MARC THIESSEN: The past 100 days have been a disaster — for Democrats.
But most damaging has been the Democrats’ seemingly nonstop efforts to further alienate the millions of Americans who twice voted for Barack Obama but switched to Trump last year. The president’s critics have pointed to a Post-ABC News poll, which showed that Trump had not expanded his base of support since he took office. Well, Trump did not need to expand his base. He won the election (and the poll suggested that if the election were held again today, he would not only defeat Hillary Clinton again but also win the popular vote this time).
The ones who need to expand their base are Democrats — the party that lost — and they utterly failed to so. According to the Post-ABC News poll, only 2 percent of Americans who voted for Trump regret their votes, while fully 96 percent say it was the right thing to do. In other words, after 100 days, Democrats made no inroads with these Obama-Trump voters. Quite the opposite, today just 28 percent of Americans say that the Democratic Party is in touch with the concerns of most Americans today — 10 points behind Trump.
Perhaps one reason is that Democrats have made clear their deep-seated contempt for the values of working-class, socially conservative Democrats who left their party in droves last year.
Even uber-lefty Greg Sargent gets it:
Top Democratic pollsters have conducted private focus groups and polling in an effort to answer that question, and they shared the results with me.
One finding from the polling stands out: A shockingly large percentage of these Obama-Trump voters said Democrats’ economic policies will favor the wealthy — twice the percentage that said the same about Trump. . . .
50 percent of Obama-Trump voters said their incomes are falling behind the cost of living, and another 31 percent said their incomes are merely keeping pace with the cost of living.
A sizable chunk of Obama-Trump voters — 30 percent — said their vote for Trump was more a vote against Clinton than a vote for Trump. Remember, these voters backed Obama four years earlier.
42 percent of Obama-Trump voters said congressional Democrats’ economic policies will favor the wealthy, vs. only 21 percent of them who said the same about Trump.
Well, when you’re the party of urban gentry and $400,000 Wall Street speaking fees, people will tend to think that. And I don’t think Tom Perez, who looks like a 1970s central-casting Marxist agitator, will change things either.