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Im-Politic: Looking Backward and Forward on Trump and Trumpism

13 Wednesday Jan 2021

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Im-Politic

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cancel culture, Capitol Hill, Capitol riots, China, climate change, Congress, Conservative Populism, Constitution, Democrats, election 2016, election 2020, election challenge, Electoral College, establishment Republicans, Hillary Clinton, identity politics, Im-Politic, Immigration, impeachment, incitement, insurrection, Joe Biden, Josh Hawley, left-wing authoritarianism, mail-in ballots, nationalism, Populism, Republicans, sedition, separation of powers, tariffs, Ted Cruz, Trade, trade war, Trump, violence

(Please note: This is the linked and lightly edited version of the post put up this morning.)

The fallout from the Capitol Riot will no doubt continue for the foreseeble future – and probably longer – so no one who’s not clairvoyant should be overly confident in assessing the consequences. Even the Trump role in the turbulent transition to a Biden administration may wind up looking considerably different to future generations than at present. Still, some major questions raised by these events are already apparent, and some can even be answered emphatically, starting off with the related topic of how I’m viewing my support for many, and even most, of President Trump’s policies and my vote for him in both of his White House runs.

Specifically, I have no regrets on either ground. As I’ll make clear, I consider Mr. Trump’s words and deeds of the last few weeks to represent major, and completely unnecessary, failures that will rightly at least tarnish his place in history.

All the same, legitimate analyses of many developments and resulting situations need to think about the counterfactual. Here, the counterfactual is a Trump loss to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016. And I’m confident that her presidency would have been both disastrous in policy terms (ranging from coddling China to moving steadily toward Open Borders immigration policies to intervening militarily more often and more deeply in numerous foreign conflicts of no importance to the United States) and heatedly divisive in political terms (because of her grifting behavior in fundraising for the various supposedly philanthropic initiatives she started along with her husband, former President Bill Clinton; because of her campaign’s payment for the phony Steele dossier that helped spur the unwarranted and possibly criminal Obama administration investigation of the Trump campaign; and because of intolerant and extremist instincts that would have brought Identity Politics and Cancel Culture to critical mass years earlier than their actual arrivals).

As for the worrisome events of the last several weeks:

>As I’ve written, I don’t regard Mr. Trump’s rhetoric at his rally, or at any point during his election challenges, as incitement to violence in a legal sense. But is it impeachable? That’s a separate question, because Constitutionally speaking, there’s a pretty strong consensus that impeachment doesn’t require a statutory offense. And since, consequently, it’s also a political issue, there’s no objective or definitive answer. It’s literally up to a majority of the House of Representatives. But as I also wrote, I oppose this measure.

>So do I agree that the President should get off scot free? Nope. As I wrote in the aforementioned post, I do regard the Trump record since the election as reckless. I was especially angered by the President’s delay even in calling on the breachers to leave the Capitol Hill building, and indeed the entire Capitol Hill crowd, to “go home.” In fact, until that prompting – which was entirely too feeble for my tastes – came, I was getting ready to call for his resignation.

>Wouldn’t impeachment still achieve the important objective of preventing a dangerously unstable figure from seeking public office again? Leaving aside the “dangerously unstable” allegation, unless the President is guilty (as made clear in an impeachment proceding) of a major statutory crime (including obstruction of justice, or incitement to violence or insurrection), I’d insist on leaving that decision up to the American people. As New York City talk radio host Frank Morano argued earlier this week, the idea that the Congress should have the power to save the nation from itself is as dangerously anti-democratic as it is laughable.

>Of course, this conclusion still leaves the sedition and insurrection charges on the table – mainly because, it’s contended, the President and many of his political supporters (like all the Republican Senators and House members who supported challenging Electoral College votes during the January 6 certification procedure) urged Congress to make an un-Constitutional, illegal decision: overturning an election. Others add that the aforementioned and separate charge not includes endorsing violence but urging the January 6 crowd to disrupt the certification session.

>First, there’s even less evidence that the lawmakers who challenged the Electoral College vote were urging or suggesting the Trump supporters in the streets and on the lawn to break in to the Capitol Building and forcibly end the certification session than there’s evidence that Mr. Trump himself gave or suggested this directive.

