A new YouGov poll of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin registered voters for CBS doesn't offer much hope that the Trump campaign can win in either state and that, in fact, neither can really be seen as a 2020 swing state the way Florida, Arizona, Iowa and even Texas and Georgia are. About three-quarters of voters in each state say things are going badly in the U.S. If the election were held today, Biden would thrash Trump decisively in both states. About two-thirds of voters in each state-- more so in Wisconsin-- dislike how Trump handles himself personally.When asked which candidate most demonstrates these traits it went this way in each state:Pennsylvania
1- Compassion• Biden- 51%• Trump- 30%• Both equally- 7%• Neither- 11%2-Honesty• Biden- 44%• Trump- 31%• Both equally- 4%• Neither- 20%3- Religious• Biden- 38%• Trump- 26%• Both equally- 13%• Neither- 23%
Wisconsin
1- Compassion• Biden- 53%• Trump- 25%• Both equally- 6%• Neither- 16%2-Honesty• Biden- 45%• Trump- 26%• Both equally- 5%• Neither- 23%3- Religious• Biden- 39%• Trump- 22%• Both equally- 13%• Neither- 26%
A few days earlier, Pew released a poll that shows Trump's approval nationally is even lower than in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania-- just 38% approving (59% disapproving). 77% of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters approve of Trump. He draws much higher job approval ratings among white adults who have not completed college (55% approve) than among those with a four-year degree (33%).And the national CIVIQS poll that was released last week shows Trump's approval numbers greater than his disapproval numbers in just 18 states, most of them known for racism, ignorance and evangelicism:
• Alabama- 56%• Arkansas- 62%• Idaho- 56%• Indiana- 51%• Kansas- 50%• Kentucky- 57%• Lousiana- 53%• Mississipi- 53%• Missouri- 54%• Nebraska- 54%• North Dakota- 60%• Oklahoma- 60%• South Carolina- 49%• South Dakota- 57%• Tennessee- 54%• Utah- 50%• West Virginia- 62%• Wyoming- 61%
You've probably noticed that there is not one single swing state on that list. None of the swing states approve of the job Trump is doing. These are the traditional swing states' plus potential 2020 swing states' disapproval:
• Alaska- 52%• Arizona-54%• Colorado- 60%• Florida- 52%• Georgia- 53%• Iowa- 52%• Maine- 59%• Michigan- 56%• Minnesota- 58%• Montana- 51%• Nevada- 60%• New Hampshire- 62%• New Mexico- 55%• North Carolina- 53%• Ohio- 50% (47% approve)• Texas- 49% (48% approve)• Virginia- 58%• Wisconsin- 54%
That list absolutely screams: No Path To Victory. Still, it's shocking that only 5 states' disapproval is 70% or better: California, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts and Vermont (76%).Now, think back to the questions about honesty, compassion and religion-- this was right after Trump's psychotic screed about Biden wanting to hurt the Bible and God. Is anyone buying it? Even many of the people who like the idea of Trump as a president understand he's a profane, blasphemous person who has more in common with Satan than with Jesus. Of all the charlatans selling Trump to low-IQ evangelicals, none is a bigger hypocrite than the pervert just fired from Liberty University, Jerry Falwell, Jr. He vouches for Trump but who vouches for him? Calum Best, a Liberty University graduate, writing for The Bulwark yesterday noted that his zipper's been down for years and that "his bizarre Instagram picture is just the latest in a long line of bad decisions that have harmed Liberty University... The board of trustees... announced on Friday that the president and chancellor of the university, Jerry Falwell Jr., had assented to the board’s request to take 'an indefinite leave of absence' from both positions, 'effective immediately.' The board’s request followed several days in which Falwell had been widely criticized in the news and on social media." It wouldn't surprise me if he went to work full time for the Trump campaign... which brings us to Elizabeth Dias' horrifying NY Times column over the weekend, , about the deal with the devil white evangelicals made with Trump.Paraphrasing a great deal from the first chapter of Kristin DuMez's important book, Jesus and John Wayne, Dias began her narrative with the famous Trump speech from 2016 at Dordt University, in Sioux Center, Iowa-- the one you know by his boast that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and “wouldn’t lose any voters. But Dias had another quote from that speech she chose to talk about: "I will tell you, Christianity is under tremendous siege, whether we want to talk about it or we don’t want to talk about it... And yet we don’t exert the power that we should have. Christianity will have power. If I’m there, you’re going to have plenty of power, you don’t need anybody else. You’re going to have somebody representing you very, very well. Remember that."He took 81% of the voters of Sioux County in November-- and 81% of evangelicals nationwide. Dias continued that today this group could be Señor Trumpanzee's best chance at re-election. His response to the pandemic has battered his political standing and "even among white evangelicals, his approval rating has dipped slightly. But 82 percent say they intend to vote for him, according to the Pew Research Center."
