Dem
47
GOP
53
Kristen Soltis Anderson is a Republican pollster who also writes an occasional column for The New York Times. She has noticed Donald Trump's sagging poll numbers and upside-down approval ratings and is now asking the question: Why? In particular, she is interested in the questions: What did the voters elect Trump to do and is he doing it? Is he doing what the voters wanted or is he going rogue on them? Did they want him to demolish the government and disrupt the financial order, or just want cheaper groceries?
She believes that the answer to that last question will determine his ultimate success or failure and will determine whether the Republican Party will achieve its policy agenda in the years ahead. She also looks at her data and sees that Trump views his job differently from what his voters wanted. He sees himself as a powerful disrupter after 4 years of the weak Joe Biden. He believes he has a mandate to go big and bold. But she says the data say something else. They say that after a prolonged period of inflation (brought on by the pandemic), all the voters wanted was a stable economy with the cost of living more manageable.
In contrast, Trump and his cabinet have told the country that access to cheaper goods is not a priority. They are asking Americans to accept some short-term pain in return for long-term gain. However, he has not specified what the long-term gain will be or when it might arrive. Voters are notoriously short-sighted. Investors are famous for demanding that the next quarterly dividend go up. Ordinary Americans have no such patience.
Anderson's data show that voters largely knew that Trump planned to levy tariffs and deport immigrants, but that doesn't say they voted for him on account of these items. They might have voted for him despite these items. Tariffs have never been high on the Republicans' to-do list. In fact, free markets have always been high on the list.
After Trump's inauguration, Anderson asked voters what they wanted. Number 1 was: Reduce the cost of living. Securing the border was also high on the list. Tariffs and firing government employees were way down on the list, with only a quarter of respondents saying these were a top priority.
Presidents have misread the election results before, often with disastrous results. George W. Bush was reelected in 2004 to keep the country safe from terrorists. Instead he spent all of his political capital trying to privatize Social Security. His approval ratings went from an astonishing 90% after 9/11 to 25% in late 2008 before climbing back to 34% at the end of his term. As a consequence, he got nothing done in his second term.
Barack Obama was elected to fix the disaster of the 2008 financial crisis. Instead he focused on health insurance. Democrats were crushed in the 2010 midterms.
Presidents often listen to what their donors or strongest activists want, and these are often policy issues far from what ordinary voters want. The trouble is, sometimes the presidents know better than the voters what is good for the country. In retrospect, if Obama had ignored health insurance and just tried to tweak the economy, he would probably have ended up with zero real achievements. Doing what he did, he managed one major achievement, at least.
Anderson thinks that if Trump continues to ignore the voters and just keeps on course wrecking the government, something the voters didn't ask him to do, he may end up having to pay the piper in 2026. (V)