>Second, I agree with the argument – made by conservatives such as Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul (often a Trump supporter) – that authorizing a branch of the federal government unilaterally to nullify the results of elections that the Constitution stipulates should be run by the states is a troubling threat to the Constitutional principle of separation of powers. I’m also impressed with a related argument: that sauce for the goose could wind up as sauce for the gander.

In other words, do Trump supporters want to set a precedent that could enable Congress unilaterally to overturn the election of another conservative populist with something like a second wave of Russia collusion charges? Include me out.

>Further, if the Trump supporters who favored the Electoral College challenge are guilty of insurrection or fomenting it, and should be prosecuted or censured or punished in some way, shouldn’t the same go for the Democrats who acted in the exact same ways in other recent elections? (See here and here.) P.S. Some are still Members of Congress.

>Rather than engage in this kind of What About-ism, and help push the country further down the perilous road of criminalizing political behavior and political differences, I’d much rather consider these challenges as (peaceful) efforts – and in some cases sincere efforts – to insert into the public record the case that these elections were marred by serious irregularities.

>How serious were these irregularities? Really serious – and all but inevitable given the decisions (many pre-pandemic) to permit mass mail-in voting. Talk about a system veritably begging to be abused. But serious enough to change the outcome? I don’t know, and possibly we’ll never know. Two things I do know, however:

First, given the thin Election 2020 margins in many states, it’s clear that practices like fraudulent vote-counting, ballot-harvesting, and illegal election law changes by state governments and courts (e.g., Pennsylvania) don’t have to be widespread. Limiting them to a handful of states easily identified as battlegrounds, and a handful of swing or other key districts within those states, would do the job nicely.

Second, even though I believe that at least some judges should have let some of the Trump challenges proceed (if only because the bar for conviction in such civil cases is much lower than for criminal cases), I can understand their hesitancy because despite this low-ish bar, overturning the election results for an entire state, possibly leading to national consequences, is a bridge awfully far. Yes, we’re a nation of laws, and ideally such political considerations should be completely ignored. But when we’re talking about a process so central to the health of American democracy, politics can never be completely ignored, and arguably shouldn’t.

So clearly, I’m pretty conflicted. What I’m most certain about, however, is that mass mail-in ballots should never, ever be permitted again unless the states come up with ways to prevent noteworthy abuse. Florida, scene of an epic election procedures failure in 2000 (and other screwups), seems to have come up with the fixes needed. It’s high time for other states to follow suit.

As for the politics and policy going forward:

>President Trump will remain influential nationally, and especially in conservative ranks – partly because no potentially competitive rivals are in sight yet, and possibly because Americans have such short memories. But how influential? Clearly much of his base remains loyal – and given his riot-related role, disturbingly so. How influential? Tough to tell. Surely the base has shrunk some. And surely many Independents have split off for good, too. (See, e.g., this poll.) Perhaps most important, barring some unexpected major developments (which obviously no one can rule out), this withering of Trump support will probably continue – though the pace is tough to foresee also.

>The Republican Party has taken a major hit, too, and the damage could be lasting. In this vein, it’s important to remember that the GOP was relegated to minority status literally for decades by President Herbert Hoover’s failure to prevent and then contain the Great Depression. Those aforementioned short American memories could limit the damage. But for many years, it’s clear that Democratic political, campaigns, and conservative Never Trumper groups like the Lincoln Project, will fill print, broadcast, and social media outlets with political ads with video of the riot and Mr. Trump’s rally and similar statements, and the effects won’t be trivial.

>What worries me most, though, is that many of the urgently needed policies supported and implemented by the Trump administration will be discredited. Immigration realism could be the first casualty, especially since so many of the establishment Republicans in Congress were such willing flunkies of the corporate Cheap Labor Lobby for so much of the pre-Trump period, and Open Borders- and amnesty-friendly stances are now defining characteristics of the entire Democratic Party.

