Free Republic

The special election in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District is the first major test of the Democratic resistance to President Trump. In one sense, the results of the first round in April were promising for the party. Thanks to an impressive Democratic turnout, Jon Ossoff, the Democrat who advanced to this month’s runoff, almost cracked 50 percent of the vote in a district that’s nearly 10 percentage points more Republican than the nation as a whole.1 The result, moreover, was a reversal of some turnout trends we saw in 2016, when President Trump outperformed the polls on the back of higher...

Despite an onslaught of ridicule from the national media, chiding from their neighbors and repeated public relations flare-ups from the White House, President Trump’s voters remain remarkably loyal to him, pollsters and analysts say. These voters reject notions that they should regret their vote, saying that their frustration is not with Mr. Trump but with the resistance mounted by Democrats determined to stymie Mr. Trump at every turn....

BOZEMAN, Mont. — The ending was shocking, but the result was no surprise. Despite a bizarre election eve altercation with a reporter that led to a citation for misdemeanor assault, Republican Greg Gianforte kept a red-state House seat in Republican hands in Thursday’s Montana special election. Yet his closer-than-expected victory against Democrat Rob Quist for the at-large congressional seat proved revealing, exposing GOP weaknesses that could threaten the party’s House majority in 2018 but reminding Democrats of the uphill climb ahead against President Donald Trump. Here are POLITICO’s five takeaways after the messy two-month brawl and wild final 24 hours:...

Altamahaw (United States) (AFP) - While many see Donald Trump's presidency as a slow-motion car crash, the core voters who elected him are standing by their man, shrugging off the scandals and thrilled he is sticking it to Washington's establishment. That was a common view at the auto races at Ace Speedway in rural North Carolina, where America's stock car racing tradition was born. "I think the Democrats are trying to make things hard for him," Robin Hall said as she sat in the grandstands on Friday. The 53-year-old daycare worker dismissed the chaos cascading into the White House in...

The People’s Pundit Daily (PPD) Sunshine State Battleground Poll finds President Donald J. Trump’s approval rating in Florida far above his national numbers. The President is above water in his adopted state, 52% to 45%. Unlike other oft-cited surveys, PPD Battleground State Polls pegged President Trump’s victories on the statewide level in all but two states we identified as battlegrounds within tens of percentage points, including Florida, North Carolina, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Our final PPD Sunshine State Battleground Poll released on Nov. 6 found him leading Hillary Clinton by 1.6%, rounded up to two points. He won by 1.2%....

Hillary Clinton's aggressive attack on the legitimacy of Donald Trump's presidency -- she repeatedly noted she won the popular vote by 3 million votes, she lost because of James Comey and the Russian hacking -- on Tuesday drew huge amounts of attention in the political world. It also almost certainly helped Trump's political standing -- even for a brief time, Remember that the central reason Trump won in 2016 was because voters faced a binary choice between two choices they didn't like. The exit polling makes clear that voters were far from thrilled with Trump but that, with Clinton as...

As the Democratic Party rebuilds itself for the 2018 and 2020 elections, Democratic strategists have been preoccupied with a pressing question: why did so many voters who backed Barack Obama in 2012 switch to Donald Trump four years later, and what can be done to win them back? Top Democratic pollsters have conducted private focus groups and polling in an effort to answer that question, and they shared the results with me. One finding from the polling stands out: a shockingly large percentage of these Obama-Trump voters said Democrats’ economic policies will favour the wealthy — twice the percentage that...

Talk to voters across the country about President Trump's first 100 days in office and a few things become abundantly clear: His supporters — those who turned out in force and voted for him — still overwhelmingly love him. His detractors — and they are many, given that Trump failed to win the popular vote — are still shocked by his election and appalled by his behavior. He has lost support, particularly among moderates and independent voters. That's a big reason that polls give him the lowest approval rating of any modern president this soon after taking office. And, at...

One hundred days into his presidency, Donald Trump's supporters see a shrewd businessman who has roared into Washington, following through on campaign promises to cut government regulation, secure the border and be a fresh departure from business as usual. But at the same time his backers acknowledge that Trump has had difficulty navigating his way through the quagmire of Congress — facing opposition from Democrats and Republicans — and leaving some signature pledges incomplete. "He's in this to try to make this country a better place, to make things right," said state Rep. Tony D'Amelio of Waterbury, one of the...

Good lord. It’s one thing to blow an election once, but to lose hypothetically to a guy with a 42 percent approval rating again? Is there no limit to the humiliation the Clintons will suffer at Trump’s hands? We’ll have our answer when Ivanka and Chelsea inevitably square off in 2024. The same ABC/WaPo poll found that when 2016 voters were asked who they actually did vote for last November, 46 percent said Clinton versus 43 percent who said Trump — the same number he gets in this hypothetical rematch. In other words, given the option of a do-over, virtually...