To the outside observer, the relationship between white evangelical Christians and Donald Trump can seem mystifying.From the start it appeared an impossible contradiction. Evangelicals for years have defined themselves as the values voters, people who prized the Bible and sexual morality-- and loving your neighbor as yourself-- above all.Donald Trump was the opposite. He bragged about assaulting women. He got divorced, twice. He built a career off gambling. He cozied up to bigots. He rarely went to church. He refused to ask for forgiveness.It is a contradiction that has held for four years. They stood by him when he shut out Muslim refugees. When he separated children from their parents at the border. When he issued brash insults over social media. When he uttered falsehoods as if they were true. When he was impeached.Theories, and rationalizations, abound:That evangelical support was purely transactional.That they saw him as their best chance in decades to end legalized abortion.That the opportunity to nominate conservative justices to the Supreme Court was paramount.That they hated Hillary Clinton, or felt torn to pick the lesser of two evils.That they held their noses and voted, hoping he would advance their policy priorities and accomplish their goals.But beneath all this, there is another explanation. One that is more raw and fundamental.Evangelicals did not support Mr. Trump in spite of who he is. They supported him because of who he is, and because of who they are. He is their protector, the bully who is on their side, the one who offered safety amid their fears that their country as they know it, and their place in it, is changing, and changing quickly. White straight married couples with children who go to church regularly are no longer the American mainstream. An entire way of life, one in which their values were dominant, could be headed for extinction. And Mr. Trump offered to restore them to power, as though they have not been in power all along.“You are always only one generation away from losing Christianity,” said Micah Schouten, who was born and raised in Sioux Center, recalling something a former pastor used to say. “If you don’t teach it to your children it ends. It stops right there.”Ultimately Mr. Trump recognized something, said Lisa Burg, a longtime resident of nearby Orange City. It is a reason she thinks people will still support him in November.“The one group of people that people felt like they could dis and mock and put down had become the Christian. Just the middle-class, middle-American Christians,” Ms. Burg said. “That was the one group left that you could just totally put down and call deplorable. And he recognized that, You know what? Yeah, it’s OK that we have our set of values, too. I think people finally said, ‘Yes, we finally have somebody that’s willing to say we’re not bad, we need to have a voice too.’”Explained Jason Mulder, who runs a small design company in Sioux Center: “I feel like on the coasts, in some of the cities and stuff, they look down on us in rural America. You know, we are a bunch of hicks, and don’t know anything. They don’t understand us the same way we don’t understand them. So we don’t want them telling us how to live our lives.”He added: “You joke that we don’t get it, well, you don’t get it either. We are not speaking the same language.”The speech in Sioux Center symbolized why there has been so much confusion about evangelical support for Mr. Trump. From the beginning, the outside world focused on the comment about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue. Those in the town, though, ultimately heard something else entirely. What mattered was not just what Mr. Trump said. It was where he said it. And to whom.And so to understand the relationship, one has to go back to Jan. 23, 2016. One has to hear the speech at Dordt the way the evangelical community heard it....Schouten said "Trump’s an outsider, like the rest of us," he said. "We might not respect Trump, but we still love the guy for who he is.""Is he a man of integrity? Absolutely not," he went on. "Does he stand up for some of our moral Christian values? Yes."The guys agreed. “I’m not going to say he’s a Christian, but he just doesn’t attack us,” his friend Jason Mulder said.Mr. Schouten’s wife, Caryn, had walked over with the other wives. After the election of President Barack Obama, the country seemed to undergo a cultural shift, she said. “It was dangerous to voice your Christianity,” she said. “Because we were viewed as bigots, as racists-- we were labeled as the haters and the ones who are causing all the derision and all of the problems in America. Blame it on the white believers.”None of them said they had wanted to vote for Mr. Trump, but they did-- “When he was the last option,” Heather Hoogendoorn said. The group laughed.But they agreed it would be easier to vote for him this time. Before, it was hard to know what he would be like as president. Now they knew, and they liked the results: Supreme Court justices, conservative judges, including a Dordt graduate now on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, and growing clout for the anti-abortion movement.