Posted on 07/19/2015 9:10:17 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Last weekend, Donald Trump added to his long list of bold claims by declaring himself the champion of a new “silent majority” of Americans.
While 17 percent of Republican voters isn’t a majority, and the 4,000 raucous supporters cheering him in Arizona were anything but silent, Trump has hurtled to the top of several recent GOP primary polls. Apparently, he speaks for some Americans. So who are they and where did they come from?
As it turns out, the Trump coalition looks a lot like the rest of the Republican Party. Other than a spike in support in the Northeast, there is little in recent polling data to distinguish Trump’s supporters from the heart of the GOP primary electorate. Even immigration hardliners support him at the same rate as the rest of the Republican Party.
“It’s a strange coalition of people,” said Patrick Murray of Monmouth University. “We can’t pin them down demographically. … It appears he’s cherry-picked individual voters.”
Interviews with Trump supporters at a rally on Saturday in Phoenix and in New Hampshire, where he was among the first candidates to hire staffers, suggest he is attracting Republicans from many corners of the party who are drawn to his image as a straight-talking businessman who would shake up politics as usual.
“The issues that are driving the average Trump voter are, first and foremost, that he’s not a politician. Secondly, he is self-funding his campaign, so he can’t be bought,” said Steve Stepanek, Trump’s New Hampshire co-chairman, who supported Newt Gingrich in 2012 and Rudy Giuliani in 2008.
“People today are looking for plainspoken people who say what’s on their mind,” said Lou Gargiulo, a New Hampshire activist and Trump’s Rockingham County co-chair who supported Mitt Romney in the 2008 and 2012 Republican primaries.
Trump voters skew older, whiter and more male, but no more so than the rest of the Republican primary electorate.
In a Monmouth poll released on Monday that put Trump in second place and a Suffolk University/USA Today poll released on Tuesday that put him in first, the real estate mogul fared better among somewhat conservative voters and very conservative secular voters than he did among moderates and religious conservatives.
At least in that way, said Murray, they really are like Richard Nixon’s silent majority of middle Americans. “They’re in the middle of the Republican Party. They’re not evangelicals. They’re not hardline social or fiscal conservatives. They’re also not on the liberal side of the party,” he said.
Because Trump had flirted with running for president before without jumping in, many observers doubted he would do so, and most polls before mid-May did not include his name.
Trump’s rise came so suddenly and unexpectedly, and Republican voters are divided among so many candidates, that the data to fully understand the Trump coalition does not yet exist, said Quinnipiac University pollster Peter Brown.
What Murray can say definitively about Trump is that he is an anomaly. In a Monmouth poll released a month ago, Trump had the worst favorability rating of any Republican candidate among Republican voters, 20 percent favorable to 55 percent unfavorable, a fact cited by many political observers in pooh-poohing his viability. In the poll out this week, Trump’s favorability has pulled nearly even at 41-40. The swing was even more dramatic among self-identified tea party voters, who went from viewing him unfavorably, 55 percent to 20 percent, to viewing him favorably 56 percent to 26 percent.
“I’ve never seen a candidate who’s so well known who was able to suddenly turn around people’s opinions of him,” Murray said.
Even as Republican elites decried his claims about the alleged criminality of undocumented Mexican immigrants (which defy all available evidence) and brands cut ties with him, a large chunk of GOP primary voters were evaluating him in a positive light.
Joan Riscki, 67, a Phoenix resident and retiree, is an independent who voted for Mitt Romney in the general election in 2012. “I usually vote for Democrats, but it’s a bad situation now,” she told POLITICO outside Trump’s rally on Saturday. “They’re all liars anyways. I try not to listen to the news. I listen to KFYI,” a local conservative talk radio station.
Matt Bates, 52, a property manager from Scottsdale, who remains uncommitted to a presidential candidate, said he found out about the Trump event from his in-laws, who had heard about it on Fox News. “He’s not a politician, he’s a businessman,” Bates said of Trump’s appeal.
His wife, Stephanie, 52, a grocery store manager, said she supports Trump. “His views are similar to the GOP, but he’s not in anybody’s pocket,” she said. “You can’t trust the rest of them.”
Hazel Powell, 68, also of Phoenix, is a retired Peace Corps volunteer (she felt the need to leave the country after Obama’s election) and a fan of “The Apprentice,” Trump’s reality show on NBC. “I’ve always liked Donald with his television shows, his aggressiveness. He just speaks the truth,” she said.