The Trump China policies may survive longer, because the bipartisan consensus recognizing – at least rhetorically – the futility and dangers of their predecessors seems much stronger. But given Biden’s long record as a China coddler and enabler, the similar pre-Trump views of those establishment Republicans, and their dependence on campaign contributions from Wall Street and offshoring-happy multinational companies, important though quiet backtracking, particularly on trade, could begin much sooner than commonly assumed. One distinct possibility that wouldn’t attract excessive attention: meaningfully increasing the number of exemptions to the Trump China and remaining metals tariffs to companies saying they can’t find affordable, or any, alternatives.

>Much of the political future, however, will depend on the record compiled by the Biden administration. Not only could the new President fail on the economic and virus-fighting fronts, but on the national unity front. Here, despite his reputation as a moderate and a healer, Biden’s charge that Republican Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley have used Nazi-like tactics, and race-mongering comments accusing law enforcement of handling the overwhelmingly white Capitol Rioters more gingerly than the racial justice protesters earlier this year represent a lousy start. And as his harsh recent rhetoric suggests, Biden could also overreach greatly on issues like climate change, immigration, and Cancel Culture and Identity Politics. Such Biden failures could even shore up some support for Mr. Trump himself.

>How big is the violence-prone fringe on the American Right? We’ll know much more on Inauguration Day, when law enforcement says it fears “armed protests” both in Washington, D.C. and many state capitals. What does seem alarmingly clear, though – including from this PBS/Marist College poll – is that this faction is much bigger than the relatively small number of Capitol breachers.

>Speaking of the breachers, the nature of the crimes they committed obviously varied among individuals. But even those just milling about were guilty of serious offenses and should be prosecuted harshly. The circumstances surrounding those who crossed barriers on the Capitol grounds is somewhat murkier. Those who knocked down this (flimsy) fencing were just as guilty as the building breachers. But lesser charges – and possibly no charges – might be justifiable for those who simply walked past those barriers because they were no longer visible, especially if they didn’t enter the Capitol itself.

>I’m not security expert, but one question I hope will be asked (among so many that need asking) in the forthcoming investigations of the Capitol Police in particular – why weren’t the Capitol Building doors locked as soon as the approach of the crowd became visible? The number of doors is limited, and they’re anything but flimsy. The likely effectiveness of this move can be seen from an incident in October, 2018 – when barred Supreme Court doors left anti-Brett Kavanaugh protesters futilely pounding from the outside when they attempted to disrupt the new Supreme Court Justice’s swearing in ceremony. Window entry into the Capitol would have remained an option, but the number of breachers who used this tactic seems to have been negligible.

What an extraordinary irony if one of the worst days in American history mightn’t have even happened had one of the simplest and most commonsensical type of precaution not been taken.

Im-Politic: VP Debate Questions That Should be Asked

07 Wednesday Oct 2020

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Im-Politic

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1619 Project, African Americans, Barack Obama, Biden, budget deficits, CCP Virus, censorship, China, Confederate monuments, Constitution, coronavirus, COVID 19, education, election 2020, Electoral College, filibuster, Founding Fathers, free speech, healthcare, history, history wars, Im-Politic, inequality, investment, Kamala Harris, Mike Pence, national security, Obamacare, police killings, propaganda, protests, racism, riots, semiconductors, slavery, spending, Supreme Court, systemic racism, Taiwan, tariffs, tax cuts, taxes, Trade, trade war, Trump, Vice Presidential debate, Wuhan virus

Since I don’t want to set a record for longest RealityChek post ever, I’ll do my best to limit this list of questions I’d like to see asked at tonight’s Vice Presidential debate to some subjects that I believe deserve the very highest priority, and/or that have been thoroughly neglected so far during this campaign.

>For Vice President Mike Pence: If for whatever reason, President Trump couldn’t keep the CCP Virus under control within his own White House, why should Americans have any faith that any of his policies will bring it under control in the nation as a whole?

>For Democratic candidate Senator Kamala Harris: What exactly should be the near-term goal of U.S. virus policy? Eliminate it almost completely (as was done with polio)? Stop its spread? Slow its spread? Reduce deaths? Reduce hospitalizations? And for goals short of complete elimination, define “slow” and “reduce” in terms of numerical targets.

