President Donald Trump waves to supporters on Saturday, March 4, 2017, in West Palm Beach, Florida. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
David Mark of NBC’s Think discusses how the Democratic pick will almost certainly run up against a virtual lock on support for Trump among GOP voters. He writes abridged:
According to Gallup polls taken every two weeks, Trump’s support among Republicans hovers in the high 80s to low 90s. And those numbers haven’t been affected by the impeachment inquiry by House Democrats against Trump over the Ukraine whistleblower affair. Paradoxically, Trump campaign officials are using the Capitol Hill proceedings to fire up the president’s bedrock of support to an even higher degree than when he took office in January 2017. Trump’s base — broadly composed of white evangelicals, the non-college educated and rural residents — is staying loyal to him in the face of impeachment.
In one measure of this loyalty, a Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) poll in September found that 72 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents prefer Trump to be the party’s 2020 nominee over any other GOP candidate — up from 59 percent in October 2017. Another is that, according to the same poll, 37 percent of Republicans say there’s “almost nothing Trump could do” to lose their approval.
Indeed, the Republican party at present is effectively a personality cult around Trump. On the left, there’s no equivalen[…]
[…] Moody’s Analytics assessed in a recent report that Trump is favored to win a second term, possibly by a blowout margin, with depressed turnout on the Democratic side a main factor in its analysis.
