PAUL BEDARD: Pollsters: Trump knows ‘how to win,’ would beat 2020 liberal ‘decisively.’
Democratic pollster John Zogby doesn’t care much for many of President Trump’s policies and thinks the man is rude, but he’s also coming to the conclusion that the Republican has something very big going for him.
“Some people just know how to win,” said Zogby, who didn’t think Trump would make it out of the Republican primaries in 2016.
After two years of polling on Trump, Zogby said that the president is emerging as an unusual non-politician who has confounded his critics and even his own party leaders by succeeding on an aggressive agenda that has pleased his supporters.
He compares Trump to three former presidents, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt, who entered office to shock from the ruling elite. “With all three there was sense by the elites that this was the end of the world,” said Zogby.
But like them, Trump has connected with many in the country by battling the ruling powers. In his latest John Zogby Strategies poll, 54 percent view Trump as one “who is fighting the Washington, D.C. establishment,” compared to 26 percent who view him as an insider. He revealed the results in his Forbes Magazine column.
It is part of what Trump campaign pollster John McLaughlin called the president’s profile as the “blue collar billionaire,” a leader standing up to Washington, and last week NATO, for taxpayers and workers.
“If you are a working class person, it feels to you that he is fighting for you,” McLaughlin said. “He’s their president.”
New polling from Zogby’s son Jonathan, who conducts the trademarked Zogby Poll, revealed that feeling is true even among some Hispanics and African Americans. His polling shows that a sizable portion of minorities feel positive about their lives and future finances under Trump, something that his father John Zogby said could “lessen the fervor to say, ‘We’re going to Hell, I’ve got to get this guy out of there.’ ”
While Trump’s critics suggest that there has never been such a threatening president, Zogby said that the same charges were filed against Jackson, Lincoln and Roosevelt, and they won reelection. “They don’t remember that we’ve been here before. There is precedent,” he said.
Well, don’t get cocky, kids.