>For Pence: Given that the administration’s tax cuts and spending levels were greatly ballooning the federal budget deficit even before the virus struck, isn’t it ridiculous for Congressional Republicans to insist that total spending in the stimulus package remain below certain levels?

For Harris: Last month, the bipartisan Congressional Problem Solvers Caucus unveiled a compromise stimulus framework. President Trump has spoken favorably about it, while stopping short of a full endorsement. Does Vice President Biden endorse it? If so, has he asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to sign on? If he doesn’t endorse it, why not?

For Pence: The nation is in the middle of a major pandemic. Whatever faults the administration sees in Obamacare, is this really the time to be asking the Supreme Court to rule it un-Constitutional, and throw the entire national health care system into mass confusion?

For Harris: Would a Biden administration offer free taxpayer-financed healthcare to illegal aliens? Wouldn’t this move strongly encourage unmanageable numbers of migrants to swamp U.S. borders?

For Pence: President Trump has imposed tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of Chinese exports headed to U.S. markets. But U.S. investors – including government workers’ pension funds – still keep sending equally large sums into Chinese government coffers. When is the Trump administration finally going to plug this enormous hole?

For Harris: Will a Biden administration lift or reduce any of the Trump China or metals tariffs. Will it do so unconditionally? If not, what will it be seeking in return?

For both: Taiwan now manufactures the world’s most advanced semiconductors, and seems sure to maintain the lead for the foreseeable future. Does the United States now need to promise to protect Taiwan militarily in order to keep this vital defense and economic knowhow out of China’s hands?

For Pence: Since the administration has complained so loudly about activist judges over-ruling elected legislators and making laws themselves, will Mr. Trump support checking this power by proposing term limits or mandatory retirement ages for Supreme Court Justices? If not, why not?

For Harris: Don’t voters deserve to know the Biden Supreme Court-packing position before Election Day? Ditto for his position on abolishing the filibuster in the Senate.

>For Pence: The Electoral College seems to violate the maxim that each votes should count equally. Does the Trump administration favor reform? If not, why not?

>For Harris: Many Democrats argue that the Electoral College gives lightly populated, conservative and Republican-leaning states outsized political power. But why, then, was Barack Obama able to win the White House not once but twice?

>For Pence: Charges that America’s police are killing unarmed African Americans at the drop of a hat are clearly wild exaggerations. But don’t you agree that police stop African-American pedestrians and drivers much more often than whites without probable cause – a problem that has victimized even South Carolina Republican Senator Tim Scott?

For Harris: Will Biden insist that mayors and governors in cities and states like Oregon and Washington, which have been victimized by chronic antifa violence, investigate, arrest and prosecute its members and leaders immediately? And if they don’t, will he either withhold federal law enforcement aid, or launch such investigations at the federal level?

For Pence: Why should any public places in America honor Confederate figures – who were traitors to the United States? Can’t we easily avoid the “erasing history” danger by putting these monuments in museums with appropriate background material?

For Harris: Would a Biden administration support even peacefully removing from public places statues and monuments to historic figures like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson because their backgrounds included slave-holding?

For both: Shouldn’t voters know much more about the Durham Justice Department investigation of official surveillance of the Trump campaign in 2015 and 2016 before Election Day?

For both: Should the Big Tech companies be broken up on antitrust grounds?

For both: Should internet and social media platforms be permitted to censor any form of Constitutionally permitted speech?

For Pence: Doesn’t the current system of using property taxes to fund most primary and secondary public education guarantee that low-income school children will lack adequate resources?

For Harris: Aren’t such low-income students often held back educationally by non-economic factors like generations of broken families and counter-productive student behavior, as well as by inadequate school funding – as leading figures like Jesse Jackson (at least for one period) and former President Obama have claimed?

For Pence: What’s the difference between the kind of “patriotic education” the President says he supports and official propaganda?

For Harris: Would a Biden administration oppose local school districts using propagandistic material like The New York Times‘ U.S. history-focused 1619 Project for their curricula? Should federal aid to districts that keep using such materials be cut off or reduced?

Now it’s your turn, RealityChek readers! What questions would you add? And which of mine would you deep six?

