April 26, 2017--Voters' Remorse

Liberal friends and I have been thinking recently that Donald Trump has sunk to such a level of ineffectiveness that his supporters must be drifting away from him and that some even might be regretting that they didn't vote for Hillary. That they have buyers' or voters' remorse.

But a report of two recent polls about this published late last week in the Washington Post reveals just the opposite to be true--the voters with remorse are almost all Clinton people.

How to figure.

Read this and weep--

According to a Pew poll, Trump voters by more than 5-to-1, 38%, say they are more pleased than expected with his performance as president whereas only 7% say he performed worse. Further, all who voted in November say that if the election were held again Trump, not Hillary, would win the popular vote by four points.

These findings are confirmed by a Washington Post-ABC poll which shows that just 4% of Trump voters say they would vote for someone else. Someone other than Hillary. But 15% of Clinton's voters say they would abandon her if the vote were held today. Again, few would switch to Trump. And she, as compared with Trump, has done nothing since November 8th that would drive people away. Yet another Hillary Clinton conundrum.

In both cases these switching voters would opt now for one or another of the independent candidates.

In regard to how Trump supporters view him, 62% say he is doing better than expected while an astonishing 33% say he is doing "much better" as president.

These findings parallel others that we saw during the campaign. Trump's support is so strong among his base that no matter what he says or, now, does does not matter. He is more than another Teflon president--he's bullet proof.

This needs to be a wake up call for Democrats and others who oppose him and do not want to see him reelected. It may feel premature to be thinking about 2020, but Trump is, having already formed a reelection committee.

Among the lessons to glean from this is that things are not entirely as they seem.

Believing that Trump is out of his depth, ignorant about the issues, lacks the intellectual discipline for the presidency, and will have difficulty getting anything through Congress, assuming this is not enough to assure that his support will erode and make him easy to defeat in four years. Anyone counting on this needs to think again.

He is a political phenomenon that defies all the rules and conventional wisdom. He is our first asymmetrical president. And we had better figure out ways to deal with him and that. Or we're looking at eight years of Trump.