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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The start of 2019 is midway between the last presidential inauguration and the next – but will it also prove the halfway point in Donald Trump's presidency? Following up Hopes and Fears, which set out in compelling detail why America sent Trump to the White House, Half-Time! brings together two years of groundbreaking research, exploring what the voters make of the President's agenda and character, how they see the issues at stake and – with voices at the far ends of the political spectrum set to dominate the debate – how they are lining up for the 2020 election.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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half-time!
American public opinion midway through Trump’s (first?) term – and the race to 2020
Michael A. Ashcroft
Contents
About the author
LORD ASHCROFT KCMG PC is an international businessman, author, philanthropist and pollster. From 2005 to 2010 he was Deputy Chairman of the UK Conservative Party, having been its treasurer from 1998 to 2001. He is the founder and chairman of Crimestoppers, a Trustee of the Imperial War Museum, chairman of the trustees of Ashcroft Technology Academy, Chancellor of Anglia Ruskin University, and Treasurer of the International Democrat Union. From 2012 to 2018 he served as the Prime Minister’s Special Representative on Veterans’ Transition. He is also a Trustee of the Cleveland Clinic and a Fellow of the Canadian Geographical Society.
For more information on his work and polling, visit www.lordashcroft.com and www.lordashcroftpolls.com. Follow him on Twitter: @LordAshcroft.
Lord Ashcroft’s political works include:
Smell the Coffee: A Wake-Up Call for the Conservative Party
Minority Verdict: The Conservative Party, the Voters and the 2010 Election
Pay Me Forty Quid and I’ll Tell You: The 2015 Election Through the Eyes of the Voters
Well, You Did Ask: Why the UK Voted to Leave the EU
Call Me Dave: The Unauthorised Biography of David Cameron (with Isabel Oakeshott)
Hopes and Fears: Trump, Clinton, the Voters and the Future
The Lost Majority: The 2017 Election, the Conservative Party, the Voters and the Future
His other books include:
Dirty Politics, Dirty Times
Victoria Cross Heroes
Special Ops Heroes
Heroes of the Skies
George Cross Heroes
Special Forces Heroes
Victoria Cross Heroes Volume II
White Flag? An Examination of the UK’s Defence Capability
Introduction: Two years down, six to go?
THE BEGINNING OF 2019 brings the second anniversary of Donald Trump entering the White House: the half-way point between the last presidential inauguration and the next one. We don’t yet know whether it will also prove to be the half-way point in his presidency. This report brings together more than two years of research to examine the state of public opinion midway into President Trump’s (first?) term, and to assess the forces at work in the long run-up to the 2020 election.
Our work began in the autumn of 2016, spurred by the unusual degree of interest in the UK in political developments across the Atlantic. I decided to do what I had done in British politics and the then recent Brexit referendum and look more closely at the people who should be centre-stage in any election: the voters themselves.
Thus began my Ashcroft in America project. In the weeks leading up to election day we visited seven swing states to conduct focus groups with people from all kinds of backgrounds and political persuasions, reporting what they had to say in their own words and immortalizing their observations in a weekly podcast. Together with the results of a 30,000-sample poll, I drew these findings together in a book which sought to explain Donald Trump’s election as President of the United States: the different parts of a divided electorate and their varying characteristics and priorities, how they saw the candidates and issues, what mattered and what didn’t in a febrile political atmosphere, and how the country ultimately arrived at its decision. I called the book Hopes & Fears, reflecting our observation that while voters had made their choice with their eyes wide open, many felt that they were taking a gamble or were choosing the lesser of two evils.
Since that time we have made a number of return visits to take the temperature among different kinds of people across America – our focus group tour has now taken in 16 states – and conducted further surveys to see what the country makes of its new political order. Most recently, we listened to people in competitive Congressional districts as the midterms loomed and surveyed 15,000 Americans in the wake their decision.
Half-Time highlights the most salient findings in that work, looking in detail at how diverse parts of the electorate see President Trump and his agenda. We explore the voters’ verdict last November, and how they are lining up for the next decision day in 2020. We also return to the segments of the electorate we identified two years ago – from the ‘Cosmopolitan Activists’ to the ‘Fox News Militants’ – to see how they have moved, grown or shrunk over two years of relentless political drama and near-daily battles on social media and elsewhere. We will aim to explain where the American public is and where is seems to be heading in the year 3 AD (Anno Donaldus).
I hope our findings will be self-explanatory, but here I will take the opportunity, as one who can watch from a distance with no axe to grind, to make a few observations of my own. One is that “hopes and fears” remains a useful framework for understanding America’s fraught political debate.
First, the hopes. So far, President Trump has largely met or even exceeded the expectations of those who voted for him positively, rather than as the only way to stop Hillary Clinton. They point to a thriving economy stoked by tax cuts and deregulation, two conservative appointments to the Supreme Court, a newly combative approach to international affairs, willingness to reshape global trade deals in the interests of American jobs, and a tough line on illegal immigration and border security. They like that he has retained his status as a non-politician, is unbound by special interests, and continues to say exactly what he thinks; the outrage this causes in some quarters only adds to their enjoyment. And if his statements sometimes fall foul of the fact-checkers, they see him as honest in the more important sense that he has set about doing the things he said he would: a rare enough trait in an elected official. After many years of feeling ignored or even despised by the political class, believing a President is speaking and acting for them – is on their side – is an almost exhilarating experience.
That is not to say they like everything about him. Many Trump voters view his personal ethics with distaste, want him to be more presidential and refrain from namecalling, and generally wish he would calm down, especially on Twitter. But even his more reluctant voters mostly approve of his actions as President. Whatever their qualms about his character, they decided at the election that other things mattered more, and this still holds true.
On the other side of the ledger, those who did not support Trump feel their fears were well-founded: their vision of a divisive, erratic, chauvinistic President embarrassing America on the world stage has, they believe, come to pass – confounding the slim hopes some had that high office would confer a degree of dignity and gravitas. But fear arguably dominates practical politics in a broader sense than this. During the 2016 campaign we asked Americans how afraid they were of various scenarios: Republicans’ biggest worry was the immigration system letting in individuals who would threaten their community; for Democrats, it was finding themselves unable to pay for treatment in the event of serious illness. Two years later, what was the central plank of the Democrats’ successful campaign to take back control of the House of Representatives, and the top priority for people who backed the party (including those who had voted for Trump in 2016)? Healthcare. And over what issue, at the time of writing, is the federal government in shutdown? Funding for a Mexican border wall. For all the furore over collusion with Russia, which has so far had little impact on the voters (critics of the President regarding him as obviously guilty, while his supporters regard the whole investigation as a politically-motivated witch hunt), these are the things closest to the voters’ hearts around which the 2020 battle lines look set to be drawn.
Where does that leave the President as he contemplates the long march to reelection? With a devoted base every bit as solid as it was when it cheered his victory, and an opposition movement that seems to become more riled and determined by the month. But despite the well-documented polarization of American society, not everyone falls into one of those two camps. Those who voted for Trump as the least bad alternative remain supportive, but markedly less so than those who were enthusiasts at the outset. The same is true of those who backed the President having supported Barack Obama in 2012. And in the suburbs especially, enough Republicans stayed at home or switched sides in 2018 to give the Democrats control of the House, not least in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – the three states around which he built his 2016 victory. The Republicans lost a Senator in Trump-voting Arizona and got a run for their money in Texas and Mississippi, having mislaid a seat in deep-red Alabama the previous year. Meanwhile, the stock market reversals at the end of 2018 are a reminder that booms are not indefinite, and that the degree of support that depends on a growing economy is precarious.
