Follow the numbers
by digby
Ryan Struyk is one of the sharpest political analysts around and I'm always interested in what he has to say. Since everyone's doing lists, he's gathered some of the most important polling trends of the past year. You can click over to see them all, I'll just highlight a couple that I think are particularly interesting. First some good news:
The number of Republicans in the American electorate has shrunk to its lowest in a quarter century after Trump's election last year, according to numbers from Gallup.
Only 38% of Americans self-identify as Republicans or Republican-leaning independents during 2017, while 45% of Americans say they are Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents.
That also means roughly one in eight people who identified as Republicans or Republican-leaning in November 2016 no longer do so. (The number of Democrats has held roughly steady over the same period.)
Keep that in mind when you see numbers about how the Republicans are sticking with Trump. That might be true but you have to ask how many people are sticking with the Republicans. That number is shrinking and it's because the GOP is now the party of Trump and for some Republicans or GOP leaners that's just not something they want to be affiliated with.
Now for the bad news:
US global reputation takes a hit under Trump
Perceptions about the United States and the President took a major hit on the world stage in 2017, according to numbers from the Pew Research Center. (Pew conducted surveys in 37 countries during the spring and reported global medians in June.) Check out this chart from Pew:
Good lord that's bad. The US is way too powerful to be so mistrusted. I get it, of course. Most of us don't trust the US under this leadership either at this point. But this is dangerous. Trump is an f-ing moron, we know that, so he thinks that the most powerful nation on earth should be "unpredictable" when the exact opposite is true. The most powerful nation on earth should be steady and solid so nobody makes the kind of mistake that could result in a tragic move that can't be taken back. I think we've seen how that's working out so far. Trump has the whole world jumpy. And that's not good.
One bit of news that's slightly unnerving is that as Trump is in office longer he's starting to get credit for the growing economy he inherited. That's not unusual but when that happens the president is usually pretty popular. So far that hasn't happened, but you never know ...
Trump has turned a lot of the normal expectations upside down so it's unknown whether any of these trends are predictive. In the age of Trump, all bets are off. But we'll keep watching the numbers just in case.