Im-Politic: Your Guide to the Inauguration Weekend Numbers Game

21 Saturday Jan 2017

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

2016 election, Electoral College, Im-Politic, inauguration, popular vote, Richard Nixon, Trump, Vietnam War moratorium, Women's March

With today’s national and global Women’s Marches, the numbers game has just intensified greatly. Don’t kid yourself. Despite organizers’ claims that they’re not anti-Trump events, they’re all about discrediting Donald Trump’s presidency even as it’s just beginning – a continuation of the campaign that began right after the insurgent Republicans’ victory with (accurate) observations that he seemed to have lost the popular vote.

If you have any doubts, you need to get on Twitter. There, President Trump’s opponents, including in the supposedly impartial mainstream media, have spent the last 24 hours gleefully and ceaselessly reporting that the crowds that gathered for yesterday’s inaugural events were considerably smaller than those for previous such presidential occasions. And the boasting has continued today, with (also accurate) observations that the women’s marchers – including in Washington, D.C. – are also more numerous than the inaugural gatherings.

Don’t get me wrong. In a democracy, playing the numbers game is really important, legitimate, and actually necessary. In fact, these newest claims bring back memories of my own participation in the second Vietnam War “moratorium” demonstration in the nation’s capital in November, 1969. Interestingly, as the roughly 500,000 protesters filled the Mall, many of us wondered if our presence would make any difference to then President Nixon, who seemed more than able and willing to ignore us. It turns out he was paying plenty of attention.

I strongly suspect that President Trump has been paying attention, too. He certainly should. There’s clearly a lot of manufactured hysteria at work in these marches (which, as is typical with such efforts, tend to attract mongers of many imagined grievances), along with superficial virtue-signaling.  But it’s also clear that many participants are genuinely troubled, scared, outraged, or some combination of these emotions. That’s their right, and Mr. Trump unfortunately bears the blame for at least some.

Nevertheless, numbers exist in a context, and here’s some to consider before concluding that any of these developments mean that Mr. Trump is anything less than a legitimate president, or that he’s even losing the battle for public opinion.

First, the numbers game that counts most is the election. And under the U.S. Constitution, the election numbers that count decisively are those of the Electoral College. That’s the contest President Trump won, and it’s the contest around on which all the candidates for the White House based their strategies. Had the popular vote been the determinant, all these campaigns would naturally have evolved much differently – with possibly big implications for the popular vote.

Second, there may be much less to the turnout numbers of the last 24 hours as well. After all, without doubting the strength of anti-Trump feelings, the president’s opponents can draw on the impressive institutional strengths that have been built up over decades by major interlocking progressive and identity organizations – including labor unions. They’ve had more than two months to organize these marches and protests not only at the national but at the state and local levels as well.

So it’s not at all surprising that they were able to mobilize – and transport – large numbers of participants. What’s much more surprising is how poorly they performed when they had a chance to prevent Trump from reaching the White House in the first place. And don’t forget – their presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, was thought to have a major edge with the population groups that supposedly represented America’s demographic future.

As Mr. Trump repeatedly states, he’s heading a movement, too. But it should be obvious that this movement is embryonic, and that its organizational reach is limited at best. Think of how few truly Trump-ian candidates ran in House and Senate races. Think of how poorly they were funded. In fact, a major test of the staying power of Trump-ism will be its ability to recruit, train, and finance quality office-seekers throughout the country.

It’s also important to remember that relatively few Trump voters have long histories, or any history, of political activism. As indicated above, they’ve had few if any organizations to join, and their very support for such an unconventional candidate with such a strong anti-establishment message surely makes clear their deep disdain for the nation’s public life.

Of course, they turned out for Trump campaign rallies and other events in numbers that were stunning largely because of the campaign’s lack of organization and infrastructure. But now that their champion is in power, nothing would be more logical than for them to return to their lives and jobs in the simple expectation that it’s now up to Mr. Trump to deliver. As a result, for so many to have journeyed to Washington, D.C. – which, chances are, involved taking more than a short, Amtrak northeast corridor train ride – augurs well for the new president.

