Stanley Greenberg, Democrat Party pollster and policy wonk for the party, was surprised at the results of a poll he took of 1,000 registered voters two weeks ago in key battleground states:
We were … surprised by how much Donald Trump’s loyalist party is totally consolidated at this early point in its 2022 voting, and how engaged it is….
With such high early engagement of Republicans and white working-class voters in this survey, it means the era of Donald Trump shaping the electorate is not over.
Greenberg hoped that the Trump era was over. In his book, R.I.P. G.O.P.: How the New America is Dooming the Republicans, published in 2019, he predicted that the thrashing Republicans took in 2018 would be repeated in 2020. No doubt he was surprised that he was wrong then, too.
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The problem Democrats have, Greenberg opined after reviewing the results of his poll, is that Republicans “are deeply engaged [while] Democrats are barely following politics.”
Greenberg is smart enough to know why:
Do not think [wrote Greenberg to his liberal Democrat constituents] Trump’s current focus on the stolen election is an amusing side-show. It is about Blacks and Democratic politicians in the cities using illegal voting procedures and stuffing ballot boxes to steal away Trump’s great victory….
This survey shows what are the true drivers of GOP identity — the deep hostility to Black Lives Matter, undocumented immigrants, and Antifa.
And imagine their reaction to the flood of unaccompanied children at the border, the guilty verdict in Minneapolis, and Black Lives Matter protests after each police shooting of unarmed Blacks.
He warned that, based on his polling in districts where Democrats won by narrow margins in 2020, “Republican primaries will only confirm Trump’s ascendancy.” He added, “Democrats [must not] fail to see how early Trump’s party is fully engaged with its ongoing culture war, focused on crime, open borders, and defunding the police.”
For Democrats Greenberg’s numbers are daunting. Three quarters of Republican voters surveyed support Trump, either as “loyalists” (Greenberg’s term), or as “Trump-aligned” voters. In the key battleground states and districts where he polled — Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, plus 13 contested districts in California, New Jersey, Texas, and Virginia — Greenberg found that the margins favor Republicans by more than double digits.
President Biden is unwittingly helping to fuel this through the radicalism of his policies. Given the extent to which he is riding roughshod over the Constitution via his executive orders and mandates, his determination to weaken further the United States vis-à-vis Communist China, and his efforts to flood the country with illegal aliens, it’s no wonder that Republican conservatives are so engaged.
They can hardly wait for November 2022, when they will have a chance to turn out the traitors and resume Trump’s efforts to Make America Great Again.