The crowd in Phoenix was overwhelmingly white (as is the Republican primary electorate), and Trump’s fellow Republicans have condemned his comments about undocumented immigrants as racist, but Powell said he would eventually win over Latinos. “The Latinos are going to support him because they’re smart enough to know: He’s going to get them jobs.”
Trump has made the same claim, saying that “tens of thousands” of Latinos have worked for him over the years and that they “love” him.
In New Hampshire, Trump is currently polling second to Bush.
Greg Moore, the state director for the Koch-backed group Americans for Prosperity, which lost several staffers to Trump’s Granite State effort, has gotten an up-close look at the mogul’s supporters. His offices share a building with Trump’s campaign. He said he sees a lot of unfamiliar faces coming and going from Trump’s New Hampshire headquarters — not the state’s typical Republican activist crowd.
“They seem to be galvanized [by] a notion that Washington is hopelessly corrupt – and you need somebody who is completely outside of the process to go in there and shake things up,” he said. “Immigration really isn’t an issue in New Hampshire, but for a lot of these folks, I think immigration speaks more broadly to a federal government that’s not doing its job as effectively as they think it should be or could be.”
Despite Trump’s recent success capitalizing on widespread discontent with Washington, establishment Republicans say they aren’t worried his support will make him a viable candidate.
“I don’t think in the end, people when they vote in the primary will throw their vote away,” said Judd Gregg, a former senator and New Hampshire governor. “They’re not going to vote for somebody who isn’t a legitimate candidate for the nomination who can win the nomination and can govern.”
Since they’re so perplexed I’ll have to shout
PEOPLE ARE SICK OF THE REFUSAL OF THE GOVERNMENT TO ENFORCE THE LAWS AGAINST ILLEGAL ALIENS !!
So Trump took a low blow to McStain about his POW status, and they want to excoriate him. Yet McStain ridicules conservatives left and right and the leadership is a bunch of useless GOPee lying windbags. Which is worse? I’ll take Trump any day over the horrific useless establishment.
As for pollsters not being able to get a read on Trumps supporters cant that be said about every gop pollster for the last about ten years?
Donald Trump did not steal your money. Donald Trump did not raise your taxes.
Donald Trump did not quadruple the price of food. Trump is not stirring a race war. Trump did not leave any US soldiers in Benghazzi to be slaughtered and desecrated by Muslims.
Trump did not send the US Navy to fight for Syrian Al-Qaeda. Trump did not arm ISIS and systematically exterminate Christians throughout the Middle East. Trump did not betray Israel. Trump did not provide financing and technology to Irans nuclear weapons program. Trump did not give our military secrets to China. Trump did not remove our nuclear missile shield in Poland at the behest of Russia. Trump did not shrivel our military, and betray our veterans. Trump did not cripple our economy. Trump did not increase our debt to 20 trillion dollars. Trump did not ruin our credit, twice. Trump did not double African American unemployment. Trump did not increase welfare to a record level for eight years. Trump did not sign a law making it legal to execute, and imprison Americans. Trump did not set free all of terrorists in Guantanamo bay. Trump did not steal your rights, violate US Constitutional law, or commit treason, hundreds of times.
Trump is being ripped apart in the news, non stop. Barrack Hussein, Hillary Clinton and the criminals occupying our government, are not.
The media is the Democrat Party.
Save your culture. Stop listening to them.
He has said NOTHING derogatory about MEXICANS .... He has said what American citizens KNOW..... This country has to close its borders to illegal immigration.
That is IT!
I like this part “It appears he’s cherry-picked individual voters”. Boy is this guy clueless.
BTW, the Republican primary is overwhelmingly white. Just had to put that out there. OK. Carry on.
I will shout too!
WE WANT A CLOSED SECURE BORDER! WE WANT TO PUT AN END TO FOREIGNERS ENTERING THE U.S. WE WANT IMMIGRANTS WHO ARE HERE LEGALLY TO BE ASSIMULATED INTO AMERICAN CULTURE!
DEPORT ILLEGAL FOREIGN CRIMINALS!
ARE WE CLEAR?
This is hilarious.
Hey Mr. Polster...
I’m also Jewish.
shhhh!!
