Trump Polling Poorly Among Independents

At RealClear Politics, Greg Orman, an independent politician and critic of the two-party system, considers why Trump -- underwater with independent voters since the start of his term -- is really tanking among those voters now.

Orman finds a recent Quinnipiac poll illuminating in this regard:

[T]he president has hemorrhaged support among independents over his handling of an array of matters ranging from the economy and the deployment of ICE and the National Guard in U.S. cities to tariffs and Russian aggression in the Russia-Ukraine war. On each of those issues, independents disapprove of the job the president is doing by more than a 2-1 margin. They give him only slightly better marks for his attempts to politicize the military, with a net approval rating of -24%.

It is interesting how Orman deals with a common Republican objection to such polls:

Trump supporters may be tempted to rationalize the numbers away by arguing that Quinnipiac was actually polling Democrats disguised as independents. This happens sometimes, but in this survey, a majority of independents give the president credit for the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. As Democrats are not inclined to give Trump credit for anything, it suggests that the respondents were genuine independents.

While this independent regards the "peace" "deal" as a travesty, I can see why this would poll well, considering how badly reported the war is, and how tired many people are of this eternal conflict, given the moral relativism that infects this reporting and the President's own views on foreign policy. So, yes, assuming that most people mistakenly see this "deal" as a good thing, I think Orman's test is a good one.

Orman then indicates that this poll did not touch on the steady stream of corruption in this Administration, and hypothesizes that this is also giving independents a dim view of Trump. I think Orman is probably correct here.

Since independents are hardly a homogeneous group, it is interesting to consider what this poor polling means and doesn't mean. Note that where Trump does worst in the poll are all radical departures from policies one would expect of a traditional Republican President.

Using (para-)military units on American soil is anything but a limited government position. One would expect left-leaning independents to dislike these policies on the basis of who is carrying them out, but right-leaning independents espousing limited government to be horrified. (Ditto for politicizing the military.)

Nearly everyone, including lots of cowardly Republicans in Congress, got the memo long ago that tariffs are a stupid idea, so that number is a no-brainer.

And, while the left somehow has finally gotten on board with the fact that Russia is an enemy, many right-leaning independents will be "old enough to remember" when Republicans still knew that. And this is on top of the fact that only an abject moral relativist (or Russian "shared values" stooge) would fail to condemn this invasion or see it as the threat to American interests that it is.

These are all issues that unite left-of-center and right-of-center voters, variously for different or the same reasons.

Orman focuses on corruption, another issue almost anyone can agree on, and leans into it when advising the Democrats:

While the midterm elections are over a year away, without a course correction that seems unlikely, Republicans will succumb to the traditional midterm shellacking.

All this assumes that the Democratic Party gets its act together and unifies behind a message that resonates with the American people. Right now that's a big ask. As a party, Democrats need to abandon the purity tests that have plagued their candidates and talk about how they're going to improve people's everyday lives. Incorporating their own plan for how they intend to address not only the president's corruption, but also the systemic corruption in Washington D.C. would be a good place to start if they want to win independents.

Attacking systemic corruption sounds a lot like rein in fraud, waste, and abuse to me, and it reminds me of the following passage about a phrase, "middle of the road," that used to be much more common in the past (and for which I think many people now substitute independent):

... Objectivism dismisses as foolish the notion that republican government is a "middle of the road" between statism and anarchism. Statism is one extreme; individualism is the other. Anarchism is merely an unusually senseless form of statism; it is not an extreme of "freedom," but the negation of the concept.

There are middle-of-the-road'ers in politics, who advocate a union of individualism and statism. This brings us to the system that rules the West today: the mixed economy. [Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, p. 373.]

This quickly leads me to where I am pretty sure I disagree with Orman:

A mixed economy is a mixture of freedom and controls -- with no principles, rules, or theories to define either. Since the introduction of controls necessitates and leads to further controls, it is an unstable, explosive mixture which, ultimately, has to repeal the controls or collapse into dictatorship. [Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, p. 206.]

Indeed, had No Labels or the like won the last election, neither would that President have addressed the cause of corruption and our slide into dictatorship. He would only (at best) continue our country's drift towards corruption and dictatorship, rather than actively accelerate it, as Trump is.

I no longer recall the source of the saying, To get the money out of politics, get politics out of money, but it nicely sums up what it will take to address corruption in the long haul, and I don't see either party doing it any time soon.

And unless an American Milei arises (i.e., someone dedicated to economic and personal freedom while also able to connect with a large number of voters), the best we will be able to hope for is each party holding the other in check more effectively until support for ending the entitlement/regulatory state builds in some other way.

It is not enough to reject bad policies and corruption, as America's horrified independents are doing. One must re-embrace the positive goal of freedom that both parties abandoned long ago.

-- CAV