White House acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney has been doing a lot of grinning lately — and for good reason. He believes that come November 2020, voters will swarm to polls to give President Donald Trump another 4-year lease on his White House digs.
Axios reported Sunday that Mulvaney has been telling friends and colleagues that the impeachment inquiry will actually help the president despite Trump’s concerns that it may tarnish his legacy.
It turns out that his gut feeling may have a lot of merit.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Election Lab researcher Alexander Agadjanian revealed the results of his latest findings in The New York Times last week that Democratic presidential candidates’ hard turn to the left, which he says is the “defining feature” of the primaries, will be their undoing by turning off the all-important swing voters.
Barring unusual circumstances, Democrats will always vote for Democratic candidates, and those who identify as Republicans will always vote for Republicans. Accordingly, it’s the swing voters, those with no party affiliation, that more-often-than-not determine electoral winners and losers.
Agadjanian’s research found that progressive policies such as open borders and free healthcare for illegal immigrants “repels independents, with a negative effect that is stronger and clearer than the signs of enthusiasm generated among Democrats.”
He reached this conclusion after poring over a survey of 3,973 American voters, administered by Civis Analytics, a Democratic data firm.
Approximately half of the respondents served as a control group and were given innocuous information such as schedules for upcoming state primaries and caucuses. The other half was given actual far-left policy positions of the candidates.
Independents were strongly repelled by the far-left policy positions of Democratic candidates that were drawn from current headlines.
Agadjanian concluded that “the question is, are Democrats giving Republicans a head start and making themselves a juicier target? This experiment suggests the answer might be yes.”
Mulvaney’s conclusion that 2020 would be a Democratic rout was rooted more on the Democrats’ current thirst for impeachment, and he believed the longer the process took the better it would be for Trump.
In a piece that ran Sunday in Politico, reporter Andrew Desiderio’s research was more limited, but was nonetheless revealing.
He sat through a series of town hall events and interviewed voters in Illinois’ sixth congressional district, which had traditionally been a Republican stronghold, but was now represented by a Democrat — Rep. Sean Casten. That makes the district, located in a Chicago suburb, the blueprint for a swing district.
Constituents told Desiderio that impeachment was an issue that would likely have a negative impact on voters. Therefore it was an issue that Democrats wouldn’t be able to win on in 2020. They also said they believed Trump’s corruption claims against former Vice President Joe Biden.
One told him that California Democrats Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Adam Schiff are “lying heir little butts off,” while another asked Casten why he wasn’t condemning Biden because of the allegations made against him and his son Hunter.
Desiderio concluded, after speaking to constituents at the various town halls, that Casten’s position in support of impeaching the president will come with “real political risks.” Constituents were also concerned about policy issues as well, as MIT’s Agadjanian found.
And those particular policy issues will depend in large part on who becomes the Democratic presidential nominee.
Biden, the perceived moderate, led the pack early on, but his campaign is faltering. The smart money is now on Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the uber-progressive Massachusetts Democrat.
She’s overtaken Biden in the most recent national polls, as well as statewide polls in Iowa and New Hampshire — the two states that will kick off the Democratic presidential caucus and primary season.
Warren’s newfound lead is confirmed by her third quarter fundraising. She raked in $24.6 million to Biden’s $15.2 million. That, together with other issues, including Biden’s repeated gaffes on the campaign trail, confirm that you can stick a fork in the former vice president — he’s done.
In case you’re wondering, the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee raised a combined $125 million for the third quarter — a record.
Warren’s platform includes all those far-left proposals that scared independent voters in the poll analyzed by MIT’s Agadjanian. And Warren supports impeaching the 45th president of the United States — an act that Desiderio believes would come with “real political risks” after talking to Illinois swing district voters.
Accordingly, Mulvaney’s wager that Trump will be re-elected by a landslide appears to be right on the money. If he’s right, now might be a good time for him to buy a lottery ticket.
Michael Dorstewitz is a retired lawyer and has been a frequent contributor to BizPac Review and Liberty Unyielding. He is also a former U.S. Merchant Marine officer and an enthusiastic Second Amendment supporter, who can often be found honing his skills at the range. To read more of his reports — Click Hee Now.
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