The only reasonable conclusion? Donald Trump continues to generate strong feelings among backers and opponents alike, and since both groups number in the tens of millions, he’s now – as widely noted – the leader of a deeply divided country. Can he bridge this divide substantially? Significantly? At all? And can he expand his base to include whatever fence-sitters are left? The answers will go far toward determining his administration’s success.

As for his opponents, the big question they face is one similar to one posed endlessly to the Trump campaign: Your backers will attend rallies. But will they vote?

Im-Politic: Why the First Presidential Debate Really Mattered

02 Sunday Oct 2016

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Im-Politic

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2016 election, Alicia Machado, battleground states, Donald Trump, Electoral College, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, Lester Holt, presidential debate

As I wrote last Tuesday, I was hoping to get the complete TV ratings for last Monday’s presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton before deciding how the results would impact the election. They’re apparently still not out, but I’ve found enough info in the news coverage to answer my biggest question, and conclude that the evening was a major setback for the Republican nominee – though not quite in the sense widely assumed.

The decision to delay stemmed from my feeling that knowing how long most viewers stuck with the contest could matter decisively in judging its effects. As per the conventional wisdom, it was clear to me that Clinton won the debate as a whole. But I also agreed that the Democratic standard-bearer was kept on the defensive for much of the first half hour by Trump. Since human attention spans are often short, I surmised that the more viewers who lost interest in the slugfest as it wore on, the fewer who saw those segments where Clinton skillfully baited Trump into protesting his personal failings way too much. Therefore, they would have missed those exchange in which he projected the childish, boorish bullying image that’s saddled him throughout the campaign – and understandably limited his appeal.

But at least according to the press coverage, most of the audience watched most of the full 98 minutes, and therefore saw Trump at his worst. Moreover, Trump’s insistence on sustaining his Twitter assault on former beauty queen Alicia Machado has amounted to doubling down on failure – for days. So the maverick businessman has indeed been bested – and the most reliable polls subsequently showed that strong majorities of Americans agreed.

The question still remains whether Trump’s hopes for the White House have been fatally damaged. My hunch: Quite possibly. But in my view, what’s just happened isn’t that Trump lost an opportunity to reassure and possibly win over some college-educated independent men and women and thereby overcome a narrow Clinton lead and widen his Electoral College path to the presidency. It’s that he’s squandered a chance to blow the race wide open.

After all, on the eve of the debate, Trump not only had drawn into a virtual tie in the national presidential polls. He was also displaying momentum or stabilizing the situation both in key traditional Republican strongholds where Clinton was making headway (like Georgia, North Carolina, and Arizona), and in states that changing demographics have been turning first from Republican red to genuinely purple and now possibly to Democratic blue (like Colorado and Nevada). Moreover, the Trump rebound had been widely – and rightly – attributed to a focus on issues like the economy and national security

So imagine the effect had Trump responded to Clinton’s renewed charges of misogyny with something like, “Madame Secretary, this is really so sad – but so revealing. This country faces so many problems and crises – no good jobs, lousy growth, terrible infrastructure, failing schools, rising crime, unprotected borders, terrorism. And you’ve just decided to waste the precious time we have tonight by diving into the gutter. I won’t dignify this sleaze-mongering with an answer. And I hope you’ll return to focusing on the issues Americans really care about.”

This kind of statement would certainly have passed the “presidential test” – with flying colors. I suspect it would have been absolutely electrifying. And of course Trump missed other opportunities like this during the debate – notably moderator Lester Holt’s evident belief that his involvement with birther-ism is the country’s worst race relations problem.

But it could well be that the above amounts to wishing that pigs had wings. There’s no doubt that even with only five weeks left till Election Day, both candidates will have many more chances to redefine themselves and the presidential race – due to their own efforts and to the wild cards that an unpredictable world could throw into the mix. But the longer Trump obsesses on tabloid-level vendettas, the longer his campaign will remain a hostage to fortune – and needlessly so.

