Whither the Anti-Trump Uprising?
The early Democratic contests suggest that the Resistance is running out of steam.
by David Catron
February 28, 2020, 12:12 AM
Long before the recent caucuses and primaries, countless pundits, pollsters, and political scientists began predicting that high Democratic dudgeon produced by the dark doings of President Trump would drive unusually high turnout at the polls. One excitable academic predicted “a voter turnout storm of a century in 2020.†In Iowa and Nevada, however, turnout barely exceeded their lackluster 2016 levels. Even New Hampshire fell short of its 2008 record, according to FiveThirtyEight: “As a percentage of eligible voters, turnout in the Democratic primary this year was around 26 percent, while it was 29 percent in the 2008 Democratic primary.â€
Yet much of the legacy media clearly missed the obvious lesson that most objective observers would have learned from such large gaps between projections and actual turnout. Reuters, for example, recently ran a story that claims “a swell of anti-Trump activism that followed his entry into the White House in 2017 is still rolling across the country’s largest population centers.†This is based on a poll that compared 53,394 responses gathered during the last half of 2015 and 35,371 answers obtained during the same period in 2019. It purports to show that the city mice are more politically engaged than their country cousins and that Trump will thus be swamped by an urban “blue wave†next fall.
This nonsense is based on a variety of myths about small town America in general. As the Washington Post’s Christopher Ingraham recently pointed out, the terms “rural†and “conservative†are not synonyms. Nor is “rural†synonymous with “politically disengaged†or “white.†In fact, the bucolic congressional district where this is being written has been represented by a black Democrat for more than three decades. The Reuters/Ipsos poll obviously fails to account for these distinctions and is consequently useless for purposes of predicting what voters are likely to do during the primaries or the general election. But the Democrats have long nurtured an affinity for election mythology.
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https://spectator.org/whither-the-anti-trump-uprising/
