New Washington Post-ABC News Poll Provides Some Fascinating Data Points

I get that any corporate media poll needs to be taken with a giant grain of salt, but upon looking at some of the questions and answers from the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll, I founds some interesting nuggets that help explain a lot of what’s going on in our increasingly demented political environment. Let’s begin with the Trump stuff.

First, the poll found that 36% of Americans approve of Trump, which seems consistent with where things have stood for a while now. What I found far more interesting were the reasons given by the larger group of people who expressed disapproval.

Here’s some of what we learned:

Americans who disapprove of Trump — 58 percent in the Post-ABC poll — offered a different range of responses focusing more heavily on his personal and character traits. Topping the list of non-policy criticism is the way Trump talks and acts (13 percent), laments about him not being informed or knowledgeable (12 percent), while an additional 12 percent mentioned concerns about lies, false statements or general dishonesty. Among disapprovers who named issues as their biggest criticism, the most common were immigration (8 percent) and health care (7 percent), the travel ban at 3 percent and others at 2 percent or less.

The above is extremely discouraging to me. The most common answer given by those opposed to Trump has to do with how “he talks/acts.” While it’s fine for that to be something people take into consideration when judging a President, for it to be the very top thing people find objectionable about Trump tells you a lot about the mindset of much of the American public. Namely, that many Americans just want a slicker salesperson for authoritarianism, which is precisely why Obama remains very popular amongst certain segments of the U.S. population despite being a horrible President on almost every metric that really matters.

I think this reflects the mindset of many establishment/corporate Democrats, which is why that party is as unpopular as Trump right now (more on that later). Rather than opposing him on the grounds that he gave up his economic policy to Goldman Sachs and his foreign policy is leading to a rapidly rising number of civilian casualties overseas, Democrats focus on Russia and grammatical errors in his tweets.

Nevertheless, there was one positive thing to point out in the answers.. We find that only 4% of those who disapprove of Trump, do so based on his desire to not start WW3 with Russia, as opposed to you know, lunatics like this…

As such, the poll provides further evidence that the Russia thing really is primarily an obsession of media pundits, bloodthirsty, imperial D.C. interventionists and bitter Clinton dead-enders.

While all of that is interesting enough, another question proved equally fascinating. It has to do with whether or not the Democratic Party stands for something:

At 37%, the percentage of Americans who think the Democratic Party stands for something is roughly equal to the percentage of Americans who support Trump. In other words, despite Trump’s low popularity, Democrats aren’t doing themselves any favors by hyperventilating on Russia 24/7 while the domestic landscape remains a neglected, oligarch-dominated, corrupt, neo-feudal monstrosity.

This just furthers my case for why we need political decentralization (see my four-part series). The national debate isn’t sane, rational or productive. It’s Trump carrying on much of the worst of Obama and Bush before him, and the “resistance” merely wanting a better salesperson for oligarchy. This isn’t healthy and it isn’t going to get us anywhere good. An increasingly polarized public divided into two-warring gangs, none of which will actually help the public is where we stand, and unless we get over that and focus on issues that help people in their everyday lives, I don’t expect things to get better.

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In Liberty,
Michael Krieger

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