Im-Politic: What American Muslims Think of American Political Parties

13 Sunday Dec 2015

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Im-Politic

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Tags

2016 elections, American Muslims, Democrats, demographics, Donald Trump, Electoral College, Gallup, George W. Bush, Im-Politic, Muslim ban, Muslims, polls, Republicans, September 11, The Atlantic

I hate to keep reporting on polls here at RealityChek because, as I keep noting, gauging public opinion sometimes doesn’t seem much more scientific than alchemy. But sometimes the results are so darned interesting – and focus on such neglected subjects – that they demand spotlighting.

So kudos to the Gallup organization for shedding light on a question that’s the mirror image of something that surveys have been obsessing about recently. Rather than (yet again), asking what Americans of different parties think of Islam and the nation’s Muslim population, Gallup asked American Muslims what they think of the two major political parties. Thanks to recent headlines, the results aren’t surprising.  But their ultimate political importance may be much less obvious.

Just as most polls have detected more concern about American Muslims and their religion in Republican than Democratic ranks – along with more Republican support for measures like Donald Trump-like bans or restrictions on Muslim travel to the United States – Gallup’s latest shows that American Muslims are the religious group most enthusiastic about the Democrats.

According to Gallup, fully two-thirds of American Muslims “identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party.” American Jews are the only other significant religious group that comes close, at 60 percent. The figures for Catholics and Protestants, respectively, are 43 percent and 39 percent.

In addition, “Muslim Americans have the lowest percentage of any religious group who identify as or lean Republican.” And here the gap is even wider. This figure of 16 percent is much lower than that of the next least Republican identifiers – Jews, at 31 percent. Forty one percent of Catholics and 48 percent of Protestants identify with or lean Republican.

There’s of course a strong temptation to conclude that Republicans’ unpopularity with Muslims is all Trump’s fault. But this interesting recent Atlantic piece makes clear that the GOP’s standing with America’s Muslims has been weakening steadily since George W. Bush’s initial election as president in 2000. Moreover, it provides evidence that this decline began during Bush’s presidency, despite his high profile efforts to encourage toleration towards Muslims throughout the entire post September 11 period.

Perhaps most intriguing of all, election results presented in this article indicate that Muslim views of Republicans have actually improved somewhat since the mid-2000s, and that this trend has continued in the Obama years.

Will today’s Republican campaign drive even more Muslim voters into the Democratic camp? And how much will this matter, given the importance of individual states in the U.S. presidential election system and how the geographic distribution of the (voting age) Muslim population compares with various electoral college strategies all presidential candidates are developing right now? I sure don’t have any answers at this point. (Just FYI, here’s one U.S. government state- and county-level breakdown on where the nation’s Muslims live.)

What does seem clear is that what you hear about Islam and Muslims and related policy questions from the two major parties and their candidates will of course reflect genuine convictions about national security and public fears. But it will also reflect technical political calculations stemming from Gallup-like polls and Electoral College-related demographics.

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  • Uncategorized

The Snide World of Sports

  • (What's Left of) Our Economy
  • Following Up
  • Glad I Didn't Say That!
  • Golden Oldies
  • Guest Posts
  • Housekeeping
  • Housekeeping
  • Im-Politic
  • In the News
  • Making News
  • Our So-Called Foreign Policy
  • The Snide World of Sports
  • Those Stubborn Facts
  • Uncategorized

Guest Posts

  • (What's Left of) Our Economy
  • Following Up
  • Glad I Didn't Say That!
  • Golden Oldies
  • Guest Posts
  • Housekeeping
  • Housekeeping
  • Im-Politic
  • In the News
  • Making News
  • Our So-Called Foreign Policy
  • The Snide World of Sports
  • Those Stubborn Facts
  • Uncategorized

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Current Thoughts on Trade

Terence P. Stewart

Protecting U.S. Workers

Marc to Market

So Much Nonsense Out There, So Little Time....

Alastair Winter

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Smaulgld

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Reclaim the American Dream

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Mickey Kaus

Kausfiles

David Stockman's Contra Corner

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Upon Closer inspection

Keep America At Work

Sober Look

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Credit Writedowns

Finance, Economics and Markets

GubbmintCheese

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VoxEU.org: Recent Articles

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Michael Pettis' CHINA FINANCIAL MARKETS

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George Magnus

So Much Nonsense Out There, So Little Time....

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