“Obama wanted to take my assault rifle, he wanted to take out all the high-capacity magazines,” Mr. Schouten said. “It just —”“— felt like your freedoms kept getting taken from you,” said Heather’s husband, Paul, finishing the sentence for him.When the Schoutens got home, Caryn, 36, scooped a chip into sour cream dip and plopped into a chair in her living room.She spoke of her concern about sex trafficking. She had seen posts on Facebook about mothers being followed to their cars if they went shopping at Target in Sioux City, almost an hour away.“I’m safe when I’m here. I’m not afraid when I’m here,” she said.They thought about the lives they want for their children, and why they send them to a Christian elementary school. “We hope our kids eventually find a Christian spouse, and that exposes them to other kids of like-mindedness,” her husband said. The two of them met through their rival Christian high schools.People seem to get married younger around here than they do in corporate America, Mr. Schouten said. “It’s fairly common for women to go to Dordt to get their M.R.S. degree, their Mrs. degree,” he said.When she was younger, his wife said, she used to say she would leave Sioux County. She remembered the shock of traveling to Europe in high school and seeing “men in full drag” for the first time.“We have life very easy, it is laid back, it is like-minded people. And it’s just, I like the bubble,” she said. “I like not worrying about sending them outside to play, or whose house they are going to if they are going to the neighbors a few houses down, they might not go to the same church, they might not hold all the same beliefs, but I trust them. I don’t know, maybe that is naïve.”The years of the Obama presidency were confusing to her. She said she heard talk of giving freedoms to gay people and members of minority groups. But to her it felt like her freedoms were being taken away. And that she was turning into the minority.“I do not love Trump. I think Trump is good for America as a country. I think Trump is going to restore our freedoms, where we spent eight years, if not more, with our freedoms slowly being taken away under the guise of giving freedoms to all,” she said. “Caucasian-Americans are becoming a minority. Rapidly.”She explained what she meant. “If you are a hard-working Caucasian-American, your rights are being limited because you are seen as against all the races or against women,” she said. “Or there are people who think that because we have conservative values and we value the family and I value submitting to my husband, I must be against women’s rights.”Her voice grew strong. “I would say it takes a stronger woman to submit to a man than to want to rule over him. And I would argue that point to the death,” she said.Submissive wife by Nancy OhanianShe felt freer as she spoke. “Mike Pence is a wonderful gentleman,” she said. “This is probably a very bad analogy, but I’d say he is like the very supportive, submissive wife to Trump. He does the hard work, and the husband gets the glory.”She turned to her husband. “Let’s be real, Micah, do you have any clue what goes on in our children’s lives on a daily basis? No.” They laughed.“Pence you can picture as your father, as your dad,” he said.But Mr. Biden as president really worried her: “Biden is a few fries short of a Happy Meal.”...The Trump era has revealed the complete fusion of evangelical Christianity and conservative politics, even as white evangelical Christianity continues to decline as a share of the national population. There are some signs of fraying at the edges of the coalition, among some women and young people. If even a small fraction turns away from Mr. Trump, it could make the difference to his re-election.But even if he loses in November, mainstream evangelical Christianity has made plain its deepest impulses and exposed where the majority of its believers pledge allegiance.There is a straight line from that day at Dordt four years ago to a recent scene at a chapel in Washington, where armed officers tear-gassed peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square and shot them with rubber pellets. They were clearing the way for Mr. Trump to march from the White House to St. John’s Episcopal Church and hold up a Bible, a declaration of Christian power.“We have the greatest country in the world,” he said. “We’re going to keep it nice and safe.”It was another instantly infamous moment, covered by cable news and decried by Democrats as an unseemly photo op. But in Sioux Center, many evangelicals once again received a different message, one that echoed the words uttered by a long-shot presidential candidate in a sanctuary on a cold winter morning.“To me it was like, that’s great. Trump is recognizing the Bible, we are one nation under God,” Mr. Schouten said. “He is willing to stand out there and take a picture of it for the country to see.”He added: “Trump was standing up for Christianity.”