Dogs Of Hell Are Unleashed On Donald Trump As Sleeping Giant Awakens
the powerful socialist cabal and the corrupt crony capitalists are scared. I’ve never seen them this outraged, this vicious, this motivated or this coordinated. Never in all my years in politics have I seen anything like the way the mad dogs of hell have been unleashed on Donald Trump.
No matter how much they say to the contrary, the media, business and political elite understand that Trump is no joke. He could actually win and upset their nice cozy apple cart.
It’s no coincidence that everyone has gotten together to destroy The Donald. No, this is a coordinated conspiracy led by President Barack Obama himself. Obama himself is making the phone calls and giving the orders; he’s the ultimate intimidator who plays by the rules of Chicago thug politics.
These run-of-the-mill establishment politicians are all puppets owned by big money. But there’s one man — and only one man — who isn’t beholden to anyone. There’s one man who doesn’t need foreigners, or foreign governments, or George Soros, or the United Auto Workers, or the teachers union, or the Service Employees International Union, or the bar association to fund his campaign.
Billionaire tycoon and maverick Donald Trump doesn’t need anyone’s help.
That means he doesn’t care what the media says. He doesn’t care what the corporate elites think. That makes him very dangerous to the entrenched interests. That makes Trump a huge threat. Trump can ruin everything for the bribed politicians and their spoiled slave masters.
What kind of solutions might Donald Trump offer that the establishment now in Washington, DC might not be too happy about? How did Iceland go about turning around their financial problems? The answers to Iceland’s ills are clearly solutions that ‘the Donald’ might offer.:
Trump will ask if Obamacare’s architects can be charged with fraud for selling it by lying. He will ask if Obama himself committed fraud when he said, “If you like your healthcare plan, you can keep it.”
Trump will investigate Obama’s widespread IRS conspiracy, not to mention Obama’s college records.
Trump will prosecute Clinton and Obama for fraud committed to cover up Benghazi before the election.
How about the fraud committed by employees of the Labor Department when they made up dramatic job numbers in the last jobs report before the 2012 election?
Obama, the multinational corporations and the media need to stop this. They recognize this could get out of control. If left unchecked telling the raw truth and asking questions everyone else is afraid to ask, Trump could wake a sleeping giant.
Trump’s election would be a nightmare. Obama has committed many crimes. No one else but Trump would dare to prosecute. He will not hesitate. Once Trump gets in and gets a look at “the cooked books” and Obama’s records, the game is over. The gig is up. The goose is cooked.
Holder could wind up in prison. Jarrett could wind up in prison. Obama bundler Corzine could wind up in prison for losing $1.5 billion of customer money.
Clinton could wind up in jail for deleting 32,000 emails, or for accepting bribes from foreign governments while secretary of state, or for “misplacing” $6 billion as the head of the State Department, or for lying about Benghazi.
The entire upper level management of the IRS could wind up in prison. Obamacare will be defunded and dismantled. The Obama crime family will be prosecuted for crimes against the American people. And Obama himself could wind up ruined, his legacy in tatters.
Trump will investigate. Trump will prosecute. Trump will go after everyone involved — just for fun. That will all happen on Trump’s first day in the White House.
That’s why the dogs of hell have been unleashed on Donald Trump.
Excerpt from-
http://allnewspipeline.com/Now_More_Than_Ever_Come_Together.php
RINOs and LIVs. Most of his supporters just listen to the MSM and know virtually nothing about him, especially his work background.
So all the people here who support him or are refreshed by his “take no prisoners” attitude are RINOs and LIVs? Interesting. Are they also “crazies” John?
Obama is a true believer but does what he is told. He's a useful tool of those who pull his strings.
Could you explain that? He wants 60 million illegals to stay in the U.S. He thinks Americans should kowtow to Muslims, by not criticizing them. He think putting the Confederate flags in museums will somehow save America. He won't say anything about gay issues, because he's absolutely afraid of offending them.
Are they also “crazies” John?
There was a lot funny about that. Trump is no farther to the right than McCain. Trump supporters ARE crazy, if they are looking to Trump as their messiah. Trump actually distracted from all the terrible things McCain does.
Well said!
No one was talking about the terrible things McCain does and now they are. You don’t make sense.
On his website, donaldjtrump.com, it says he accepts contributions. But I haven't heard any sound bite where he's soliciting them.
Bumping your post
No, they aren’t. They are talking about his military service. (And no one was talking about McCain at all, because it’s summer, his re-election is far off, and he hasn’t done anything recently)
You never make sense.
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