Anecdotal stories about disillusioned supporters of Donald Trump are overdone. The fact is that, on a broad scale, Trump supporters say they aren't disappointed. In fact, a poll showed they were more pleased than disappointed, by about 5 to 1: "...The Pew Research Center released a poll showing very little buyer's remorse among Trump voters. The poll showed just 7% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say Trump has performed worse than they expected him to. Fully 38% - five times as many - say he has performed better." A new Washington Post-ABC News poll confirms this - in spades. And,...

We are nearly 100 days into Donald Trump's presidency, and the most remarkable aspect of it thus far is that the political environment hasn't changed much at all. The same media that largely ignored the widespread dissatisfaction with the political establishment and wrote off Trump's electoral chances continue looking for evidence that the president has lost traction with the people who elected him. The effort to write the Trump-remorse narrative began in the Republican primaries, when analysts and the media expected GOP voters to eventually rally around a Trump alternative, and continues even now. But still, reality continues to confound...

So guess what? In the last weeks before the election, the Hillary Clinton campaign did no polling. No. Polling. Whatsoever. Oh, it had data. Lots and lots of data. Analytics, even. Data analytics! But it had no independent information on the overall field of battle in states like Florida, Michigan, Virginia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. So when the election began to turn Donald Trump’s way, the Clinton campaign had no idea. This is one of the thousand revelations in “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign,” the new book by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes that, for political junkies, redefines the...

President Trump’s rocky first months in office haven’t much bothered his voters. At least, not yet. Yes, there have been lots of stories from the Rust Belt about stirrings of discontent among the Trump faithful. But those are mostly anecdotal and so far data – meaning polls – don’t back that thesis up. For instance, in a big new Pew Research survey fully 92 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say Mr. Trump has done as well or better than they expected. Only 7 percent say he’s done worse. What this means is that Trump’s base remains intact. In turn,...

Despite setbacks on his effort to repeal and replace Obamacare and court challenges to his executive orders on immigration, President Trump remains very popular among his supporters in Massachusetts. That's according to a new WBUR poll (topline results | crosstabs) of voters in towns across the central part of the state that voted for Trump in November. In Townsend, voters chose Trump over Hillary Clinton 50 to 41 percent. It's one of about 50 towns in the central part of the state that went for Trump. And they are the focus of the WBUR poll. 'Pretty Much A Total Polarization'...

As they investigate the forces behind the party’s stunning losses in November, Democrats are coming to a troubling conclusion. The party didn’t just lose among rural white voters on Election Day, it may have failed to capture them in its pre-election polling as well. Many pollsters and strategists believe that rural white voters, particularly those without college degrees, eluded the party’s polling altogether — and their absence from poll results may have been both a cause and a symptom of Donald Trump’s upset victory over Hillary Clinton in several states. . . Determining what exactly happened is one of the...

Some of President Trump's supporters expressed a more favorable view of him following a number of recent controversies surrounding his administration, according to an online poll released Thursday. In a handful of cases, while most registered voters expressed a negative view of Trump after the controversies, a plurality of Trump voters felt more favorably toward him, according to the Politico/Morning Consult poll. Nearly 20 percent of respondents said the polled controversies did not change their opinions of the president. Some of the controversies in the poll include the resignation of Trump's first national security adviser Michael Flynn last month, Attorney...

Just over 3 percent of those who backed Donald Trump for president now regret their vote, according to a Mood of the Nation poll from Penn State's McCourtney Institute of Democracy. "Of the 339 poll participants who originally voted for Trump, only 12 (3½ percent) said they would do something different," Michael Berkman, director of the institute and Eric Plutzer, who directed the poll, wrote in The Washington Post. Here are some of the reasons given by those surveyed, according to Berkman and Plutzer: •"I don't like his decisions so far." •"Trump's actions since the inauguration." •"… Trump cannot get...

President Donald Trump's core supporters are staying with him in his hour of need. Polls by Gallup and other survey researchers indicate that at least 80 percent of fellow Republicans approve of his job performance, even though the latest Gallup tracking survey finds that Trump has poor ratings with the general electorate. Only 39 percent of Americans approve of his job performance and 55 percent disapprove. But because his core supporters remain committed to him, it's unlikely that his overall job approval rating will decline much more, political strategists of both major parties say. This is particularly important now because...

Donald Trump’s compulsion to exaggerate the magnitude of his election victory––talking about a landslide that didn’t happen and miscounting electoral votes––has distracted from the true strategic importance of his triumph. From one perspective, the size of Trump’s win wasn’t so impressive. He received 45.9 percent of the popular vote––two points less than his opponent and four points shy of a majority––and he captured fewer electoral votes than the winners of seven of the last nine elections. From another angle, Trump’s win was very impressive. He won the battleground states of Ohio, Florida, North Carolina and Iowa––states that swing back and...