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The Make America Great Again movement is no longer sure if this is possible.
that is based on a New CNN Poll Survey of Republicans and Republican-leaning Independents conducted by SSRS. While the poll focuses on the political landscape ahead of the 2024 presidential election, the numbers that stand out point to deep pessimism about what’s to come.
Here’s Jennifer Agiesta and Ariel Edwards-Levy from CNN:
Only 30% of Republicans and those who lean Republican say America’s best days are yet to come – a huge change from 2019, when Trump was in the White House, and 77% were optimistic that the best days would come. Better days lie ahead, even lower than the 43% said in the summer of 2016, before the Trump election.
Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are naturally pessimistic during a Democratic administration, but the decline at the end of the Obama administration was worth taking note of.
At the end of the Trump administration, The vast majority on both sides of the political aisle (67% leaning Democrat, 77% leaning Republican) say the country’s best days are ahead.
Today, fewer than a third of those who lean Republican say the same, suggesting a dramatic shift in sentiment.
Note: When we refer to poll respondents in this story, we mean Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.
There have been warnings of a widespread national depression before. Then-President Jimmy Carter addressed the nation in July 1979 — 10 days after canceling a previously planned speech on the energy crisis, Carter then attempted to address every class of America — and declared that there was a “trust of trust” in the country. crisis”.
“For the first time in the history of our country, most of us believe that the next five years will be worse than the last five,” Carter said in a speech that his opponents mocked for his “flappy” speech, although he The word “discomfort” was not used.
The lack of optimism he conveyed to the nation was blamed for his defeat in the presidential election a year later.
Opinion Columnist David French recently written in the new york times When viewed through the lens of today’s political climate, Carter’s speech sounded almost prophetic.
“It’s an address more suited to our time than its own,” French said.
Some of the themes Carter mentioned — inflation, energy prices, political divisions and the thorny political process — did take a hit Nervous today
“The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy America’s social and political fabric,” Carter said at the time.
“Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself, but in the ability of citizens to be the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy,” he added.
It’s hard not to read Carter’s last sentence and consider another detail in the new CNN poll. Joe Biden is halfway through his presidency, and after all allegations of voter fraud in 2020 have been reviewed and dismissed, an overwhelming majority of Republican-leaning Americans (63%) still don’t believe Biden legitimately won enough votes to win the presidency.
Telling the hard truth and encouraging a national psychotherapy conference did not prove to be a political victory for Carter, and might actually have prompted Ronald Reagan to argue that he could chart a new course that was more optimistic than Carter’s.
There’s a lot of overlap here. Among pro-Republicans who don’t think Biden has a legitimate win, 78% also think the country’s best days are behind it.
Among white Republicans and Republican-leaning independents Seventy-five percent of people in the CNN poll who believe people without college degrees make up Trump’s political base think their best days are behind them.
Republican-leaning Americans with college degrees are more optimistic and more likely to prefer Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in new poll: 64% Say the best days are behind you.
Trump, who officially launched his campaign, has the strongest support among potential Republican primary voters in a CNN poll. DeSantis, Who has not officially launched the event, Followed by. Neither man has the support of more than 40% of potential voters.
Both are selling to their followers the idea that the administration has been armed against them by racially and culturally sensitive elites — whom both Trump and DeSantis derisively refer to as “woke ones.”
Agiesta and Edwards-Levy noticed another shift:
A majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (61%) say the country’s growing racial, ethnic and ethnic diversity is enriching American culture but increasingly sees it as a threat.
The 38 per cent who now see these changes as a threat is about double the figure four years ago and similar to where the party stood in 2016.
Meanwhile, 78 percent of Americans who support the Republican Party say society’s values of sexual orientation and gender identity are getting worse.
Seventy-nine percent say the government is trying to do too much that should be left to individuals and businesses, only slightly lower than the proportion who felt that way at the height of the Tea Party movement under Barack Obama’s presidency.
I couldn’t help but read that part of the CNN poll and thought New column from CNN’s Ronald Brownsteinon how the Republican-controlled state government is trying to seize The power of local governance comes from Democratically governed cities and counties.
From Brownstein:
These include Georgia legislation that would create a new statewide commission to discipline or remove local prosecutors, a bill in Texas that would allow the state to control the prosecution of election fraud cases, and Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSong Initiatives by Thies and Missouri Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey to fire the Democratic-elected county attorney and a Mississippi bill that would allow the state to take over policing in the capital, Jackson.
While the specifics of those efforts vary from minimum wage and family leave laws to takeback policies, he sees the larger political fights over crime and political justice reform.
Brownstein notes that “these antagonisms have an unmistakable racial dimension”.
He writes, “In many instances, state-level Republicans elected primarily with the support of White, non-urban voters are looking to seize power from, or remove from office, Black or Hispanic local officials elected by largely non-White urban and urban voter.”
CNN John King put on an interesting segment on his “Inside Politics” show where he applies current poll numbers to how the Republican primary actually works.
In fact, many states grant all of their representatives to The person with the most votes in a primary election, even if that person did not receive anywhere close to a majority of votes.
King noted that in 2016, when Trump first won the Republican nomination, he lost his first race in Iowa and won New Hampshire and South Carolina, but won only about a third of the way. Primary ballots.
He ended up with about 45 percent of the primary vote, compared with 50 percent among his three main rivals. That means the votes there are likely to beat Trump. But for now, that means Republicans may have to coalesce around a single alternative.