Your bad news of the day
by digby
Trump’s going up in the polls:
Trump widened his lead over the rest of the GOP field in a new poll out today. https://t.co/urZG6PiAnr pic.twitter.com/K1tvuRPmwY— MTP (@MTP) December 4, 2015
Why? According to NBC, because of terrorism and immigration. Greg Sargent has more:
Senator Lindsey Graham continues to win plaudits for the remarkable, off-the-cuff speech he delivered yesterday, in which he excoriated his party’s extremism on immigration as political suicide. Graham said the route to winning the White House is not to maximize GOP base turnout, but rather to halt “the incredibly hateful rhetoric driving a wall between us and the fastest growing demographic in America,” i.e., Latinos. Graham added that “most” of those who come here illegally “are good,” and mocked the idea (embraced by Donald Trump) of “forced deportation.”
“We’re literally gonna round ’em up. That sound familiar to you?” Graham said. “You think you’re gonna win an election with that kind of garbage?” Graham also said: “I believe we’re losing the Hispanic vote, because they think we don’t like them.”
Unfortunately for Graham, a new CNN national poll out this morning — which shows Trump continuing to dominate — finds that a majority of Republicans want what Graham described as “forced deportations.” Even more striking, two thirds of Trump’s supporters want this. The CNN poll asks:
Do you think the government should attempt to deport all people currently living in the United States illegally or should the government not attempt to do that?
A majority (53 percent) of Republicans and GOP leaners think the government should attempt to deport “all” those here illegally. Among Trump supporters, 67 percent agree. Among Americans overall, the numbers are the other way around: They oppose this by 63-35.
This is in sync with our polling, which has found a lot of overlap between Trump backers and those who support mass deportations and want to bar the entry of Syrian refugees. It is also in sync with polls earlier this year that found large percentages of GOP voters agree with Trump’s various immigration pronouncements and prescriptions.
Dave Weigel has a great piece today in the Washington Post calling out the “data wonks” for failing to see the real story of this election developing. He talks about the endless assurances that Trump was going to fade along with dismissals that something real was going on here. He concludes:
Few if any reporters will tell you that they expected this to happen. Some may fantasize about another universe, where the field is Trump-less, and candidates like Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.) are dominating the news with substantive fights about privacy rights and terrorism. Even this summer, the rise of Trump was seen by the Republican establishment as a way to freeze the field, while the grown-ups could hibernate and take over when it counted.
We do not live in that universe. We live in the one where, as Philip Bump points out, 53 percent of Republicans want all illegal immigrants to be deported and many are finding a champion in Donald Trump. Nate Silver left room for this one year ago, when he contradicted the conventional wisdom that Jeb Bush would win the GOP nomination because establishment candidates always pulled it off.
“Bush may face more vigorous competition on his right in 2016 than [Mitt] Romney did in the likes of former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry in 2012,” Silver wrote. “And to the extent that Republican voters have shifted slightly further to the right over the past four to eight years, that could make his task harder at the margins.”
Yeah, that’s true.
Here’s the thing. Trump may not make it all the way. But as Weigel says, this phenomenon is saying something about the country. And, from my point of view, it’s pretty awful. We’re looking at a rather large group of people who are being worked up into a frenzy of bigotry, xenophobia and irrational fear of terrorism. There is every reason to believe the Republican party will be heavily influenced by this and that the Democrats will lose their nerve. It’s not good.
.
.