Wednesday, January 04, 2017
Tuesday, January 03, 2017
Public Has Less Faith In Trump Than In Past Presidents
Democrats weren't happy with the idea that Bush would soon be president in 2001, and Republicans weren't happy with the idea that idea that Obama would soon be president in 2009 -- but the general public gave both men the benefit of the doubt, believing they were competent and would do a good job. Donald Trump doesn't have that. The general public simply doesn't have faith in Trump to be a good president.
That charts above are from a recent Gallup Poll -- done between December 7th and 11th of a random national sample of 1,028 adults, with a 4 point margin of error. The poll shows what the public thought about each president just before they took office. Note that Trump rates significantly less than any of our past three presidents (Obama, Bush, Clinton) in every single category.
Trump wants to believe that he has the overwhelming support and faith of the American people as he starts his term. That is not even remotely true.
Public Is Not Buying The GOP Lie About Insurance Costs
For years now, and throughout the 2016 campaign, Republicans (and their presidential candidate0 have been telling Americans that Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act) is responsible for the rise in the cost of premiums for health insurance. It's not even remotely true, as most knowledgeable experts admit that the rise in premium costs have not been going up as fast as they were before Obamacare was passed.
Those same Republicans have promised to repeal Obamacare, and say they will replace it with a plan that will decrease the cost of health insurance. While that may sound good to those who don't understand the greed of the private insurance industry, it's just not going to happen. First, because those GOP congresspeople have been unable to agree on any plan at all (let alone a plan that will decrease costs). And second, because repealing Obamacare will significantly reduce the number of people with insurance and remove the mandate to have insurance -- both of which will cause the insurance companies to raise their rates.
Insurance rates were going up precipitously before Obamacare was passed, and it will do so again after it is repealed.
But the chart above shows most Americans don't believe the Republican lies. They don't believe repealing Obamacare will decrease insurance premiums. A huge majority of the general public (and all groups) believe the repeal will either increase the cost of insurance or have no effect on rising premiums. Only a tiny minority (about 21%) believe the repeal will decrease the cost of insurance.
The chart was made from information in a recent Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between December 17th and 20th of a random national sample of 1,396 (including 1,193 registered voters), with a 3.3 point margin of error.
Trump Is A "Glitch" President (Not A Mandate President)
The following article concerns Trump's ridiculous claim of having an electoral mandate (and how Democrats should react to it). It was written by Peter Weber at The Week:
All newly elected presidents claim a mandate to lead the country in whatever direction they want, and in typical Donald Trump fashion, he and his team have claimed a huge one.
"We truly do believe that our president-elect has secured a mandate for leadership," Vice President-elect Mike Pence told a group of wealthy donors last week at a Heritage Foundation dinner in Trump's new hotel in Washington, D.C. "This is a historic victory." Late last month, Kellyanne Conway, Trump's senior adviser and former campaign manager, tweeted a similar conceit about Trump's Electoral College tally: "306. Landslide. Blowout. Historic." On Sunday, Trump claimed on Fox News that he won a "massive landslide victory, as you know, in the Electoral College."
These claims should be taken seriously, but not literally, as the Trump campaign might say. They need to be taken seriously because Trump won, and he will be president. But the "mandate" should be regarded as hyperbole because — not to put too fine a point on it — to call Trump's victory "historic" (in a positive sense) is to stretch the definition of the word beyond all recognition.
A mandate is the authority to enact policy based on victory among an electorate. Nationally, the electorate gave Hillary Clinton 2.8 million more votes than it gave Trump, or 2.1 percentage points. . . . But the big loss among actual voters obviously bothers Trump. He even concocted the absurd talking point that he "won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally."
Well, it should bother him.
In reality, Trump eked out "a historically small mandate," says Aaron Blake at The Washington Post. The fact that Trump did not win a mandate "is almost so obvious that it doesn't bear stating," says Robert Schlesinger at U.S. News & World Report. "Trump is a glitch president, not a mandate president."
Going "back to 1856, the first contest pitting the two major parties against one another, Trump's 2016 win is below average on every single metric," says Phillip Bump at The Washington Post. "Trump's popular vote loss was in fact historic. Trump's loss in the popular vote was three times all previous popular vote losses from an eventual president combined. As a percentage of votes cast, Trump's margin was the second worst loss among eventual presidents over the past 160 years."
The obvious rejoinder to that is: So what? And it is a good point, actually. Trump will be our next president. Clinton will not be.
So here's why it matters that Trump lost a crushing popular defeat to Clinton: It is a license to say no.
Democrats in the House will have very little power, but Senate Democrats will have a chance to block Trump's more outrageous proposals — at least as long as the filibuster stands — and a handful of Republicans skeptical of various aspects of the Trump agenda (see: Russia) will wield a lot of clout. More to the point, these senators will have every right to block Trump, if they see fit. After all, America has elected its senators by popular vote since the 17th Amendment took effect in 1913 — unlike Trump, all 100 of these Senate members won more votes than their opponents.
"Mandates are ephemeral and ultimately require the assent of the defeated party," Schlesinger notes. Republicans did not assent in 2009 after Obama won 365 electoral votes, 52.9 percent of the popular vote, and nearly 10 million more votes than his Republican opponent. If Democrats, and even a few Republicans, don't buy this 46 percenter's claim to a mandate, that seems more like common sense than fighting dirty.
Monday, January 02, 2017
This 2016 Poll Should Scare The Hell Out Of You
The Public Religion Research Institute recently went over their 2016 polls to determine if any of them contained information that could be relevant to 2017 politics. One that they found was the chart above from an April 2016 survey they did.
It showed that 65% of the supporters of Donald Trump said they thought this country needed a president who was willing to break the rules. And in case you wondered, those rules are the laws derived from our Constitution. These fools don't care about the Constitution as long as they can get what they want. They don't seem to realize that allowing a leader to break the rules (i.e., violate the Constitution) is a big step toward tyranny (rule by a leader that makes his own rules).
Even scarier is that the chart showed that 45% of the general population agrees with the trumpistas -- also thinking the country needs a leader willing to break the rules. Only 51% thought a president should always follow the rules, and 4% said they were unsure. That's almost half of the population willing to toss the Constitution out the window to get what they want.
That scares the hell out of me, and it should scare all Americans. These nuts got the president they want, and seem to be willing to ignore his breaking of the rules. That's frightening, since Trump is known for flouting the rules to get what he wants.
Our Founding Fathers sacrificed to give us a representative democracy. Is the current generation too stupid and selfish to keep it?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)