Most of Clinton’s margin of victory came from Cheshire, Merrimack, and Strafford counties which cut an arc roughly 75-10 miles northwest of Boston. Clinton also won Grafton county (home to Dartmouth College & Plymouth State).
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Martin wrote: “Basically, at a certain point, it can be so socially uncomfortable to openly support a Democrat that the numbers tip dramatically in the Republican’s favor. ” As a Dem in deep red WV (in a county that is still.nominally Democratic) I can relate to this. However, we must persevere. I write my letters to the local paper,expecting a backlash that has never (yet) come, and back in the thanks of people who are also horrified by Trump. People need to see that Dem support in their midst.
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I don’t think you present compelling support for the title. Nor does the linked AP article. In any case we all hope you’re right, evidence or not.
This is Trump with 43% job approval. He consistently underperforms it.
What, for you, would be “compelling support” for the argument that Trump is losing support?
It’s great that some of these failed voters now “disapprove” of our unqualified, mentally disabled wannabe dictator, but whether he has lost their vote remains to be seen and is at best anecdotal. There is always the braindead “lesser of two evils” mantra, which is what voters like this live by, and which at the end of the day always seems to render the competent, qualified Dem as the greater risk. Their brains have been destroyed by decades of “conservative” sewage ingestion, whether they eat huge daily doses or just select morsels, ha-ha. And watching the useless corporate “news” is almost as bad.
The 46% responded to an express campaign of spite and hate directed towards non-whites, and that lizard brain component of National Trumpalism has only been escalated and enhanced by Der Trumper and his allies—he sticks with a “winning” format, one has to give him that! And hate is not a mental dynamic that is going to change in many of The 46%, absent economic Gotterdammerung. Also, one can’t forget that (again, anecdotally) there seem to be many new (white, mostly male) teen voters that are pretty jazzed up about National Trumpalism’s race hatred and can’t wait to be a supporting actor in the fun. Like KKK Rover in 2004, National Trumpalism’s best bet is turning over more rocks to find more spiteful Americans who have (until now) opted out of voting, and that’s a huge pool when one looks at our stunning non-participation rate by the citizenry.
Ultimately, with our failed, anti-democratic constitution, electing a prez is a total crap shoot. Especially now, when the “conservative” movement (and its plutocrat funders) have come to understand (and accept) that their wholly-owned party simply cannot win the popular vote, and never will again—absent a ginned-up illegal war of aggression, ala Bushco. Hence the electoral college’s transformation into the Founders’ Greatest Achievement(tm), which must be defended to the death by the forces of reaction and retardation. So we’ll certainly get “X” number of disgruntled Trumpalists, and Der Trumper will generate “X” new ones with his Nuremberg Rally tactics and “Both Sides are Equally Bad” corporate reporting. And where those numbers will ultimately settle in the ridiculous “battleground” states will only be seen on election night.
A lot of these former Obama voters who pulled the lever for trump in 2016 did so because they could not stand and/or trust Hillary Clinton. As bad a basis as that was, under the circumstances, for casting a vote, or in some cases not casting one, especially given the alternative, that’s essentially what drove them. They saw Trump as “different” and that he would not govern in a same old overly cautious, status quo way as Clinton had all but promised she would, ways that had left them with issues to be addressed after eight years of Obama. Note that Trump was “smart” enough to see that, and being the con man that he is, explains why he lied about protecting social security, doing better on health care and other progressive policies he had no real intention of working to implement (and the GOP never would have let him had he tried), because he knew that would sell with those voters. This worked because, for the voters who, although the Clinton is not trustworthy meme didn’t affect them, just did not like what she was selling.
After having gotten a bitter taste of him, Trump can kiss many of these voters goodbye in 2020. He was nothing like what they thought he’d be. And this time around, which ever candidate the dems put up, that person will be nowhere near Trump in terms of negative approval rating, as Clinton was in 2016. Trump’s racism may motivate a few more white voters to slither out from under their rocks and vote for him purely on hate and white supremacy. But I believe he’s gone too far with it for “respectable” white people who while they may quietly be comforted behind closed doors by racist stereotypes, they won’t want to be associated with Trump’s brand of embarrassing megaphone racism, led to boot by a crude, incompetent bigot you wouldn’t want your kids to emulate.
This is why the top tier democratic candidates all beat Trump by decent margins if the elections held today. And if the economy goes to shit in ways that affect consumers before 11/2020, as it appears it just might, the bottom will drop out for Trump. And he won’t be able to keep the margins close enough for him to pull it off as a result of the cheating that will surely happen on his behalf, by the Russians, and GOP “voter fraud” schemes.
The democrats will win the white house If: (a) they nominate a candidate who can frame trump as an incompetent bigot, too obsessed with race, petty twitter feuds and his own ego to effectively deal with looming issues; (b) the democratic party platform becomes uniformly coherent on health care before the convention, and (c) they build and improve on 2018 GOTV efforts. I see as a bonus resulting from impeaching Trump in the House, and letting Moscow Mitch, Leningrad Lindsey and the rest of the cowards in the GOP senate go on record once again for protecting Trump, siding with Russia and ignoring popular legislation such as gun safety, an opportunity to defeat McConnell and make gains if not take back the senate.
Winning the presidency and getting rid of Trump is good, but if the dems are going to have a chance at implementing any of their policies, let alone cleaning up the mess the Trump GOP has made, they’ll need complete control.
Also, the GOP is shrinking. 90% of a party smaller in 2020 than in 2016 isn’t a good bet to place. So he has the GOP sewn up, but at the cost of alienating a lot of others. If a person isn’t on the GOP bandwagon, right now they are at least somewhat against them. We haven’t seen opposition like that against a sitting president and their party in a long time. Going to be interesting…
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