This isn’t working out like the left would like.
After days of relentless attacks by an unholy alliance of the establishment media, Democrats in Congress and the titans of Big Tech in the wake of last week’s violence in the nation’s Capitol, American voters appear just as deadlocked about President Donald Trump as they were before the Nov. 3 election.
And that is a bad sign for liberals hoping an anti-Trump campaign would boost a Democratic agenda.
A pair of polls released Monday give the picture.
On the right, as reported by TheBlaze, pollster Frank Luntz surveyed 800 Trump voters over the weekend and found an almost unanimous 91 percent of those who cast a ballot for Trump would do so again “if another presidential election were held today.”
Despite their criticism of his conduct since November 3rd and last week, 𝟵𝟭% of Trump voters say they’d still vote for him if another presidential election were held today. pic.twitter.com/Gi4uEwJcVu
— Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) January 11, 2021
That number dropped to 65 percent when the question concerned the 2024 election, Luntz found, but the responses indicate Trump’s base is essentially unshaken. Considering the amount of vitriol that has poured from the country’s television screens since the Capitol incursion, that should be a message to the elite of what passes for “news” in this country that their tactics aren’t working.
Granted, that’s a small-ish poll, and Luntz is known primarily for his work on the conservative side of the aisle. But things are much the same elsewhere.
From the left, a Politico story Monday bore a headline obviously aimed at pleasing a liberal readership: “Poll: Americans narrowly back Trump’s impeachment, resignation.”
It was true as far as it went, since the story noted that about 48 percent of those polled “agreed that Congress should begin impeachment proceedings to remove Trump from office, compared to 44 percent who disagreed.”
“A separate question, worded somewhat differently, found that majority of those polled — 53 percent — said they would approve of the House of Representatives voting to impeach Trump, compared to 40 percent who said they would not approve the idea,” the story continued. “Support was nearly identical for the Senate convicting Trump in the event the House brought impeachment charges against the president.”
That might sound reassuring to the contingent of liberals who never reconciled themselves to the results of the 2016 election, but it shouldn’t, considering the poll of 1996 respondents included 813 Democrats to 595 Republicans, with 588 independents. It had a margin of error of 2 percent, according to Politico.
The outlet noted, “Public opinion of the resignation question broke heavily along party lines. More than 85 percent of self-identified Democrats, as well as about half the independents, surveyed said Trump ought to resign. Fewer than one out of five Republicans agreed.
“The parties were also nearly evenly split on Trump’s impeachment, with 81 percent of Democrats in favor of Congress moving forward while 84 percent of Republicans opposed the idea. Self-identified independents were also torn, with 44 percent opposed to impeachment proceedings and 41 percent in support.”
In other words, even after the undeniably inexcusable events at the Capitol on Wednesday and the anti-Trump rhetoric from Democratic politicians and supposedly unbiased news media that followed, even after the giants of social media have tried to smother the president and signaled their disapproval of conservative beliefs (like, say, free speech) the country remains deadlocked.
For the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden, that doesn’t bode well, even with the support of Democrats in both houses of Congress. This is still a constitutional republic, no matter how hard progressives have tried to destroy it. And that means politicians will need popular support.
One telling question in the Luntz poll showed how hard that support is going to be for progressives to earn.
Asked to name the biggest threat to national security, the Republicans’ top responses were: “Socialism,” “The Radical Left,” and the “Fake News Media.”
If Big Tech’s tyranny were thrown in there, it would pretty much sum up the Democratic Party’s power structure.
It’s a good bet that the 75 million or so Americans understood exactly what they were getting when they opted to back an incumbent whose administration saw an astonishing rebirth of the economy, triumphs over enemies like the Islamic State group, and strides in peacemaking in the Middle East that would have produced universal hosannas if Trump had been a Democrat.
The doubts of Trump supporters about the 2020 election — based on compelling accounts of election fraud — aren’t the same as the Democrats’ refusal to accept Trump in 2017, which relied on a hazy tale of “Russian collusion,” birthed by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, that fell apart of its own weight after years of investigation.
The liberal doubts about the accomplishments of the Trump presidency that Democrats and their establishment media and Big Tech allies are trying to foster — with a boost from the unwarranted events of Jan. 6 — are not in the same league.
Last week, like the weeks and years before, liberals had a virtual monopoly on the news Americans saw and the perspective Americans were supposed to see it with.
It isn’t working out the way the left would like. And it’s a very good bet that it never will.