Trump's threats – and the weak public resistance of GOP leaders in Congress – constitute the most recent evidence that his mid-term failure has not changed the White House's fundamental strategic calculation.
Although the proposed border-wall faces widespread opposition from all the electorate groups that contributed to the big Democratic gains in the House last month, and government closures have historically alienated a wide range citizens, the end and the means remain popular among the main supporters of the president.
Trump could still back down before triggering a government shutdown just in time for Christmas. But his determination to push this confrontation to the edge of the abyss – for a cause, the construction of the wall, with such a narrow support base – shows how much he remains determined to energize his base, even at the cost of alienating him. Wider electorate.
Since Trump's sneaky meeting with the future Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and the head of the Democratic Senate, Chuck Schumer, the greatest attention has been given to the President's willingness to assume the responsibility of A possible closure of the government. This statement has stunned many congressional Republicans because previous stops have always been unpopular and each party has maneuvered to blame the other.
Public Opposition to a Wall Closure
Concerned GOP Officials Have Legitimate Reasons to Be Concerned: In a poll released by National and Marist Public Radio last week, only 36% of Americans said that Trump should prevent the government from leaving the government. do not finance his wall. A majority of 57% said that he should make a compromise to avoid a stop.
But about two-thirds of self-identified Republicans in the survey said that they would support a wall closure, and that's what hard core of immigration in the party that Trump has targeted with his agenda and his speech on the issue.
At the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, Trump's harsh approach to immigration, symbolized by his calls for the construction of a wall on the southern border that he would force to financing Mexico, was its distinctive feature in the overpopulated world. Trump has largely won by consolidating the elements of the GOP's most antagonistic electorate vis-à-vis undocumented immigrants and immigration in general.
At the polls at polling day, in 20 US states, voters felt that undocumented migrants should be allowed to obtain legal status or be expelled; the majority of voters, even in the GOP primaries, supported the expulsion. Yet this extremist minority has supported Trump in such overwhelming proportions that she won the majority of her vote in 18 of the 20 states, polls revealed.
But Trump's Call for the Wall has never gained wide public support. For years, polls have consistently shown that while Americans support the path to the legal status or citizenship of undocumented immigrants without a criminal record, they also place a high priority on border security. Yet even within the framework of this broad consensus, Trump's specific solution – the frontier wall – has always been confronted with unbalanced opposition.
In 10 national polls from Quinnipiac University, from April 2017 to August 2018, no more than 40% of Americans have already expressed support for the wall. Steadily, the share of Americans who oppose the construction of the wall has been much higher, from 57% to 64%. A CNN survey conducted by SSRS and released last week found that 57% of them were against a wall, against 38% for.
The opposition to the wall is overwhelming among all the groups that have moved away from Trump and the GOP in the election of last month. In the CNN survey, 76% of African-Americans, 66% of Latinos, 66% of adults under 35, 57% of independents, 66% of white university graduates and 56% of 35 years have expressed Trump's opposition to the border. to 49.
Strong support for a wall among Trump's base
The wall's support was firmly centered on Trump's central groups: in the CNN inquiry, the wall was supported by a strong majority of 78% of Republicans, as well as 49% of whites without a university degree.
But the results of a survey conducted earlier this year indicate that the support base of the wall could be even narrower than these figures suggest. When the non-partisan Public Religion Research Institute asked questions about the wall in its annual US Values Report, it found that two-thirds of white evangelical Christians favored building the wall. He also found that three-fifths of blue-collar white men who are not evangelical Christians supported the barrier.
But a solid majority of 55% of the white women in blue collar that are not evangelical opposed to the wall. And among white graduates of higher education who are not evangelical, the wall was faced with the opposition of 63% of men and 73% of women.
According to exit polls, these attitudes toward the wall closely follow voting patterns in last month's House elections. As a new analysis of the results by CNN shows, while Republicans in home runs carried about three-quarters of white evangelical Christians and a narrow majority of non-university white men who were not evangelicals, they lost each of these other groups. Among whites who are not Evangelical Christians, Democrats have won nearly three-fifths of non-university and educated men, and 71% of women who have attended college.
[19659007] Even before the emergence of Trump, the The Republican Electoral Coalition was increasingly supporting groups in American society most concerned about demographic and cultural changes in general, and immigration in particular: evangelical, old, rural and many white Christians. White collar . At the same time, Democrats have grown stronger among the most comfortable groups with the shifting changes in America in the 21st century: younger white voters, non-white voters, laypeople and graduates, especially women .
Trump's Strategy
With his increasingly manifest calls for white racial resentment and conservative anxieties about other social changes such as the #metoo movement and the assertion women in the workplace, Trump intensified this reshuffle.
The 2018 elections showed the risk of this process to the GOP, as Democratic victories have been propelled by huge margins among groups comfortable with change – all of which represent a growing share of society and the electorate.
In the House, Democrats have made significant gains in districts located in diverse, information-age, and rapidly expanding metropolitan areas: almost after November, Republicans occupy about one in eight seats where immigrants exceed their share of the national population. about 1 in 6 of those who are more racially diverse than the national average and about 1 in 4 of those with more university graduates than the average.
In the Senate, the GOP lost seats in the various and young states of Arizona and Nevada, rich in immigrants. Even after the Republicans got a seat in Florida and a seat in Texas – another state with a large immigrant population – Democrats now hold 33 of the 40 seats in the Senate of the 20 states where immigrants make up the largest part of the population. population.
Several of the remaining Senate GOP seats in these highly immigrant states will start almost at the top of the list of Democrats' goals for 2020, including Colorado and Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia, and the United States. Texas presenting more difficult but not insurmountable challenges.
Few analysts in both parties dispute that Trump's strategy of doubling troubled groups for change may allow him to win a close victory in 2020. But he has undeniably left the GOP in the lead. try to take a bigger advantage from shrinking groups – a process that inexorably becomes more and more precarious over time.
Triggering a government shutdown that most Americans oppose to advance the cause of building a wall that most Americans also oppose would also, quite rightly, be a monument to this high-risk strategy
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